The Book That Redefined Go-to-Market.

Companies are born out of dreams. Think about it. Someone had an amazing idea. They dreamed about making something better, newer, easier, more convenient. They dreamed about doing something that had never been done before, and they formed a company to make that dream a reality. The people they hire along the way buy into the dream and want to help achieve it. Indeed, the thought of realizing that compelling vision energizes them when they come to work every day.

But doing business is messy and unpredictable. Companies face challenges—competition, changing markets, limited resources, and more—that cause them to underachieve those dreams. There is a relentless, ongoing pressure to grow the company, with employees to pay, customers to serve, and countless other funding needs. To keep it all going, you have to keep growing.

Before the Wright brothers achieved sustained flight with their motor-operated airplane in 1903, there were many wild and crazy inventors who dreamed up fabulous flying contraptions. Often, they put together talented teams and built those machines, with visions of soaring like an eagle dancing through their heads. And then the day came when they hauled it up to the top of a ramp, or a hill, or God forbid, a sheer cliff on top of a mountain, and they launched it.

Perhaps you’ve seen some of the old film footage of these failed early endeavors, where the strange winged machine sails down the ramp, briefly leaps into the air, then careens to the ground and breaks into pieces as the distraught inventor and team look on. Every single one of those failed machines started out as the wild-eyed vision of a talented team.

Of course, the original dream wasn’t to simply fling a machine off the end of the ramp and somehow keep it from crashing right away. No, the dream of those early inventors was to enable humans to fly like the birds. Successfully launching a plane was only the first big step to making the dream a reality. For sustained flight to really achieve the vision, they had to figure out how to create vehicles that could reliably take people higher and higher, get them where they wanted to go, and return them to the ground safely every time.

The struggle to achieve reliable air travel gives us a perfect picture of the struggle most companies face. Achieving the dream isn’t "one and done." It’s an ongoing business transformation from ideation to transition to execution—also known as the 3Ps of problem-market fit, product-market fit, and platform-market fit—and somehow, you have to navigate these stages without losing momentum and stalling out somewhere along the way.

Go-to-Market is a transformational process for accelerating your path to market with high-performing revenue teams delivering a connected customer experience. In other words, your GTM process connects your company strategy to your customer outcomes, helping customers realize the dream that the company was built on and enjoy the benefits that dream promises to deliver.

It might be helpful to visualize company strategy, customer outcomes, and GTM as three interlocking gears that keep your company moving forward, with GTM acting as the connecting gear between the other two. It’s these three gears working together that makes extraordinary growth possible.

For most companies, the missing link is that middle gear. They have a company strategy and they have customers, but they lack a high-performing GTM function. Consequently, they underperform and underachieve, and the dream gets further and further away from achievable. As a result, customers become increasingly unhappy, and retention declines.

If customer retention is suffering, if customers are complaining more and more, if employee turnover is high, then you are underachieving. Maybe there’s messiness inside of your business. Sales hit their number, but it wasn’t pretty. People are so fatigued that it feels like losing even when they win. Maybe momentum has stalled, so even though everyone is still working hard, no one feels like they’re getting ahead.

Your company strategy is not your GTM strategy. GTM operates in the service of your company strategy in order to drive your business forward faster and further—not just once but reliably and repeatedly.

If you’re a big online retailer like Amazon, your company strategy is to make your products and services readily accessible on the internet. That is your ongoing mission. Your GTM process, then, is how you plan to achieve some of those elements in the short term. As you probably recall, Amazon started off with one service: selling books online. Over time, they added other products and services, such as music, videos, groceries, self-publishing services, and cloud computing. Amazon is truly a well-oiled GTM machine.

This isn’t a guide for creating your company strategy, mission, or vision, and it’s not a handbook for building great products. We’re here to provide a framework for your GTM process that will help you unlock your potential so you can deliver your unique value proposition to customers and create an enduring company with a sustainable ability to keep growing and scaling.

So many companies struggle with this. Why is it such a problem? We believe it’s because leaders don’t know what questions to ask. If you want better answers, ask better questions, as the old saying goes. Adding to the difficulty, GTM is cross-functional and ever changing, so you need to ask those questions over and over again.

The good news is, you can implement a framework for your GTM strategy by answering just four questions. It all comes down to these:

• Whom should we market to? (Market) • What do we need in order to operate effectively? (Operations) • When can we scale our business? (Velocity) • Where can we grow the most? (Expansion)

We can summarize these questions as your Market, Operations, Velocity, and Expansion, or MOVE. As it turns out, finding and aligning on the answers to these four questions is a lot more difficult than it seems when you don’t have a clear framework for doing so.

Sadly, most companies lack a centralized GTM process. They’re not thinking holistically, and there’s no one who owns the GTM process. For example, the marketing team may be focused entirely on leads, but some of those are the wrong leads. Sales is trying hard to close deals with some of those bad leads. Customer Success is working hard, with increasing frustration, to retain customers who should never have been sold to in the first place. A telltale sign that your GTM is broken: having to resell to customers during onboarding.

