I’d bet that not many industries have undergone more drastic transformations over the past 20 years than Media. Its distribution channels, business model and customer base have been under constant threat.

Understanding how the winners of that transformation navigated the period of change is going to be useful to any executive, but some specific parallels exist with today’s B2B SaaS landscape that warrant attention.

Specifically, I want to focus on three.

1. Declining Trust in our Core Route to Market.
2. Pressure on our Core Business Model.
3. Changing Consumption Habits.

We will look at all three of these in some detail, and the lessons we can take into how we approach SaaS GTM strategy today.

Declining trust in core GTM channel

Wherever you look, you will find evidence supporting the statement that buyers simply don’t trust sellers anymore. To look at why would be a lengthy piece in itself, so for the purpose of today we will take the likes of G2 and Gartner at their word.

G2 labels it a “Trust Crisis”, with 94% of buyers not trusting sales reps. Those reps themselves feel it; per Gartner 65% of reps find it harder than ever to earn prospects’ trust.

The discrepancy between these two statistics tells a story in itself; we are slow to recognise and react to this critical problem.

The media industry, and traditional media in particular, has seen a similar challenge. Recent years have seen a rise in highly convenient and engaging forms of digital media that have disrupted that industry.

• New platforms (TikTok, Instagram), formats (video, audio) and sources (UGC). These have infringed on the market share of traditional media but also trust in digital content, muddying the waters between professional journalism and content creation.
• New business models. As we will discuss later, widespread sensationalist and click-bait content, fed by a popular model of targeting 3P ads at readers, undermined trust in digital media and news providers.

In both SaaS and media, trust has fallen in the primary channel through which we reach, engage and monetise audiences. In SaaS, it’s sales reps. In media, it was digital media. For both, the effect is a major obstacle to building trust with their target audience, not helped by the widespread neglect for that audience’s personal data.

Lessons we can learn

I would argue that a lot of media companies were asleep at the wheel here. For a long time, publishers traded their core asset - trust - for short term revenue gains. It optimized content purely to maximise time on page, and a swathe of clickbait headlines and sensationalist journalism did huge damage to brands and the industry’s perception as a whole.

The third-party datasets that made this model possible (and briefly, lucrative) also came into question as audiences understood the true cost of that free content. Again, trust was hit.

Not everyone fell prey to this temptation though, or at least not to the same degree. Many publications (titles like The Guardian and Financial Times spring to mind) invested in their relationships with audiences and in premium journalism. They understood that their relationship with audience and the trust they received was their number 1 asset, and their biggest differentiator.

Here lies the lesson for SaaS GTM leaders. Invest in your customers’ trust, even at the expense of short term gains. This can be a challenge in the face of economic headwinds and top-down revenue goals, but failure to do so poses a much more existential long term threat than any short term consequences.

Business model pressure

If you were to have polled media executives around 2018 as to what the core vital of their business was, the metric that formed the heartbeat of the business, I suspect a popular answer would be CPM. What is the value to advertisers of 1000 eyeballs on their advert. The higher that figure, the higher our revenue.

A similar poll of SaaS executives in 2024 might produce a few answers, but I suspect a common one would be outbound conversion. At the end of the day we play a numbers game. Engaging a high volume of potential customers at the top-of-funnel, leading to 4x or 5x pipeline coverage, is going to cover up a lot of Product or GTM problems. And with most businesses heavily reliant on outbound to provide pipeline, sustainable conversion rates are clearly a core vital for any SaaS business.

The common thread between 2018 CPMs and 2024 conversion rates? They are falling.

In 2019, CPMs fell off a cliff. Per Statista, CPMs on Facebook more than halved when the pandemic struck.

Certainly this was a more sudden impact than anything we can expect in SaaS (we hope).

But, we are witnessing a similar threat to the “core vital” of SaaS. 73% of SDRs missed quota in 2023.

While some might expect (or simply hope) to see that rebound, it is reflective of a broader issue that suggests it is unlikely to.

