I've just seen this post on LinkedIn 

"Most go-to-market strategies still revolve around selling

But the best teams are making a different shift:

They’re helping the right customers buy

That means mapping the buyer journey
Aligning internal stages with external behaviour
Getting decision-makers involved earlier
And offering the right information at the right time

It’s a mindset shift that turns sales from pressure into partnership

The result?
Fewer dead ends
More confident decisions"

It did make we chuckle, so let's map the buyer's journey for say a payroll system

Buyer goes to ChatGPT and puts in prompt “Create me a short list of 5 of the tops payroll companies, we have 2,000 employees, multiple employments and will want to integrate with a Human Resources (HR) system as a second stage”  

Putting this into ChatGPT myself to test it, it did come up with a short list of 5 and ChatGPT also came up with 3 qualifying questions. I could go on and qualify the list further

The buyer going to AI is the buyer's journey

To quote Forrester “89% of B2B buyers have adopted generative AI (genAI), naming it one of the top sources of self-guided information in every phase of their buying process”

As a buyer, I don't go to Google, I don't go to your website, I don't fill in any webforms.  And I'm not an MQL

Research shows that buyers trust the results of AI, but will back the search up with some human validation

The second part of the buyer's journey, is the human part

As well has searching on AI we will test the market with our networks

Who is it we trust, who is it that is connected to us is the obvious choice?

The problem with 99% of sales people is they look untrustworthy and they are not connected to the people they are trying to influence

So when buyers look to their networks for support, you won't be the obvious choice

We know people buy people, but you won't be the person I turn to help

Marketing teams need to stop chasing the market from 20 years ago and understand how AI has change modern day marketing

Marketing teams need to be empowering their sales teams to be on social, looking trustworthy, making sure buyers are in your networks and buyers will want to read your authentic content 

Afterall, this is how buyers, buy today!