Pipeline. Across three calls I had this week, it was the big GTM issue that needed to be fixed. Quickly. Different companies, different deal sizes and different stages.

Pipeline is now such a consistent issue that I’m surprised when a CEO doesn’t immediately raise it.

It wasn’t that long ago when win rate, deal size and sales cycle were metrics that were the focus, that were underperforming. Not now. Nearly every conversation I’m having, pipeline is the constraint to revenue growth. There isn’t enough pipeline being created, and the leading Marketing metrics are down.

As CRO at Elucidat, my mantra to everyone in GTM was ‘pipeline is destiny’. We had a good product, decent sales processes and the right people in the right seats. We consistently closed a good percentage of deals we were in. We just needed to be in those opportunities. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how people are buying. And almost nobody’s playbook has caught up.

Everyone is trying to improve the dashboard numbers

Digital pipeline (and lead) attribution is a lie, or at best a gross oversimplification. Calling it oversimplification is being very generous. What is even worse is that Marketing leaders have codified the data points they can track into how they communicate their value to their company and boards.

Someone has opened some emails, visited the website and downloaded a white paper? Call it an MQL and tell Sales to close the business. This approach has led to wasted effort and resentment in many a GTM function.

What got lost was that none of it was ever quite true. Digital attribution captured the last click, or the first click, or some weighted average across the touches a tag could see. It never saw the podcast someone listened to on the drive home. It never saw the LinkedIn post a peer shared in a private DM. It never saw the conversation in a Slack community where someone said “we use these guys, they’re solid.” It saw what it could tag. And it called that the whole picture.

Digital attribution has led to Marketing teams focusing their efforts on what they can track, then working on how to claim credit for pipeline and sales.

CROs and CMOs are presenting the pipeline and top of funnel metrics to their boards. Pipeline volume is down, there are quality concerns because salespeople are progressing opportunities they wouldn’t normally. SEO traffic is down. Paid CPCs are up. MQL volume is soft. The SDR team is sending more sequences than ever, and reply rates keep falling.

The conversation with their team and the board is focused on how they will improve each of the metrics that are not hitting target. Update the messaging. Refresh the landing pages. Re-score the lead model. Add another nurture track. Tighten the SDR cadence. The whole motion is about going back to what was working and making it work harder.

It won’t.

Time to stop looking backwards

The conversation CROs and CMOs need to be having is that buying has changed.

Individually, we all know that AI has changed how we buy. More and more people are using LLMs as their front door to the internet. We are increasingly connecting with people we trust through events, communities and content they create. We are not scrolling through a Google Search results page to go to a vendor website and provide our contact details to download a PDF.

So why do some Marketing leaders still use content forms and count MQLs based on engagement? It is because they show up in the dashboard. The board got used to those numbers. Marketing got used to defending them.

At every board meeting, marketing leaders relied on digital attribution reports. UTM-tagged campaigns, form-fill conversion rates, cost per MQL, pipeline contribution by channel. It was a beautiful story because it was a measurable story, and boards love things they can track quarter over quarter. Data that could be used to improve specific parts of Marketing was being used to prove that Marketing worked.

And here we are.

There is a declining number of people buying the old way. You won’t win by trying to get a larger slice of that shrinking pie. You might be doing your best SEO work ever, but that will not remove the impact of AI overviews. You can’t make up the gap from declining search engine traffic with traffic from LLMs. People used to click through from the Google results page. Now they stay in the LLM. Untrackable and completely invisible to you.

Now is the time to retire your trusty playbook.

Start with the first principles of GTM

Here is timeless advice for a new problem. My love of GTM came from my Dad. He ran UK Sales for a big US tech firm. He taught me that people love starting in the details, which leads to friction and failure. People get too focused on individual items, whether you’re selling a new service or you’re trying to change something internally. Agree on the principles first. Specifics get easier once everyone is aligned on what you’re actually trying to do.

Let’s start by setting out the principles of GTM.

Go To Market is all about connecting your customer with your product. This starts with being clear and aligned to your customer. If that is an issue for you, I suggest reading ‘Why the AI era has made GTM alignment worse (and how to fix it)’.

Pipeline is a measure of how many qualified sales opportunities you currently have. As long as you have a clear qualification framework and sales process, this is easy to measure.

How you create pipeline is by potential buyers at Ideal Customer Profile accounts engaging with you when they might buy. That could be when they recognise a pain, or it could be when they have decided to make a change.

The million-dollar question is, how do you make that happen?

If you can’t answer that question based on live customer insight, you are in trouble.

From Dashboards to the Customer Insight Flywheel

Here’s what I install when I come into a company facing this. It isn’t a tool or a tech stack decision. It’s a four-step operating rhythm that puts the buyer back at the centre of how the GTM team makes decisions. Listen, map, show up, learn. Quarter on quarter, it gets sharper. That’s the flywheel.

