THE METHOD
Most go-to-market work starts in the middle. Somebody buys a tool, hires two reps, or rewrites the deck, and none of it holds because the decision underneath it was never made. This is the sequence I run, why it goes in this order, and what comes out of each step.
01
WHAT HAPPENS
Before anything gets designed, the data says what is actually happening. I read the CRM, sit in on calls, talk to reps and whoever owns operations, and look at the last two years of closed business rather than asking anyone to describe it.
Six reads, and they separate completely different problems. Which way revenue is moving. Whether there are enough first meetings. What happens to the ones you get. Whether deals die at one stage or everywhere. What is happening to deal size. How much of last year’s growth came from customers you already had.
Plenty of meetings that do not close is a qualification or enablement problem. Not enough meetings is a targeting or motion problem. Deals dying at one stage is a process problem. Those are three different projects and the symptom looks the same from the outside.
THE PART PEOPLE DO NOT EXPECT
Most of this happens without you in the room. Your time is the scarcest input in the engagement and I would rather spend it on the two conversations that matter than on describing to me what I can read for myself.
WHAT USUALLY TURNS UP
The sales cycle number is wrong. Almost always. The CRM says fourteen days and that is not because deals close in two weeks, it is because nobody controls where a deal enters. Ask three people what qualifies an opportunity to exist and you get three answers, which means every number derived from that pipeline is decorative.
WHAT COMES OUT
A written read of the six, with the one that is actually costing you money named and ranked.
02
WHAT HAPPENS
The ICP, built from your closed-won and closed-lost record rather than a persona workshop. Which segments convert, which ones look attractive and quietly lose money, what the good-fit accounts have in common that nobody has written down.
WHEN THE DATA IS TOO THIN
It often is, because CRM hygiene is weak in most companies and that is not a criticism. We build it from first principles instead: what you actually sell, who has genuinely bought, and the honest answer to if you could hand-pick the next twenty customers, who would they be and why. Then it gets refined as real data arrives, because an ICP is a living document and not a poster.
WHY IT IS SECOND AND NOT FIFTH
Almost everything downstream is derived from this. Which motions you can run. What the messaging says. What a rep needs in hand. Who you hire and what good looks like. I have watched people hire well against no definition and lose those people inside five months, and that was my mistake, not theirs.
WHAT COMES OUT
A written ICP with the segments named, the disqualifiers named, and the evidence behind both.
03
WHAT HAPPENS
The ICP becomes a structured target list with enough detail that a rep is dangerous on the first call. Not a list of company names. For each account: who to open with, the lead offer, sample messaging, and the reason to call now.
WHY THIS IS THE ARTIFACT PEOPLE REMEMBER
Everything else in this sequence is a system, which is valuable and abstract. The target list is the thing a rep opens on Monday and works. It is the ICP made usable, and it is usually the point where a team stops debating strategy and starts calling.
WHAT COMES OUT
The list, loaded into your CRM, with the fields that make it workable rather than admirable.
04
WHAT HAPPENS
Outbound, inbound, product-led, channel, community-led, event-led, ecosystem. Most companies are running four or five and chose maybe one on purpose. The rest accumulated.
We decide which ones you can actually run at your stage, with your team, in your market. You cannot run them all. You can run several, and which several depends entirely on the business and the industry.
WHY RUNNING A MOTION BADLY IS WORSE THAN NOT RUNNING IT
It consumes the same attention, returns a fraction, and makes the numbers harder to read because you cannot tell which motion is failing. Two motions run well beat five run badly every time, and the second is the more common state.
ON CHANNEL AND ECOSYSTEM
These are the two most often bought by an executive and abandoned by everyone else. Twenty signed partners and no revenue is not a partner problem. It is usually partner economics, recruitment by volume rather than fit, or deal registration that never resolved channel conflict. 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 COMES OUT
A decision, with the reasoning written down, and what evidence would tell you a motion is working before you have spent a year on it.
05
WHAT HAPPENS
Stages with entry and exit criteria a manager can verify in ten seconds, built on evidence the buyer produced rather than activity the seller performed.
Then the forecast, which can only be built once the stages mean something.
