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How Workato Built $5.7B of GTM on B2C Principles and AI Speed

When Rishi Mallik joined Workato, the company hadn’t yet hit double digits. Today, as Chief Growth Officer, he oversees go-to-market at a $5.7B enterprise integration and automation platform. Workato’s CEO, Vijay, co-founded Tibco and built Oracle Fusion Middleware. The company just raised $200M. Rishi came in when most of that story was still ahead.

In a recent conversation on Unicorn Marketers, Rishi pulled back the curtain on how Workato got here. The playbook isn’t complicated. It’s just ruthlessly disciplined.

The first principle feels almost too simple: B2C marketing DNA in a B2B company. “let’s market how we would want to be marketed to. Let’s sell how we would want to be sold to,” Rishi said. He meant it as a complete philosophy, not just a tagline. It shapes everything from SDR scripts to content strategy to community building. It means respecting the buyer’s time, being honest about fit, and only reaching out when there’s a real signal of interest.

This drove a structural change that most GTM leaders would never think to make. Workato moved SDRs from the sales organization to marketing. That shift sounds organizational. It’s actually strategic. When SDRs report to sales, they optimize for volume and velocity within their own pipeline. When they report to marketing, they optimize for message consistency and inbound quality. Rishi explained: the SDR organization becomes a feedback loop that sharpens every piece of marketing. It also forces marketing to own demand generation quality instead of hoping SDRs compensate for weak campaigns.

The same principle applies to outbound. Everyone treats cold outbound as a numbers game. Workato doesn’t. “we do what we call warm outbound, which is you’ve engaged with us in some way, shape or form.” Reach out after they download content. After they visit your site multiple times. After they search for you by name. After they engage with your social. The signal comes first. The outreach comes second. This approach scales more efficiently than spray-and-pray because the intent is already there.

And it works on inbound too. “people feel that phone calls are dead and we see a lot of success through phone,” Rishi noted. But speed matters. “we have a very strict SLA that our SDRs actually respond and make a phone call within five minutes of that lead coming in.” Five minutes. The difference between capturing momentum and losing it. The difference between hot and cold.

Now, AI. Every GTM leader is scrambling to incorporate it. Most are doing it wrong. “the number one common mistake from go to market leaders in leveraging AI is that you use a stochastic model to make deterministic decisions,” Rishi said. Translation: let AI draft emails and surface suggestions. But humans make the final call. Humans handle nuance. Humans say no when something feels off. At Workato, AI generates first-touch outbound emails based on intent signals. But everything after the first reply goes through human hands. It’s what Rishi calls using a “stochastic model for deterministic decisions.” It keeps the benefits of AI speed without the risk of sounding like a robot.

The bigger AI play is what Workato calls Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. About 1.5 years ago, Workato’s Head of SEO changed his title to Head of GEO. The insight was simple: AI Overviews in Google don’t rank content the same way traditional search does. “it seemed like AI Overviews was really into content that was written as bullet points, top five FAQs, really easy to decipher and really easy for the LLM to understand,” Rishi said. So Workato rewrote swaths of their content library. Bullet points instead of paragraphs. FAQs instead of long-form guides. Easy-to-parse formats that LLMs could surface in their answers. The result was immediate. “we leveraged AI to outsmart AI.”

The numbers prove it. Rishi checked the attribution numbers recently. “less than 10% was actually coming from generative engines.” Six months later, “It’s about 25% of folks are saying that they heard about us through the generative engine.” Doubled and a half in half a year. Not by accident. By understanding the new medium and adapting to it.

But the most durable play is community. Workato invested in building a space where CIOs could convene and learn from peers. “one of the projects that Alex sort of took on was one is that we made sort of a CIO council podcast where CIOs actually would, one or two at a time would come and talk about some interesting challenges that they worked on. And it was like one of the top streamed podcasts on Apple podcast for a while, not just in tech, but in general.”

That wasn’t the end. It was the beginning. “CIOs wanted a space to hang out and chat. And now there’s hundreds of CIOs that get to write articles and learn from other CIOs on it.” It started as a podcast. It evolved into a platform, CIOsNews.com. It became a community moat.

There’s a philosophy underneath all of this. Rishi called it out directly: “market how you want to be marketed to and sell how you want to be sold to. I think we forget that as marketers.” Most GTM playbooks do forget. They optimize for metrics and scale and velocity. Workato optimized for respect and fit and speed.

His 2026 advice was blunt. “this is going to be the year of doing complete 180s in terms of strategy and having to do that again and again week after week.” AI is moving that fast. Generative engines are changing how content ranks. Buyer behavior is shifting. The GTM leaders who win this year won’t be the ones with the perfect plan. They’ll be the ones who move fastest and adjust most often.

His final thought: “the best marketing is when you’re doing them a favor.” Every decision at Workato goes through that lens. That’s what B2C DNA in a B2B company actually means.