01 / GTM ARCHITECTURE
Who you target, how you reach them, what a stage means, and whether the forecast is a number or a feeling. Everything else in a go-to-market is downstream of these four decisions, which is why most of what looks broken somewhere else started here.
SOUNDS LIKE YOUR TEAM
“Every rep has a different idea of who we should be selling to”
“The forecast is never right and nobody trusts the pipeline”
“We are running six motions badly instead of two well”
“We hit the new logo number and the base still shrank”
WHAT IS ACTUALLY BROKEN
Almost every company I look at has the same shape of problem, and almost none of them describe it the same way.
The symptom arrives as a sales problem. Not enough pipeline, or pipeline that does not close, or a forecast that misses in a direction nobody predicted. So the response is a sales response: more reps, more activity, a new tool, a harder Monday meeting.
Then you look at the record and the cause is upstream. Nobody decided who this is for, with enough precision that a rep could act on it. Nobody decided which motions the company is running, so it is running five badly instead of two well. Nobody wrote down what a stage means, so the pipeline is a set of opinions with dollar values attached.
The work in this component is deciding those four things on purpose, writing them down, and building the artifacts that make them real in the tools your team already uses.
None of that is a sales problem. All of it lands on the sales team.
Artifacts, not recommendations. Every one is a thing your team holds and runs after I am gone.
ON THE SEVEN MOTIONS
Outbound, inbound, product-led, channel, community-led, event-led, ecosystem. Most companies are running four or five of these and chose maybe one on purpose. The rest accumulated: somebody went to a conference, somebody hired a partner manager, somebody turned on a content tool.
Running a motion badly is worse than not running it. It consumes the same attention, produces a fraction of the return, and makes the numbers harder to read because you cannot tell which motion is failing.
CHANNEL AND ECOSYSTEM
They are the two most often bought by executives and abandoned by everyone else. A partner program with twenty signed partners and no revenue is not a partner problem. It is usually an economics problem, a recruitment problem, or a deal registration problem, and those have different fixes. I have been the manufacturer recruiting partners and the integrator deciding which line to carry, which is a useful pair of chairs to have sat in.
WHAT YOU ARE LEFT HOLDING
The ICP document, the target list loaded into your CRM, the stage model configured with its criteria, the forecast method with the review that runs it, the motion decision with the reasoning written down, and the expansion trigger with an owner.
NINETY DAYS OF REVISIONS
A segment turns out to be wrong, a stage needs a different gate, the list needs a second pass. For ninety days after handover that is part of what you already paid for.
BEST FOR
Companies with capable people and no written system, where results still depend on who owns the account and nobody can explain why the good quarters were good.
NOT FOR
Companies under about $1M. At that stage you need customers, not systems, and I will tell you so on the first call rather than six weeks in.
Run the Six Reads. Six questions, three minutes, and it names which of six problems you actually have.
The next step
Thirty minutes, no deck and no discovery script. Tell me what the last two quarters actually looked like and I will tell you which of the six you are dealing with, and whether I am the right person to fix it.