THE ENTRY GATE FIRST
Most companies want to fix the middle of the funnel. The gate that matters is the first one, because an undefined entry gate corrupts every number downstream: cycle length, win rate, stage conversion, forecast accuracy. Fix where deals enter and half of what looked broken resolves itself.
PRICING AND PACKAGING, WHILE WE ARE HERE
This is also where pricing gets looked at, because it shows up as a process problem before it shows up as a pricing problem. What you sell versus what actually gets bought. What gets discounted and why. Whether a rep has anything to trade in a negotiation other than price, which is usually the real answer to why margin keeps slipping.
WHAT COMES OUT
Stage definitions configured in your CRM, not described in a deck. A forecast method. The weekly review that keeps both honest, which is a different meeting from the one where everybody reads their deals out loud. And a read on pricing and packaging if that is where the money is leaking.
06
WHAT HAPPENS
The complete package a rep needs, audited against what exists and then built. The deck, the one-pager, the ROI model, discovery guide, objection handling, competitive battlecard, proposal template, case study format.
WHAT IS USUALLY WRONG
Most companies have marketing-built material. It looks right. Then you talk to the reps, or better, to the buyers, and the gaps are obvious inside ten minutes. Marketing builds for the brand. This gets built for the conversation. The test is not whether a resource looks good. It is whether a rep uses it without being told to, and whether a buyer recognises themselves in it.
THEN THE DRILLING
Materials do not create fluency. The five questions your buyers actually ask, answers that reason from mechanism rather than feature, and a fifteen-minute weekly drill until the answers hold under pressure from someone who is not being polite.
WHAT COMES OUT
The assets, in your tools, plus the drill that keeps them sharp.
07
WHAT HAPPENS
The question is not do we hire more people. It is whether more people are the answer, and if so which people in which roles.
Capacity analysis first: what the current team can actually carry given the cycle, the deal size and the coverage. Then role design, because the honest answer is sometimes that you need a different role rather than another of the one you have.
Then the hiring profile, drawn from who has actually succeeded in your business rather than who looks impressive. Then an interview process built to find that profile rather than to find people who interview well. Then ramp, with evidence required at each checkpoint instead of attendance.
WHY IT IS LAST
You cannot write a hiring profile until you know the motion. You cannot ramp someone into a process that does not exist. Hiring first is the most expensive way to discover this, and I have done it.
WHAT COMES OUT
A capacity model, a hiring profile, an interview kit, and a ramp plan with checkpoints.
ACROSS ALL SEVEN
Neither is a project, which is why neither gets a number. They belong inside each of the seven.
Prospect research that used to take forty minutes and now takes three, so reps actually do it. Two years of closed-lost notes read in one pass. Meeting prep. Call analysis that surfaces the pattern rather than transcribing the call. First-draft writing from a real brief, where the human supplies the point of view.
And the other half, which matters more: where the human still carries more weight. Discovery is judgement under uncertainty. Coaching works because someone whose opinion a rep cares about was watching. Deciding which accounts deserve your team’s time is the highest-leverage call you make and it is yours.
HOW IT IS TAUGHT
Documented workflows with the actual prompts, written for your buyer and your process, not a generic library. Then a working session sitting with the team until they use it without being asked. A prompt library nobody opens is the same as no prompt library.
Half the revenue is after the signature and it usually has no owner.
Expansion with a number and a trigger. Referrals as a process rather than a hope. Feedback that reaches the people who could act on it. A renewal that is a motion rather than a deadline that arrives.
WHY THE ORDER DOES NOT CHANGE
Start in the middle and you get work that looks finished and does not hold. It is the most common way a go-to-market project fails, and it is why most of them are rebuilt within two years by somebody else.
WHAT YOU ARE LEFT HOLDING
Everything built during the engagement, in the tools where you use it. The read, the ICP, the target list, the motion decision, the stage model configured in your CRM, the resources, the AI workflows, the capacity model, the hiring profile and the ramp plan.
Ninety days of revisions are included. 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.
Six questions, no email, and it tells you which of six problems you actually have. Or book a call: thirty minutes, no deck, and I will tell you which step you are missing.