Listen. This is the whole GTM team, sales and marketing and customer success, talking to customers and engaged prospects on a standing cadence. Not surveys. Conversations. How did you decide to look at this? Where did you go for information? Who did you talk to? What made you trust the people you trusted? And the one question every hand-raiser should be asked at first contact, every time: where did you hear about us? You then review what you’re hearing as one team. Not marketing reviewing its own customer research in a silo. Not sales hoarding the call recordings. One GTM team, one set of conclusions, segmented by industry, country, and size, because buying behaviour is not uniform.

Map. Out of the listening, you build an influence map. Where does your ICP actually spend its attention? Which podcasts, newsletters, creators, communities, events, LLMs, peers? Then you overlay it with where your current pipeline is finding you. The gap between those two maps is the most important diagnostic you’ll run all year. That’s where your future pipeline is hiding. Take it to the board. It’s a story about where your buyer is, which is a fundamentally different conversation from where your leads came from.

Show up. Two motions, running together. Out of market: brand and distribution, no digital attribution tax. Add email open tracking and you tank deliverability for the sake of a data point you didn’t need. Focus on being present, useful, and memorable in the places your buyers told you matter. In market: commercial intent, LLM visibility, a hand-raiser experience that doesn’t punish people for being ready to buy. Underneath both motions sits something most B2B companies have stopped doing, which is building a brand future buyers know, like, and trust before they need you. When they decide it’s time to solve the problem, you want to be on the shortlist they bring into the room. Not the vendor they discover after the shortlist is set. That only happens if you’ve been showing up consistently, with a point of view, in the places they actually pay attention to. This only works if you are memorable. Forgettable B2Bland is the hidden killer, especially with the surge of AI produced content.

How do you know if what you are doing is useful and memorable? You test it with your market first. You get feedback from the same persona at your customers. You use a research service like Wynter to access those same people at prospects. Rich, qualitative feedback from the right people.

Learn. Every conversation, every hand-raiser, every campaign that worked or didn’t, goes back into the listening loop. The map updates. The show-up motion adjusts. The team’s understanding of the buyer compounds. This is the flywheel. The advantage isn’t that you found the perfect channel. The advantage is that you’re learning faster than your competitors about a market that’s changing faster than any of you can fully track.

The rest of the company and the board also need to learn. It is down to you to educate them on how people buy, what you need to do for them to buy from you, and what you can’t measure. Lead with customer insights, not digital attribution charts.

The new Board reporting for Marketing & pre-pipeline GTM

Your board is made up of smart and accomplished people. The easy part is educating them about how buying has changed and why the data points previously used to measure pre-pipeline are no longer valid.

So what replaces the traditional dashboards? You still need to answer the same questions:

• “Is Marketing working?”

• “Are we reaching our ICP accounts?”

• “Will we hit our pipeline creation targets?”

• “What do we need to improve?”

There are still key metrics to capture and report on. Here are some that I would lead on:

1. Pipeline created - Volume and value. The Marketing leader should own this number. Irrespective of channel and whether the pipeline is new business or expansion. You might disagree with me on expansion, but if your marketing is only focused on new business and leads you are leaving NRR on the table. They need to be optimising everything they do to generate qualified pipeline, both short and long term.

2. Sales Qualified Leads - For a Sales Led motion, the definition is a meeting booked to discuss a potential opportunity with an ICP prospect or customer. For a Product Led motion, the definition is a sign-up. These are the earliest data points in the buying journey you have full visibility of.

3. SQL to opportunity conversion rate - Potential sales opportunities need to be qualified and progressed. A lack of focus on the outcome of first sales meetings is common and leads to lower pipeline and win rates. Sales leadership usually focuses on forecasted deals and relies on opportunity records in the CRM. Meanwhile, SQLs are tracked on contact records and often left open.

4. CAC Ratio - GTM costs divided by new ARR. This measures the efficiency of your GTM engine. The key here is to also split out your different GTM functions, so you can track the CAC ratio for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. Investors can provide benchmarks from other portcos.

5. Execution vs plan - What did you deliver versus your plan for the month? The board don’t need to know all the operational detail of the Marketing plan each month. What they do need to know is that you had a plan and how much of it you delivered. This doesn’t show whether you delivered quality work that had impact, but it shows if you have a plan and if you are shipping.

Here’s the big change. The board discussion on pre-pipeline GTM uses a ‘Market Heatmap’. Where you have distinct segments, you will need to produce different versions. The Market Heatmap shows:

• Influence - Where your target market engages and learns. AI, communities, influencers, events, podcasts, etc. Only include what comes up consistently. Show weighting, so everyone understands the importance ranking.

• Marketing plan - Where your current Marketing is reaching.

• Quality test - The feedback from customer and prospect research on the quality of the Marketing.

• Direct attribution - Where your new SQLs are reporting they heard about you. The conversion to pipeline and sales.

The Market Heatmap is easy to create and understand. Simply create a column for each area, with the first column being the highest priority. Each column contains:

1. The name of the influence

2. Summary of insight

3. The GTM activity

4. The quality test scores

5. Direct attribution SQLs, pipeline and sales

The commentary covers the changes in insight and the actions being taken to address any quality issues and to align the marketing plan to where your target market engages and learns.

