GTM: Why Old Playbooks Are Breaking and How AI Assisted GTM Actually Works | Dave Boyce

Dave Boyce is a go-to-market–focused technology executive, author of Freemium, and longtime SaaS operator and board member. Over two decades leading and advising B2B companies, he’s helped founders navigate the shift from sales-led to product-led, from gut-driven to instrumented, and now from manual GTM to AI-assisted systems. Today, Dave teaches revenue architecture and PLG through Winning by Design’s Growth Institute, works with leadership teams on Bow Tie–based growth models, and is all-in on how AI will reshape GTM as a true engineered system.Discussed in this episodeWhy classic sales & marketing playbooks haven’t caught up to how modern buyers actually buy.How the Bowtie model exposes the real levers of growth that funnels hide.Why PLG-style thinking is now essential even for sales-led and enterprise motions.The 3 first principles of freemium: empathy, generosity, and metrics.Where AI can reliably outperform humans across the customer journey, and where it absolutely shouldn’t.How to design hybrid human + AI workflows using a clear data model, not vibes.What RevOps should own in a modern revenue architecture (and why it can’t just serve the CRO narrative).Hard-earned founder lessons from Fundly on reinvention, calling bets early, and letting go of old branches.Episode highlights00:00 — GTM is still running 20-year-old playbooks01:29 — “Sales, marketing, CS… the last unengineered engine”03:20 — The myth of “just add more heads”05:50 — The Fundly story: reinvention, too late08:30 — Why Freemium had to be written11:01 — Three first principles of freemium15:25 — Mapping AI across the entire customer journey19:29 — “Automate the predictable, humanize the exceptional”25:18 — What the Bowtie exposes that funnels hide27:25 — Building a “minimum viable BowtieThis episode is brought to you by our sponsor: ZoomInfoZoomInfo is the GTM Intelligence Platform built for sales, marketing, and RevOps.By unifying data, workflows, and insights into a single system, ZoomInfo helps revenue teams find and engage the right buyers, launch go-to-market plays faster, and drive predictable growth. With industry-leading accuracy and depth of data, it gives your team the intelligence advantage to win in competitive markets.It’s trusted by the fastest-growing companies and has become the category leader in GTM Intelligence.Learn more at zoominfo.com.Follow Dave Boyce (Guest)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boycedaveSubstack: https://daveboyce.substack.comWhere to Find GTMnowWebsite: https://gtmnow.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnowX (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_nowPodcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcastThe GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.