A few years into my career I was brought into a company with a strong product and no idea who to sell it to.
They had marketing activity. They had a CRM full of names. They had a sales team working every lead the same way. Revenue was flat.
The assumption in the room was that they needed more leads.
They didn’t. They needed to decide which leads were worth having.
That is the whole point of a GTM strategy, and it is where most B2B tech companies skip the work. They want the plan without the decisions.
What a GTM strategy actually is
Go-to-market is one of those phrases that sounds bigger than it is. It is not a 40-slide deck and it is not a marketing plan. It is a set of decisions about how you win a specific customer in a specific market.
Five decisions, to be exact.
Which market. Not “SMB” or “enterprise”. A segment you can name, with a problem you can describe in one sentence.
Who exactly. Your ideal customer profile, and just as important, the person who signs. In B2B tech those are rarely the same person.
Which channel. Where your buyer actually finds things. Not where everyone else is spending.
What you say. The message that connects your product to the buyer’s problem, in their words, not yours.
How you know it is working. The metrics that tell you early, before the quarter ends. A leading one like qualified meetings beats a lagging one like revenue.
If you can answer those five, you have a GTM strategy. If you can’t, you have a wish.
The three mistakes I see most
1. Confusing a GTM strategy with a marketing plan. A marketing plan is what you do. A GTM strategy is what you decided and why. Teams often build the plan first and never write down the decisions, so every quarter restarts the argument.
2. Targeting everyone. “B2B tech” is not a market. It is an industry. The narrower your ICP, the cheaper everything gets, because your message stops being a shout into a crowd.
3. Skipping the metric. If you cannot name the number that tells you it is working, you will find out too late. The best early metric is usually a leading one, like qualified meetings or pipeline created, not revenue.
How to start, if you are starting from zero
You do not need a consultant and you do not need six weeks. You need one honest afternoon.
Start with the leak. Look at your last ten lost deals and ask why they were lost. You will usually find the same two reasons repeated. Fix one of them and you have a better quarter.
Then write the five decisions on one page. Share it with the person who owns revenue and the person who owns delivery. If they both say it is obvious, you are on the right track. If either says “that isn’t what we do”, you have found the real problem.
What it looks like when it works
A clear GTM strategy makes the rest cheaper. The message writes itself because you know who it is for. The channel choice becomes obvious because you know where that person spends time. The sales team stops arguing about lead quality because the definition was agreed before the first lead arrived.
The companies I see pull this off are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that made the five decisions and then left them alone long enough to see if they were right.
The question to ask yourself
If you had to pick one market and one buyer to focus on for the next twelve months, who would it be?
If the answer takes you more than a minute, that is the work.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your five decisions, book a free consultation and bring the one-page version.