The Market Heatmap answers these questions:

1. Where are our prospects and customers looking?

2. Is our Marketing reaching our prospects and customers?

3. Is our Marketing any good?

4. Are our marketing efforts leading to pipeline?

5. What has changed?

Five things to do this quarter

1. Run buyer conversations across sales, marketing, and CS in the next thirty days. Not surveys. Conversations. Same questions. You might need to segment by industry, size, and country. Feed transcripts into the AI project and synthesise them as one team. This will also highlight if some of your GTM have knowledge gaps.

2. Add one question to your hand-raiser intake. “Where did you hear about us?” Capture it. Track it. Put it on forms and ask when you meet someone. Compare it to your old digital attribution reports. Notice the gap.

3. Create the Market Heatmap. Build the influence map and overlay it on your current Marketing strategy and pipeline sources. Where is your buyer? Where is your pipeline coming from? The delta is your investment thesis for the next two quarters.

4. Take the attribution conversation back to the board. Reframe it. Show what digital attribution can and can’t see. Replace the old vanity metrics with the core metrics and the Market Heatmap. Make sure everyone understands and can defend it.

5. Reduce spend on the channels that show up well in digital attribution but don’t show up in your buyer conversations. Please tell me you are not paying for paid ads to show up when someone enters your company name into Google? Reinvest in brand, distribution, and being present where the map says the buyer actually is. Spend more time speaking to customers and getting qualitative feedback. This will feel uncomfortable, or even wrong, for more than a quarter.

What life looks like after the fix

Expect discomfort first. You’re operating with fewer trackable data points than you had before. That feels exposed. It is exposed. The replacement isn’t more dashboards. It’s more conversations, more judgement, more closeness to the market. It’s being able to tell the live story of your customer segments to the board. The teams that win this period are the ones that get comfortable with that trade.

Then the friction goes. Once the GTM team is operating from a shared understanding of the buyer, sales and marketing stop arguing about lead quality, because nobody’s relying on the lead score anymore. You start arguing about the buyer instead, which is the right argument to be having. That’s the operating dividend of the flywheel, and it’s the answer to the diagnostic I wrote about a few weeks ago on why AI made GTM alignment worse.

What’s left is creative work. When you can’t out-spend your competitors on ads, you have to stand out from them. The work becomes about being memorable, having a point of view, and being specific enough that your ICP can describe what you do without checking the website. That’s the new bar. The flywheel gives you the buyer understanding. The creative work is what turns that understanding into pipeline.

Board meetings have richer and more strategic discussions. CEOs and GTM leaders no longer have to provide commentary on weakly correlated metrics. The conversation is rooted in customer insights and how well the team are translating them into effective marketing.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on the phone with CEOs, just trying to get a handle on what’s actually giving them trouble, especially when it comes to go-to-market and working with their boards.

A couple of things keep coming up.

The first one keeps coming back in different words. One CEO summed it up cleanly. “Everybody’s interpretation of the value proposition is slightly different, because they’re not familiar with the domain. People struggle with that. That has been a bit the biggest go-to-market challenge from my point of view.”

The challenge is real. Board members come from a range of backgrounds, and none of them are deeply involved in the company’s day-to-day operations. So when the CEO walks them through the value prop and the GTM narrative, each one lands on a slightly different version. One hears the product story. One hears the buyer’s story. One hears something else again. Getting every board member to share the same understanding of what the company actually does and why it wins is one of the hardest parts of the CEO’s job when none of them are domain experts. It gets harder every quarter because the narrative itself is moving with the market, and the gap between what the CEO sees and what the board can hold in their heads keeps widening.

The second one is the playbook problem. Another CEO described it almost word-for-word. “The guidance I had from the CRO and from the board was, OK, we’ve now got to implement the machine. Create the top of funnel, stuff happens, you do deals.” Then he said, “It was quite a naive expectation that you could just follow a playbook and stuff starts to happen, especially right now with AI.”

The real challenge is pretty consistent: most board members have spent years working with models that used to work, and now the ground has shifted under them. Getting that across is harder than it sounds.

It’s not that the board is the bad guy here. They’re just working from what they know. But when there’s a mismatch, it’s the CEO who pays for it.

So if you’re an investor, chair, or portfolio manager on a board, this is really for you.

How most boards and CEOs are handling it today

Most boards push the old playbook (to varying degrees). Pipeline coverage. Top of funnel. Conversion rates. Did we hire the reps? Are we on plan?

In most cases, the CEO doesn’t have a choice. The board is pushing the “build the machine” narrative hard, and that’s the plan the CEO ends up executing against, even when they can see it isn’t fitting the market. Pushing back costs political capital they don’t have to spend, so they go along with it. They hire the reps, build the top of the funnel, and run the playbook the board signed off on, while privately knowing it isn’t the motion the company actually needs.

What it needs is a different kind of motion. Less execution against a fixed plan, more continuous adjustment to a buyer whose understanding of the category is still forming. The narrative has to be rewritten on a rolling basis, not signed off once a year. The team has to organize around the buyer’s situation rather than the funnel stage. Feedback from real conversations has to get back into the GTM motion in weeks, not quarters. And the people running it need to make judgment calls about what to test and kill, not follow a procedure. That’s what a GTM motion built for an AI market actually looks like, and it doesn’t fit neatly into the playbook the board is asking the CEO to execute.