When we encourage business leaders to figure out their GTM approach, they often set about fixing it with tremendous enthusiasm, but the way they go about it is all wrong. They’ll bring together their executive team and announce, "Hey, we’re having trouble reselling to customers. What we’re selling them is not what they were promised. We need to fix our GTM strategy, so let’s plan a two-day offsite and build our strategy as a team. We’ll make it really memorable so we can put it on a poster."

Here’s the problem. You can’t approach GTM as if it were your company strategy, vision, or mission. It’s not a trite saying you post on the wall to collect dust. Rather, GTM is an iterative process that ensures what you’re selling is what you’re delivering, and you have to approach it in that way in order to make sure it is always working for you.

Who owns GTM? Which leader is responsible for taking the reins? Our research shows that there is widespread disagreement about this. We asked this question to a thousand business leaders. But who should own it? We’re going to say this more than once in the book—it’s that important: GTM belongs to the CEO!

When you think about it, there are very few things in a company that a CEO owns. They make sure there’s enough money in the bank. They try to ensure that there’s a healthy culture and a vision for the future. They also own the company strategy. That’s about it.

For GTM to be iterative, it must become part of the rhythm of how you do business. It must be tweaked constantly as your company matures, grows, and evolves. As Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, points out, "Go-to-market is not a project." A project is a temporary work effort with a clear start and end date, but an iterative process like GTM must continue.

It might be helpful to follow HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan’s advice and treat GTM like a product. With a product, you get feedback and iterate on it over time. The latest Apple iPhone doesn’t bear much resemblance to the original released in 2007. Why? Because the company keeps iterating on it, using customer feedback and data to make improvements over time. Treat GTM like a product.

When most companies are about to go out into the marketplace, they sit down and excitedly talk about how big of a market they’re going after. "Should we go after this $5 billion market? We could potentially reach 100,000 people if we capture it!" The sheer size of the market entices them. In reality, they’re never going to sell to every customer in that $5 billion market. They’re aiming way too broadly. It’s like trying to wash your car with a water balloon. You’ll never get the whole thing wet.

Most businesses will be far better served by narrowing their focus from Total Addressable Market (TAM) to Total Relevant Market (TRM). In other words, instead of trying to reach every possible customer in the biggest market, focus on the customers that are most relevant for the product you have today in the market that is most relevant for you today. Try to reach those relevant customers in a way that will make them happy, loyal, and willing to pay to consume more products and services.

As Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, put it: "If you’re selling hamburgers, it makes sense to put a hamburger stand on every street corner where there’s foot traffic, but that model doesn’t work for B2B." In a B2B environment, you have to be agile. If you start big, you’re going to underserve all your customers. By starting small, focusing on your most relevant customers based on the product fit you have today, you can get it right and then punch out of that box into a bigger box when you’re ready.

Many companies lack a single source of truth. You’re in a meeting with a marketing leader, a sales leader, and a customer success leader, and somehow you have to make a decision about what is and isn’t working. But marketing, sales, and customer success all have their own data, and you spend thirty or forty minutes debating whose numbers are right. Quite frankly, questions about the business can’t be answered by isolated departments.

This is a clear indication that you need a RevOps team. The RevOps team solves the problem of competing and misaligned teams by becoming the "truth teller" of your organization. Since they have no emotional attachment to any particular silo, they are able to look objectively at what is working and not working across the customer lifecycle.

Every company wants to grow, but in order to do so, you have to navigate several stages of business transformation. In this chapter, we’ll explain each of these stages and help you figure out where you are. That way, you can figure out what kind of transformation your business needs to go through in order to get unstuck and progress toward the next stage.

There are three distinct stages of GTM business transformation (and their corresponding 3Ps):

1. Ideation (Problem-Market Fit): Lead-focused, sales-led, searching for repeatability. You don’t have a fully proven product yet; you are verifying that the problem is urgent and budget-backed. 2. Transition (Product-Market Fit): Account-focused, sales + marketing aligned, efficient growth. You prove you can sell the same offer to the same buyer in the same way with strong retention. 3. Execution (Platform-Market Fit): Customer-focused, integrated revenue team, expanding customer lifetime value across multiple product lines and broader distribution.

Keep one critical principle in mind: Revenue is not the material indicator of your current stage. You can have $20 million in revenue and still be at the ideation stage, figuring things out, or you might race through to the transition stage with only $8 million in revenue. Similarly, you can have $150 million in revenue and still be in the transition stage, while another company navigates to platform-market fit with much less revenue.

When leadership behaves as if the company is in Execution when it is structurally still searching for Product-Market Fit, it burns millions of dollars hiring salespeople who fail to hit quota. Diagnosing your true stage on the maturity curve is the first step to unlocking sustainable growth.