Your GTM Strategy Will Be Wrong Somewhere.

However good the research behind a go-to-market strategy, some of its assumptions will be wrong.

That isn't a criticism of the strategy. It is simply what happens when a plan meets a market.

Customers will surprise you. Competitors will react. Pricing assumptions will be challenged. Sales cycles may take longer than expected. A customer segment you thought would respond may not, while another may emerge that wasn't particularly important in the original plan.

Which means one of the most valuable GTM capabilities isn't simply the ability to execute a strategy. It is the ability to recognise that part of the strategy isn't working and do something about it quickly.

That sounds obvious. In practice, it is rather harder.

Alignment is not everyone agreeing with the presentation

Leadership teams frequently tell me they are aligned. Dig a little deeper and what they often mean is that everybody agreed with the deck.

That is not quite the same thing.

Real alignment means that the CEO, product, commercial, marketing, finance and operational leadership share a sufficiently common understanding of some fairly fundamental questions. Who are we serving? What problem are we solving for them? Why will they choose us? What are we deliberately not pursuing? What does success look like? Who owns which part of the outcome? And what happens when the evidence tells us one of our assumptions was wrong?

There is a simple way of testing this. Ask each member of the leadership team those questions separately.

If six executives give six materially different answers, the organisation isn't aligned. It simply had a very agreeable meeting.

That divergence eventually finds its way into the business. Marketing tells one story, sales another, recruitment hires against yesterday's requirements and operations prepares for assumptions that nobody has properly validated. Management then wonders why execution feels considerably harder than the strategy suggested it should.

Organisations can become very attached to being right

A GTM strategy is, to some extent, a hypothesis. You make a set of informed choices about a market, a customer, a proposition and a commercial model and then test those choices against reality.

The difficulty is that organisations can be surprisingly talented at protecting their original assumptions once they have made them. Practices such as explaining away inconvenient data, funding initiatives because investments already went into them, among others, lead to confusing perseverance with good judgement. And, particularly when senior leadership sponsored the original strategy, evidence can acquire a remarkable ability to become less inconvenient as it travels upwards.

So organisational readiness is not simply about having the right structure or enough resource. It is also about whether the organisation has the ability to learn. That requires useful information, reasonably short feedback loops, leaders who are willing to challenge their own assumptions and enough clarity around decision-making for the business to respond when the evidence changes. It also requires uncomfortable information to be able to travel upwards without being sanitised along the way.

That point is worth dwelling on because organisations rarely struggle because absolutely nobody knew there was a problem. More often, somebody did. The salesperson knew. The finance manager saw it coming. The customer had been saying it for weeks. Product teams have seen the same pattern emerging. The problem was that the information either didn't reach the people who could act on it quickly enough or arrived in a form that made it rather easy to ignore.

Readiness does not mean removing uncertainty

There can be a temptation to interpret organisational readiness as having everything perfectly designed before launch.

I don't think it does.

You will never remove all the uncertainty from a meaningful GTM move, nor should you try. The more useful objective is to build an organisation capable of learning quickly without becoming chaotic every time the market produces an unexpected answer. Before making a significant GTM commitment, I would therefore test five things.

Are we genuinely clear about the commercial outcome we are trying to create, rather than simply the initiative we are launching? Do we have leaders capable of handling the additional complexity the strategy introduces? Have we defined the capabilities required before defaulting to roles and headcount? Do the critical functions genuinely share the same understanding of the customer, proposition, priorities and accountabilities? And can uncomfortable information travel quickly enough for us to challenge our assumptions and adjust when the market disagrees with us?

A weakness in any one of these doesn't necessarily mean the strategy should stop. But it should change the way you approach it.

The objective is not to prove the strategy was right

Markets can look wonderfully attractive on PowerPoint. Execution happens through people, and the distance between those two things is where a great deal of enterprise value is either created or lost. The organisations that execute GTM well tend to have more than a good sales plan or a strong marketing strategy. There is a coherence between what they are trying to achieve and the leadership, capability and operating environment supporting it. Just as importantly, they are prepared to change when the evidence tells them something they didn't expect. Because ultimately the objective isn't to prove that the original strategy was right. It is to create the commercial outcome the strategy was designed to achieve.

Those are not always the same thing.

So alongside the question “Are we ready to execute our GTM strategy?”, I would ask another:

Are we ready to change it when the market teaches us something we didn't know?

An organisation that can do both is in a considerably stronger position to turn market opportunity into enterprise value.

To ensure you build a solid feedback loop reflecting market reality and impact on your plans, GTM Advisory can guide you through the playbook, the behavioral measures to apply, and the mechanics to learn, apply, and proceed to the next learning.