Board members generally attend a bunch of boards and don’t have deep industry knowledge. This makes it a real challenge to understand nuances. This is one of the reasons they default to simplified framing. The more frequent updates are a great idea, but boards will need that translated to (i) Risk, (ii) Opportunity, and (iii) how it affects the assumptions in the business plan and strategy.

One CEO characterized the board’s involvement as administrative overhead, stating, “You provide what’s required and receive no value in return.”

Why doesn’t it work

The board’s advice is often based on assumptions the market has already moved past.

In an AI world, buyers are still figuring out what they’re even buying (i.e., we’re not buying a product, we’re buying the ability to get work done, not use tools but have actions done for you, in a collaborative way) and what problem they’re trying to solve. That changes so fast. For example, one company selling AI-powered customer support saw its buyers shift in a single quarter from wanting a self-service chatbot to seeking full conversational automation, and finally to demanding integrations with human agents and CRM, which nobody had even raised before. The buyers themselves often didn’t know what they would value next, and the sales team had to keep rewriting not just the pitch but also what the product actually solved. The company’s positioning has to move with it. The value prop isn’t something you set and forget. It’s a running conversation between a buyer whose problem keeps shifting and a company doing its best to keep up.

The old playbook assumes the buyer, the message, and the path to a decision are all stable. But they’re not. If the board is still anchored to that model, they’re giving advice to a business that no longer exists.

A specific example boards probably don’t know about: what’s happening to marketing right now.

Think about the last time you wanted to understand a software category. You didn’t download a whitepaper. You didn’t fill out a contact form. You asked an AI and had your answer in 30 seconds.

That’s the machine B2B marketing has been built on for a decade, quietly breaking.

The entire MQL model, gated content, lead nurture sequences, all of it assumed buyers needed you to give them information. They don’t anymore. AI has become the top of their funnel. Not your blog. Not your ads. Not your SDR sequence.

What replaces it is harder to measure. You create content good enough to get referenced by AI systems, and build enough trust that people eventually arrive at your site already convinced. You don’t capture them. You just have to be worth showing up for.

Here’s the question boards should be asking their CMO: Are you brave enough to accept that marketing is no longer about your attribution model, it’s about how your buyer actually buys? How do we respond to this new world?

Because right now, most marketing teams are still optimizing for numbers that are becoming less meaningful. The company wants to track and gate everything. The buyer has already moved on.

That tension only ends one way.

If it were up to me, here’s what I’d try instead.

First, get the board and CEO looking at the same thing the buyer is. Not just the same deck, but the same understanding of how the buyer’s problem is changing, and what AI has done to their decision-making. Ask the CEO to walk the board through what’s shifted in the last quarter, and what the company changed because of it. Like one CEO told me, the real challenge is just getting across that things are different now, and you have to approach it differently. If everyone’s working from that picture, the rest of the conversation actually matters.

Shorten the feedback loop on what buyers are actually saying. Pipeline data is always behind. Buyer reactions aren’t. Make it normal for the CEO to bring in what’s landing, what isn’t, and what they’re having to rewrite. One way to do this: set up a regular, dedicated ‘buyer insights’ session, where the CEO shares the most recent buyer feedback, surprising learnings, and any shifts in how the message is resonating. This gives the board a built-in rhythm to hear what’s actually happening in the market and lets the CEO highlight changes or challenges before they become bigger issues.

And the reality is board members generally attend a bunch of boards and don’t have deep industry knowledge. This makes it a real challenge to understand nuances. This is one of the reasons they default to simplified framing. Boards will need frequent comms that translate to (i) Risk, (ii) Opportunity, (iii) how it affects the assumptions in the business plan and strategy.

Action, action, action

Set aside time in every board meeting for the CEO to walk through how the buyer’s problems have changed, how AI is affecting decisions, and how the value prop has shifted. It’s the best way for the board to see what’s actually happening in the market.

Between meetings, ask the CEO to share at least one recent insight about their buyer that actually changed the company’s messaging. Ideally, have these updates delivered through a consistent channel. Whichever is already part of the board’s routine and easiest for everyone to reference later. Setting that expectation keeps the flow of information reliable and makes it easy for board members to keep pace. If a couple of months go by without a real update, make that the main topic next time.

Track how the story is changing, not just the pipeline. The pipeline tells you what already happened. The value prop tells you if the company is still keeping up with the market. Both matter. Most boards only look at the first one.

Quarterly updates just aren’t fast enough for a market that moves this quickly. Monthly reviews of the buyer and the story, alongside the formal board meeting, are much closer to reality.

Let’s be realistic

None of this is easy. The way most boards operate was built for a slower market. Asking people to change habits that have worked for them for years is a big ask. The easiest way to start is to pick one board meeting in the next quarter and dedicate ten minutes to discussing a recent buyer insight or a shift in the value proposition. You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Just building this new habit into the routine is often enough to kick off the bigger change.

