Let’s Talk About the Go-To-Market (GTM) Lie Everyone’s Still Buying
Estimated Read Time: Not long enough
GTM strategy is treated like a milestone. A checklist.
You build a deck, create a persona or two, launch a few campaigns, and voilà—you’re “in market.”
But here’s the truth:
Most GTM strategies fall apart within 90 days.
Not because the product is bad.
Not because the team lacks ambition.
But because the foundations are cracked—and no one’s addressing the real problems.
As someone who’s built GTM engines across SaaS, compliance-heavy sectors, DTC, B2B, and government-backed innovation, I’ve seen the same patterns play out again and again.
If you’re a founder, CMO, RevOps lead, or anyone tied to growth—read this before your next launch.
🔥 Mistake #1: Confusing a Campaign With a Strategy
Just because you launched something doesn’t mean you’ve gone to market.
A lot of teams confuse “we shipped it” with “we built a revenue engine around it.” They launch a landing page, spin up ads, maybe send an email blast—and call it GTM.
But that’s just a campaign.
GTM is a system. It’s the coordinated alignment of product, marketing, sales, CS, and ops to create demand, capture it, and convert it—over and over again.
💭 If your GTM isn’t baked into onboarding, sales enablement, pricing, product roadmap, and support—you don’t have a strategy. You have a launch plan.
⚠️ Mistake #2: No One Owns the GTM Function
This one’s deadly.
Marketing thinks GTM is their job.
Sales thinks it’s theirs.
Product thinks marketing should be driving it.
Leadership just wants to know why pipeline is flat.
When everyone’s involved but no one is accountable, the GTM system becomes a game of telephone. Everyone hears different things, runs in different directions, and guesses at messaging or targeting based on instinct, not insight.
✅ GTM needs a quarterback. Someone who can see across functions, coordinate timing, manage roles, and own the outcome. Ideally? That’s your CMO.
🚫 Mistake #3: Targeting Everyone, Resonating With No One
“We want to target enterprise, SMB, government, startups, and mid-market all at once…”
I hear this from ambitious teams all the time.
But GTM isn’t a volume play. It’s a focus play.
Trying to be everything to everyone is a fast track to burning budget and eroding brand trust.
You need one ICP per motion.
And you need messaging that speaks their language, solves their pain, and reflects how they buy—not how you wish they would.
💡 Effective GTM narrows the lens to maximize impact. Once you win one segment, you earn the right to expand.
🔧 Mistake #4: No Operational Backbone to Support the Strategy
You’ve got messaging. You’ve got content. You’ve got product readiness.
But do you have:
- Sales enablement aligned with new segments?
- CRM tracking for this specific GTM push?
- Lead scoring calibrated to the new ICP?
- A feedback loop to track adoption, churn, or friction?
Most GTM launches are built on duct tape.
No infrastructure. No instrumentation. No measurement beyond “did we get some leads?”
🎯 Your GTM won’t scale if your backend systems can’t handle the inputs and outcomes it’s designed to drive.
📉 Mistake #5: Measuring the Wrong Things—or Nothing at All
This one hurts.
A lot of companies launch a GTM without knowing how they’ll measure success beyond “revenue.”
That’s like driving a car without a dashboard. You might be moving, but you’ll have no idea if you’re going in the right direction—or if you’re about to run out of gas.
You need leading and lagging indicators.
Pipeline velocity. Time to activation. Usage behavior. Campaign engagement by persona. Sales conversion by message variation.
📊 You can’t fix what you don’t track—and you can’t scale what you don’t understand.
🎁 BONUS MISTAKE #1: Using Old Positioning in a New Market
So many teams launch a new motion (new ICP, product, region) but reuse the same old brand story.
What worked in DTC doesn’t work in B2B.
What landed with engineers might flop with CFOs.
And what resonated pre-Series A will sound juvenile post-Series C.
💬 Your GTM strategy is only as good as your positioning refresh. Update your story, or watch your traction stall.
🎁 BONUS MISTAKE #2: Building in a Vacuum
This is a silent killer.
Founders or execs who build GTM strategy without customer input, sales feedback, or real-time market testing. Just slide decks and assumptions.
You don’t need a 50-page GTM brief—you need early signals from the front lines:
Pilot campaigns. Mock calls. Targeted interviews. Sales objections. Market friction.
🚀 Your GTM should evolve weekly—not wait for a quarterly post-mortem.
✅ What to Do Instead: The GTM Checklist That Doesn’t Miss
Here’s what winning GTM strategy looks like in practice:
- 🎯 One clearly defined ICP and buyer journey
- 🧠 Updated positioning and messaging per segment
- 🛠 A cross-functional GTM owner
- 📈 Instrumentation for all critical KPIs
- 💬 Continuous customer feedback loop
- 📣 Coordinated rollout across product, sales, and CS
- 🔁 Operational systems ready to scale it
✍️ Final Word
Most GTM strategies fail because they’re too high-level, too disconnected, and too fragile to withstand real market pressure.
But the truth is—go-to-market is your business model in motion.
If it’s not built to align, adapt, and accelerate your product’s value across every touchpoint—it’s not ready.
And if you need help building one that actually drives growth?
Let’s talk. I do this for a living.
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“This blog isn’t for people who dabble in marketing. It’s for leaders who own the outcome—who understand that strategy without execution is just expensive procrastination.”
Mark Gabrielli
Founder MarkCMO.com