Your GTM Isn't Broken; The Assumptions Under It Are

Most CEOs and founders are trying to make sense of why their go‑to‑market engine isn’t producing the consistent, compounding results they expect. Often, it's because marketing is evaluated through outdated assumptions that don’t reflect how modern revenue systems actually work. Instead of asking marketing to “turn up the volume on what we’re already doing,” the opportunity is to understand the system beneath the surface, align around it, and create clarity on how results are actually produced.

What leaders in organizations where GTM outperforms goals know is simple: Marketing rarely fails from a lack of activity. It fails because the organization hasn’t defined what “good” looks like, how the system works, or who owns what inside it.

This month, two separate engagements surfaced the same truth. Both focused on HubSpot as the enabling platform, but the real work was upstream (not system configuration): aligning lifecycle stages, building composite scoring that reflects the full buyer journey (intent, engagement, negative signals, fit), and defining handoff SLAs that make marketing and sales operate as one system rather than two functions. When leadership—and even IT, accounting, and ops—join that conversation, the air clears. Suddenly everyone understands why volume isn’t the goal, why fewer but better leads outperform any “traffic play,” and why vanity metrics actually lead to bad decisions.

When building the reporting structure, SEO came up; as it often does. That was timely given a recent Marketing Against The Grain episode in which Ethan Smith of Graphite raised valuable points about how organic discovery is shifting. I don’t agree with every one of Smith's takes (more on that later), but the nuance matters: SEO isn’t dead, and it isn’t a silver bullet. In niche or complex markets, AEO (particularly being referenced and cited externally) often carries more weight than traditional keyword plays. The real point is that SEO, AEO, content, and discoverability are parts of a larger system, not isolated fixes; and conversations about “fixing SEO” should start with understanding the system first.

And that’s really the theme: Leaders ask marketing to “do things” instead of asking marketing to achieve outcomes.

It's not uncommon that I start conversations with prospective clients with the things I don’t do; because strategic marketing is not a task list. It’s not content-on-demand. It’s not a website tune-up. It’s not lead-gen-at-all-costs. This forces CEOs to confront the real commitments required to make marketing work: budget allocation that matches ambition, SME involvement as part of the job (not a favor), operational SLAs that make qualification a shared responsibility, and recognition that marketing-attributed results are the outcome of the entire customer lifecycle—not one team’s activity.

This is why GTM continues to show up as “our biggest problem.” What founders mean is:

• “We’ve been taking a tactics-first approach.”

• “We mismatched the marketing role to our stage and maturity.”

• “We judged success by volume instead of quality.”

• “We told our marketing leader what to do instead of what to achieve.”

None of these are marketing problems. They’re operating system problems.

And they’re solvable.

Here’s the real unlock: GTM turns into a predictable system when organizations make strategic-level shifts that reshape how marketing, sales, and the rest of the business work together.

1. Choose your markets, buyers, and brand promise: Clarify value proposition, target markets, and buyer roles, then build a messaging platform around that (one that all team members share). Without this, even the best system is just well-organized noise.

2. Define the system before the strategies: Agree on lifecycle stages, qualification rules, scoring, and ownership so every team knows what “good” looks like and how a buyer actually moves through your funnel.

3. Resource marketing like a revenue function: Budget, SME contributions, SLAs, and cross-functional alignment aren’t “nice-to-haves.” They’re the operational backbone that lets marketing influence real pipeline and revenue outcomes.

4. Use data to steer, not to justify: Replace vanity metrics with decision-making metrics: quality, velocity, conversion, and impact. When leadership rallies around a shared view of performance, the noise disappears and the right priorities emerge.

When organizations make these shifts, clarity goes up, friction goes down, and results stop depending on heroics or one-off tactics. The GTM engine becomes something you can actually manage—and improve—with intention.

For more insights and resources related to this topic, see the December 2025 issue of my Velocity View newsletter.