But most CEOs have already figured this out. They’re running the company for the new market, and the board for the old one. They’re tired. Most won’t say it out loud, because it’s just not worth the trouble.

The boards that get this right won’t look all that different from the outside. They’ll just be the ones the CEO actually wants in the room, asking questions that help move things forward instead of making them explain themselves again.

That’s the part worth fixing.

BOARD MEMO:

How to find out if your GTM is getting value (internally) from AI

I caught up in March with an investor I know from one of my old companies. He was one of my favourite board members. Always fair, asked smart questions, and was happy to connect me with people. They haven’t all been like that.

This time, he was looking to connect a CEO who had taken investment last year. It was one of those conversations where you start nodding your head as they talk you through the situation. I’ve heard the same story enough times now. Growing category, early but competitive product, achievable targets. Commercial performance lagging behind plan.

My conversation with the CEO followed a familiar pattern. He saw friction between Sales, Marketing, and Customer success as being the cause. He wasn’t as confident anymore that they were all the right people. My GTM audit certainly identified opportunities to improve, but their big problem was GTM alignment.

They, like a lot of companies I have spoken to, thought they had good enough GTM alignment. Their approach to AI had also made things worse. This is a more recent trend. Marketing was adopting AI, Sales was adopting AI, Customer Success has new AI tools. They were all producing more, but they were looking at things differently to each other.

I don’t think AI creates GTM misalignment, but it does expose it. I see the ICP that was written up in an offsite, but never really agreed. The persona doc Marketing wrote that nobody actually reads. The knowledge that turned out to live entirely in the head of the early employee who left. None of these were AI’s fault. AI just multiplies what people can do. Increasing the impact, good or bad.

AI needs the human to give it context and direction. When each team, each person, is feeding AI different versions of the truth you end up with a growing margin of error. You might not immediate notice people pulling in different directions, but your prospects and customers will. It shows up in the deals you don’t close, the campaigns that don’t land, and the product features that aren’t adopted.

This isn’t an AI problem. It’s an alignment problem that AI has amplified.

The fixes that don’t work

Most companies have tried at least one of four standard responses. None of them solves the actual problem.

The traditional B2B SaaS bow tie. It looks like alignment because every function has its stage, its handoffs, and its metrics. But aligning people around their job description is not the same as aligning them around the customer. The bow tie aligns around your process. That’s a different thing.

More meetings. The reflexive response. Get everyone in a room, talk it through, get on the same page. The cost of running cross-functional alignment meetings every week is enormous, and the alignment they produce evaporates by Wednesday. Everyone knowing what everyone is doing isn’t alignment. It’s awareness with a calendar invite.

Hire a CRO to fix it. Put one person in charge. Empower them. They’ll make everyone fall into line. The problem is that alignment isn’t a position. It’s a property of the system. A new CRO can drive activity. They cannot install structural alignment by sheer force of will.

OKRs. OKRs give comfort because they temporarily align around an issue, a metric, around action. They don’t create deep structural alignment. They’re useful for execution. They’re not a substitute for the foundational work that should sit underneath them.

The reason all four fail is the same. They align around the company’s own work. The activity. The org chart. The process. The people doing the doing.

The thing they’re not aligning to is the customer.

The framework to align GTM

Alignment literally means “a line”. Picture it. Narrow. Specific. Pointing in one direction.

The reason most GTM alignment work fails is that companies are trying to align around the wrong thing. They align around their org chart, or their funnel, or their internal process. They are pointing in the wrong direction.

High-performing GTM is pointing at the customer.

It is pointed at a customer you deeply understand, not at internal process. The hard work isn’t aligning marketing, sales, product, and CS around how the company operates. The hard work is aligning all GTM functions around the same shared, deep, specific understanding of who the customer is and what they’re trying to do. Marketing’s understanding. Sales’s understanding. Product’s understanding. CS’s understanding. All pointing at the same customer.

It is narrow and specific, not fuzzy and broad. This is where the difficult decisions live. Most companies have an ICP that includes everyone they’ve ever closed a deal with, which means they don’t have an ICP, they have a sales history. Real alignment requires choosing, and saying out loud, who you are not for. That decision is uncomfortable. It is also the decision that makes everything downstream sharper: the messaging, the campaigns, the discovery questions, the product roadmap, the pricing.

It is built into the GTM operating system, not produced at an offsite. The customer is not static. The market is not static. AI has accelerated both. Alignment isn’t a document you produce in Q1 and refer to in Q4 if anyone remembers it exists. It is a continuously updating shared model that gets sharper week by week, across all four functions, as the team learns.

Alignment is not a deck. It is a discipline.

Here is how to test whether you have it, and how to start building it if you don’t.

Five steps

Step 1. Test how aligned you actually are.

Pull together your GTM leaders, your product leadership, and your exec team. Ask each of them, individually, the same four questions:

1. Who is our ideal customer?

2. What makes them a great fit?

3. What makes a similar-looking company a bad fit?

4. Who is the most important person to speak to inside one of those accounts?

Listen for consistency and specificity. If the answers come back sharp and similar, you are aligned. If they come back lacking in specifics or related but materially different, you are not. The gap between them is the gap your people and AI tools are compounding with everything they do.

