Latest / GTM Made Simple / Stop Laughing at Gartner. You're Next.
Transcript
- Let me just stop you there and share this incredible stat that's literally should make you wonder what business you're in. 70% of Gartner's value has been destroyed in the last 2 years. Let me give you numbers around it. This market has wiped out roughly 30 billion. That's with a B in value. This is not a dip. This is not just a correction. It's screaming that knowledge work is over. And that's what Christopher Lockhead, a good friend of mine who writes a lot about category creation, has been saying that over 40 years, Gartner has built an empire around selling research reports, magic quadrants, and advice on what tech to buy. And guess what? When I built my last company, we spent over $100,000 to Gartner and Forester to be in the magic quadrant in the wave and had thousands of hours of work. Like this was literally packaging, branding, all the stuff just so we can be in the quadrant because enterprises will only buy if you are apparently in the magic quadrant. That's why you can raise the value. It's almost saying, "Hey, don't fire me because I'm in the magic quadrant if the product doesn't work." That game is completely done. It's over. And if you're laughing at Gartner right now, I would say look in the mirror for yourself. is the game that you and I have been playing for the last 10, 20 years over of playbooks of forcing people to buy a certain way or you have to do certain things to get there. AI can do what Gartner does, what you do in seconds in many cases for free. Need advice on what CRM to buy or what ERP to buy or what security checks to run or how do you create all these things and who are the right competitors and what should be the process. That was the job of a service industry or Gartner that people would pay $100,000 for a subscription. Now you and I can just ask AI. And here's the massively crazy truth. Every person, every company whose value comes from packaging yesterday's insight is completely toast. And if you are saying, well, I have this pedigree. I have this business model. I have I've done this for 20 years. It doesn't really matter. Your product is no longer your moat. [music] And that's the biggest question that you have to ask. What business you're in? What's your mode? Why would people continue going to you buy from you? If you can be replaced or your product can be replaced by a $20 subscription, how are you going to do that? The winners of the post AI world aren't just knowledge business who just package whatever was there yesterday and put it into something else. But they are the ones who are creating new ways of either distribution, new ways of solving a same problem in a different way for a very specific niche or they are doing something so different so well that they are saying well you have a brand that we want to be part of. So if your mode is a brand you're okay. If your mode is a community you're okay. If your mode is something that you do so interestingly for a specific niche, you're [music] okay. But if your mode is your product, feature services, that can literally go on. So before we laugh at Gartner and lots of other businesses whose value has been dropped by billions in two years or one year, in some cases in 6 months have been dropped to nothing. You cannot bet on the past. What you have to do is bet on the future by creating something of value.