7 GTM Motions Every B2B Company Is Running (Whether They Know It or Not)

Ask most B2B leaders how they go to market, and you'll get one of three answers. "We're an outbound shop." "We're product-led." "We do a mix of inbound and outbound." Clean. Simple. Wrong.

Every B2B company is running at least five go-to-market motions right now. Most are running all seven. The difference between companies that scale predictably and companies that stall isn't which motions they run. It's whether they're running them on purpose.

Here's what I mean. Your reps are showing up at conferences. That's event-led GTM. Your customers are referring their peers. That's community-led GTM. Your product has a free tier or a self-serve flow. That's product-led GTM. You have partners sending you deals. That's channel. You integrate with other tools in your category. That's ecosystem.

None of those things stop happening just because you didn't build a strategy around them. They just happen badly.

The 7 Motions

Before I get into what most companies get wrong about each one, here's the full list. If you can't name all seven from memory, you're probably underinvesting in at least three of them.

1. Outbound

Cold calls, cold emails, LinkedIn outreach, sequences. Your team goes and finds the buyer. This is the motion everyone thinks they understand, and almost nobody runs well. The hidden insight with outbound is that most companies treat it as a volume game when it's actually a relevance game. A hundred generic emails don't beat ten that demonstrate you understand the prospect's specific problem. AI has made the volume play even worse because buyers can now smell a templated sequence from the subject line. The companies winning at outbound in 2026 are the ones using AI to research, not to spray.

2. Inbound

Content, SEO, paid ads, social. The buyer comes to you. Inbound is the motion everyone wants and few have the patience to build. The hidden insight here is that most companies confuse lead generation with demand generation. Gating a PDF and capturing an email isn't inbound strategy. It's list building. Real inbound creates a reason for someone to seek you out before they're in a buying cycle. The companies that do this well are teaching, not marketing. They're giving away the thinking and selling the implementation.

3. Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Free trials, freemium tiers, self-serve onboarding. The product sells itself. PLG gets talked about like it's a strategy reserved for developer tools and horizontal SaaS. It's not. Any company with a product that delivers value quickly can build a product-led motion. The hidden insight is that PLG doesn't eliminate sales. It redefines when sales gets involved. The best PLG companies let the product handle education and activation, then bring in a human when the use case outgrows the self-serve tier. If you're running PLG without a clear trigger for sales engagement, you're leaving enterprise deals on the table.

4. Channel

Resellers, VARs, distributors, referral partners. Someone else sells your product for you. Channel is the motion that executives love in theory and underinvest in practice. They sign a partner agreement, do a joint press release, and then wonder why the pipeline didn't materialize. The hidden insight with channel is that partners sell what's easy to sell and easy to get paid on. If your partner enablement consists of a slide deck and a pricing sheet, your channel program is dead on arrival. You need to make it easier for a partner to sell your product than to sell anything else in their portfolio. That means training, deal registration, co-selling support, and compensation that makes the math work for their reps, not just your P&L.

5. Community-Led

User groups, Slack communities, customer advisory boards, thought leadership that builds a following. The market comes to you because you're at the center of a conversation they care about.

This is the most underestimated motion in B2B, and the one with the highest long-term leverage. The hidden insight is that community-led GTM inverts the entire sales dynamic. Instead of chasing buyers, you attract them. Instead of interrupting their day, you become part of it. But here's what most companies miss. Community is not content marketing with a Slack channel bolted on. It's creating a space where your buyers get value from each other, with your brand as the connective tissue. The companies doing this right aren't broadcasting. They're convening. And the pipeline that comes from it converts at rates that make outbound look like a rounding error, because the trust is already built before the first sales conversation happens.

6. Event-Led

Trade shows, conferences, field events, dinners, webinars, roundtables. In-person or virtual, structured or informal. The hidden insight with events is that most companies measure them wrong. They count badge scans and call it pipeline. They sponsor a booth, collect a list, and hand it to the SDR team to sequence. That's not event-led GTM. That's outbound with a conference badge.

Real event-led motion means curating the room, not just showing up in it. The highest-converting events I've seen are the ones where you bring 12 of the right people to a dinner table, facilitate a conversation they couldn't have had without you, and never once pitch your product. The deal happens three months later because you created a context that no cold email could replicate.

7. Ecosystem

Technology integrations, marketplace listings, co-built solutions, API partnerships. Your product becomes part of a larger stack, and the stack sells you.

This is the motion most B2B companies don't even recognize as a GTM motion. They think of integrations as a product feature. They're not. They're a distribution channel. The hidden insight is that every integration you build is a bet on someone else's install base. When your product shows up in the Salesforce AppExchange, or the HubSpot Marketplace, or a partner's "recommended tools" list, you're getting in front of buyers who already have budget allocated and a tech stack they're investing in. The companies that treat ecosystem as GTM, not just engineering, build integration marketing, co-selling motions with platform partners, and joint customer success plays. The ones that treat it as a feature request backlog wonder why their marketplace listing gets no traffic.

The Real Problem

Here's what ties all of this together. The problem isn't that companies are running the wrong motions. It's that they're running most of them accidentally.

Your team shows up at a conference with no pre-event outreach plan, no target account list, no post-event follow-up cadence. That's accidental event-led GTM. Your customers mention you to a peer and the lead comes in through a generic contact form with no attribution, no referral program, no way to encourage it again. That's accidental community-led GTM. You have an integration with a major platform but no co-marketing, no joint webinar, no shared success stories. That's accidental ecosystem GTM.

Accidental motions don't scale. They produce inconsistent results that you can't forecast, can't improve, and can't replicate. And they create a false sense of security because revenue is coming in from places you don't fully understand, which means it can disappear from places you don't fully understand either.

What Intentional Looks Like

Being intentional about all seven motions doesn't mean investing equally in all seven. That would be insane for most companies between $1M and $100M. It means knowing which motions you're running, having a plan for each one, and making a deliberate decision about which to invest in and which to keep on maintenance.

For most B2B companies at the growth stage, I'd recommend going deep on two or three primary motions and being intentional but lightweight on the rest. The point is that "lightweight" is different from "accidental." Lightweight means you have a basic playbook, some measurement, and a trigger for when to invest more. Accidental means you're just hoping it keeps working.

Start by mapping which of the seven motions are already producing revenue for you. Don't guess. Go look at your closed-won deals from the last 12 months and trace each one back to its actual origin. You might be surprised. The motion you've been pouring budget into might be generating less than the one you've been ignoring.

Then ask the harder question for each motion: is this happening because we built a system, or is this happening because we got lucky? The answer tells you where to invest next.