This can be done in a day and tells you more about the state of your GTM than most quarterly reviews.

You can take it further and ask the whole GTM team. Run those transcripts through AI, and you have the whole picture.

Step 2. Enable the team to deeply know the customer.

Three audiences need different things.

Marketing rarely talks enough to prospects and customers. They are almost never enabled on how to deeply understand them. Swipe my Deep Customer Understanding playbook for B2B Marketing. The link is at the end.

Sales and CS know the customer day-to-day, but they are heads down on individual deals and accounts. They need to come up from the detail and listen across the whole journey, not just their bit of it.

And product is part of GTM. If your product team is building personas that don’t match the personas your GTM team is selling to, you are in real trouble. You’re not running one customer-aligned company. You’re running two, and pretending. Product is building the value the customer experiences today and the value they will experience in two years. If they aren’t aligned to the same customer the rest of GTM is aligned to, the alignment isn’t real.

Step 3. Agree the ICP and personas, together, in the same room.

This is a company strategy decision, not a GTM working session. The CEO needs to steer and make the calls. Most companies do this exercise in silos: marketing produces a deck, sales nods politely in the all-hands, nobody changes how they actually work. The hard version is doing it in one room, surfacing the disagreements, making the trade-offs explicit, and committing as one team. With the CEO holding the line on the difficult decisions.

Step 4. Document it deeply.

Use video recordings of real customers and prospects to bring the personas to life. Then put those clips in front of everyone at the company. Drop them in Slack. Play them at the all-hands. Reference them when product makes a roadmap call. The whole company should be plugged in to what your specific customer is actually saying. A persona that lives as a video clip the whole company has watched is worth ten that live in a slide deck nobody opens.

Step 5. Build alignment into your GTM operating system.

Not a workshop. A cadence. A repeating loop where the team listens to customers, updates the shared model, and adjusts the work.

AI helps here, but only after you’ve done the foundational work. AI without context produces generic results. AI fed with deep, current customer context produces sharp, specific, continuously updated alignment that lets the GTM team move as one.

Skip the foundation and AI gives you fast generic. You are moving fast, but not in the right direction. Build the foundation and AI gives you fast specific. The difference is the entire ballgame.

This is what GTM alignment looks like. What it feels like.

When GTM is aligned around a deeply understood customer, two things change.

The first is what most leaders are looking for.

Execution gets sharper.

The product roadmap, the messaging, the campaigns, the pipeline, the way customer success delivers value, all start pointing at the same thing.

Friction between GTM teams drops.

The second is the more important one.

Deep customer understanding doesn’t just sharpen what you do today. It tells you where the customer is heading.

Their world is changing faster than yours.

The buyer who signed last year is being asked to make different decisions this year. The pain point that sold the deal in 2024 may not be the pain point that wins the renewal in 2026.

In the AI era, you have to build for where they are heading. Not where they have been.

Josh Morse, Demand Karma

My Deep Customer Understanding playbook for B2B Marketing

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AI is a generational disruptor to GTM. Most of what used to work in B2B tech: the funnels, the handoffs, the playbooks, the well-referenced CRO hire, is not in need of optimization. It is invalid. Built on assumptions about buyers, teams and markets that 2026 has already written over.

This is landing at an awkward moment for investors. The era when a clean cap table and a name-brand revenue leader could carry a B2B tech company to its next round is behind us. Returns now come from operating improvement, which means GTM has quietly moved to the center of the value creation conversation for Venture and PE alike. It is the one function that both drives revenue and decides whether the company is defensible enough to command the next valuation. And the GTM leaders who can actually run a motion built for the AI era are in short supply, getting shorter.

You can feel it in the board packs. The same format, the same pipeline slide, the same confident narrative, the same slow drift between the forecast and the actuals. Everyone nods. Nobody quite asks the question underneath. In private, it sounds like this: “is this engine going to work in two years, or are we about to write a follow-on cheque for a motion that is already obsolete?”

The world has changed, and most GTM responses are pointed in the wrong direction

The instinct when something stops working is to work it harder. That is what most GTM teams are doing right now. More activity, more campaigns, more sequences, more content, more tools. The numbers that come out of the far end look similar to the numbers from a year ago, which is usually taken as a sign that at least things are stable. It is not a sign of stability. It is the sound of a motion running in place while the ground underneath it moves.

Buyer behavior has changed more than most GTM leaders have yet admitted to themselves. The first conversation a prospect has about your category is with AI, not with you. They arrive at a shortlist before a single marketing impression has been rendered. They read less, compare more, and trust almost nothing that arrived in their inbox unprompted. When they do reach for human input, they go sideways to peers and communities, not forward to vendors. Product expectations have moved with them. Nobody cares what your software does. They care what outcome it produces, and how likely that outcome is to embarrass them at the next finance review. Whole categories that described themselves as AI-enabled last year are now being asked, politely, whether they have any product-market fit left.