Per Gartner, 75% of buyers avoid direct interactions with Sales reps. That is alarming, and gives us reason to believe that this is no temporary dip in outbound effectiveness.

Lessons we can learn

Truth be told, there wasn’t much you could do if you were a media exec in 2019, such was the sudden impact. You can’t pivot a business model overnight and the time to take action would have been years earlier.

There were businesses who had done exactly that, though. While sudden, the pandemic was a  catalyst to a foreseeable long-term problem; we all knew that the death of third-party cookies meant the day would one day come where this model was ineffective.

While very few publishers were unaffected by the pandemic, the smart ones were prepared. They had diversified revenue streams that limited the impact, and had invested in first-party data capabilities that meant they were ready to adapt their business model and could still target ads.

This is where GTM leaders can learn. While a pandemic-like impact is hard to imagine (although certainly not impossible), two lessons can be learnt that are good practice for any leader, but especially one whose core model is under question. You might think that threat is overstated and that outbound will reach peak productivity again, but you would be wise to prepare in case you’re wrong.

1. Channel Diversification. How dependent are you on any one source of pipeline? Regardless of its effectiveness, over-reliance on one channel poses a huge risk to your business.
2. Long-term innovation. If you are seeing declining efficiency in outbound tactics, you’re left with two choices. Treat the problem - seek innovation and new sources of pipeline - or treat the symptom - throw additional resources at offsetting the efficiency loss. I  encourage you to recognise and treat the underlying problem. This does not mean abandoning outbound. It means challenging and adapting your outbound tactics, and seeking new sources of pipeline to complement and de-risk your primary channel.

Consumption Habits changing.

The pace of innovation in digital media, led by agile startups unburdened by the size, scale and journalistic rigour of traditional media, has been nothing short of incredible. The internet led a transformation from print → digital, impacting every element of a media business from content production to curation and distribution.

Then came iPhones, along with various other innovations, which shifted this whole landscape all over again, as well as creating a challenge to even more intrinsic elements of the media industry. The basics of storytelling were disrupted in an attention economy that thrived on shorter-form content.

Similar shifts have taken place in enterprise buying, accelerated by Covid.

We’ve gone from office-based buying groups to disparate buying groups all working from their living rooms.

We’ve gone from a single buyer, empowered at Director/VP-level to buy software, to cross-functional buying groups. Organisations are focusing on alignment, adoption plans and consolidation of their stack.

For digital-native generations the norm is not to engage with salespeople. These new buyers have different expectations. They are used to being able to access information and transact with ease in their personal lives, and that expectation carries over to their role as professional buyers.

In SaaS, as in Media, a major shift has occurred in how our customers engage with our brand and consume our products.

Lessons we can learn

Savvy media organisations, both new and established, understood that to fight against these shifts is pointless. We’ve seen investment in new forms of media, new styles of storytelling, and new channels (on and off platform) through which to engage audiences, particularly younger audiences.

SaaS go-to-market teams would do well to follow their lead.

This means providing customers with access to information on their own terms.

It means letting customers engage via digital channels.

It means helping them to buy software, not selling it to them.

And it means investing in technologies that let you get what you need - influence and insight - without getting it at the expense of what your customers expect.

SaaS GTM teams that continue to enforce SDR qualification calls, 30 minute discovery calls, and force prospects through a linear sales process that doesn’t reflect their buyer journey will be left behind. How many kids are out on bikes on a Sunday morning delivering newspapers? None. And that’s where we need to see qualification calls and "discovery-as-a-stage" go. (Yes, I quoted myself there).

To be clear (I can almost feel the old school sales execs tensing up) I am not arguing that you should ditch questions and discovery. It simply shouldn’t be a barrier to your customers getting the information they need. It must be deftly weaved into your engagements not carried out by metaphorical gunpoint, witholding a demo and product info until it is carried out as a set stage in your process.