The economics of GTM output have collapsed in parallel. A rep can draft ten personalized sequences in the time it used to take to draft two. A marketer can produce a hundred landing page variants before lunch. This sounds like leverage. It is not. It is the thing the guidelines-writers call slop: volume without context, output without judgment. In the bow tie era, a weak SDR or junior marketer produced forgettable work that was at least contained by their own throughput. AI has removed the throughput limit. The slop now scales. Anyone who has opened LinkedIn on a Tuesday morning has seen the result.

And the rate at which all of this changes is faster than most portfolios can absorb. What qualified someone as AI-native eighteen months ago is now table stakes. The playbook that looked sharp at the start of 2025 is already stale. Most GTM engines are falling a little further behind every quarter, whether or not they hit the number.

The consequence for investors is that GTM has become the single largest source of value destruction and value creation in the portfolio. Not marketing. Not sales. GTM as a whole system: the operating model that turns a product into predictable revenue. It is where capital is being quietly burned right now, and where the strongest returns over the next five years will be earned. Underneath that sits a harder problem. The standard GTM Due Diligence question, “is this motion working?”, is a question about the present. It is not useful for the decision in front of most investors, which is the decision about the next cheque. The question that matters is one step harder: “will this motion still be working in two years, or are we funding a machine that is already obsolete?”

Most diligence processes are not yet built to answer that. Most boards are not yet structured to see the signal that would answer it. Most GTM reports still land in a format designed for a market that has already moved. The answer to where the industry goes from here starts with admitting what is dead.

The traditional B2B SaaS bow tie is dead. Most of the industry is still dressed for the funeral.

The traditional B2B SaaS bow tie did a lot of useful work for fifteen years. It gave the industry a shared map. Awareness, consideration, evaluation, commit, onboard, expand, advocate. Each stage had an owner, a metric, a playbook, and a hire who had run the playbook somewhere else. The whole thing was teachable, repeatable, and forgiving. You could walk into any scale-up in 2019 and recognize the furniture. If growth was soft, you hired someone who had fixed the stage you were stuck on. If the CRO didn’t work out, you hired the next one from the company down the road and the playbook transferred with them.

That portability was the bow tie’s real product. Not the diagram. The fact that you could lift a GTM motion out of one company and press it into another and mostly expect it to work. It is what made GTM hireable, fundable, and boardroom-reportable. It is also, with some distance, what made it fragile.

The bow tie codified three assumptions. Buyers move through stages in sequence. Work gets passed between functions down the funnel. Best practice transfers from one company to the next. Every one is now wrong in the way assumptions go wrong in investing: not obviously, not catastrophically, but enough that any strategy built on them slowly underperforms until everyone wonders why.

Buyers no longer move through stages. They ask an AI, read a peer review, watch a podcast, check one vendor’s site for ten seconds, and arrive at a shortlist. Discovery, evaluation and shortlist now happen inside a single session, often without the vendor ever knowing it happened. The MQL to SQL handoff ritual, solemnly observed in revenue operations reviews across the industry, is now mostly theatre. The status in the CRM describes a stage the buyer left two weeks ago, if they were ever in it. Speaking to board members every week, the symptom that lands first is usually along the lines of “pipeline is down 35% in the last quarter.” The team has missed that the pipeline isn’t down because demand is down. It is down because the bow-tie definition of pipeline no longer corresponds to where buyers actually are.

Work can no longer be passed between silos without something expensive falling out of the handoff. Marketing runs its campaigns, SDRs run their sequences, AEs run their deals, customer success runs its renewals, each team chasing a different target and saying slightly different things to the same buyer. In the bow tie era this was inefficient but survivable. In the AI era the buyer sees through it in minutes. Every lost piece of context is another reason the buyer finishes the call politely and never replies to a follow-up. It is also another reason a CRO walks into a board meeting saying “we’re in deals but we can’t create urgency” or “we aren’t going to hit the commit.” The urgency isn’t missing because the AE didn’t push hard enough. It is missing because the buyer is comparing four vendors who all sound the same and is waiting for someone to give them a reason to choose. The teams getting this right have stopped organizing around functional ownership and started organizing around the customer’s situation, with shared context as the unit of accountability rather than handoff status.

And best practice, the comforting idea that what worked at the last company will work at this one, has stopped transferring. The GTM leader arrives with a playbook that was sharp in 2022, applies it faithfully, and watches it produce weaker numbers than the one it replaced. “The new AEs are taking longer to ramp” is the version of this complaint that lands in the boardroom, but the AEs are not the problem. The playbook they are being onboarded into is. Nobody wants to say out loud that the playbook itself has expired, so the conversation instead becomes about execution, or the team, or the market, or the product. Six months later, the leader leaves. A new one arrives with a different playbook that is also a year out of date. The cycle repeats. The companies that have broken out of it treat playbooks as starting points to be tested and killed quickly, not procedures to be defended for the length of an annual plan.

What replaces the bow tie is not a different funnel shape. It is a different unit of organization. The bow tie organized GTM around stages. The motion that works now organizes GTM around flywheels. Not one flywheel, a set of them, each aimed at a distinct customer context. A flywheel for building brand and awareness among buyers who are still out of market. A flywheel for turning pain-aware prospects into customers. A flywheel for delivering value and growing accounts once they have signed. These do not run in sequence. They run in parallel, continuously, and they reward teams that share context across them rather than pass it down a line.

The difference matters because flywheels compound and funnels do not. A stage terminates. A flywheel keeps turning, and every rotation makes the next one easier. And what makes the rotation possible is context: a persistent, shared understanding of the buyer, the account, the deal, the customer, built up over time and accessible to every function that needs it. In the bow tie era, context lived in people’s heads and was lost on every handoff. In the AI era, context is the asset. It is what makes AI produce signal rather than slop, what lets one flywheel enrich another, what allows a team to act faster without acting dumber. The winners are building context layers, not funnels.

AI GTM maturity is not about the stack. It is about the foundation underneath it.

Walk into any portco in 2026 and you will find AI tooling somewhere in the GTM stack. A meeting notes generator, a research agent, a content co-pilot, an outbound sequencer, something. Ask how it is performing and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask how it fits into the operating model and the answer gets thinner. Ask how it has changed the way the team makes decisions and you will often get silence, or a couple of anecdotes.

The common mistake is treating GTM maturity in the AI era as a tooling question. How much AI, how recent, how well configured. This is backwards. The foundation underneath the tools is what determines whether the tools help or hurt, and the foundation is built out of things the stack page of the board deck never mentions.

1. Whether the operating model can learn, align, and execute faster than the market moves.

2. Whether the strategy is built on a current picture of the buyer or a legacy one.

3. Whether AI is woven through the motion or bolted onto the side of it.

4. Whether the company is structurally dependent on a tiny group of GTM leaders who have successfully made the change.

5. Whether the board is seeing ground truth or a polished version of it.

6. Whether there is an actual plan, with a real timeline, for moving from the GTM the company has to the GTM it needs.

Those six conditions are what durability is made of. They are not a scoring rubric. They are the things that decide whether the GTM motion keeps compounding or quietly stops. And they cut across the usual revenue functional lines, which is part of why most portcos find them uncomfortable to look at squarely.

There is a seventh condition worth naming separately, because most companies are quietly getting it wrong.

7. Whether the company actually knows, with structural clarity, why it wins when it wins.

Not the positioning statement on the website. Not the tagline an agency rebuilt last quarter. Not the deck the consultant left behind after the off-site. The underlying answer to “Do we really understand why we are different in a way that our customers care about?” This is the thing AI has commodified hardest. Anyone can rewrite a positioning deck in a week. Anyone can A/B test a tagline. The deck-of-the-quarter brigade has never been busier, and the work they produce has never mattered less. The companies that win in the AI era are not the ones with the freshest message. They are the ones who have done the harder, slower work of knowing what they are materially better at and why their customers care about it, and then adapting how they say it continuously, rather than picking one version and running with it for a year. Differentiation is not a messaging exercise. It is the foundation underneath the messaging. Most of the work being sold as the former is a substitute for the latter, and the substitute does not compound.

Against that foundation, three tiers show up repeatedly across the portfolios we look at.

The first tier is rare. A handful of companies have cross-functional GTM teams working off a shared context, with AI embedded across the flywheels rather than pinned to individual workflows, and with the board close enough to the motion to guide it rather than audit it. In practice this shows up as a handful of things. They treat context as infrastructure, not an artifact of individual roles. They measure the value of each human interaction, not just the volume of them. They run GTM experiments on cadences measured in days rather than quarterly campaign cycles. And they separate execution from results in their board reporting, so the board sees whether the plan was delivered, not just whether the number was hit. These companies do not always look extraordinary from the outside. Quarterly numbers are often unremarkable for a few cycles, because the compounding takes time to surface. When it does, it is the difference between a company that earns its follow-on on strong terms and one that has to explain why the last cheque is not showing up in the pipeline.

The second tier is where most portcos actually live. Individual GTM functions are using AI to go faster inside their own lane. Marketing is generating more content. SDRs are sending more sequences. AEs are getting prettier account briefs. Activity goes up. Quality stays where it was, or drifts down. The silos that were survivable in the bow tie era now compound against the company, because every function is accelerating independently and the buyer experiences the sum of their misalignment. From the inside it feels like progress. From the outside it looks like a company that is busy without being effective.

The third tier is the most dangerous, because it is often the proudest of its AI adoption. Tools have been bought. Vendors have been onboarded. A quarterly AI update is read into the board minutes. But the foundation, the operating model, the data, the context, the cross-functional alignment, has not been touched. The tooling produces output nobody trusts, acted on by a team that is not aligned, guided by data nobody has cleaned. This is where the slop is loudest, because AI is efficiently generating things nobody should be doing. Teams are working harder than they ever have. The numbers do not trend upwards.

Something worth naming plainly here. AI has removed coordination and execution as constraints. What that exposes, quickly, is whatever was previously compensating for weak judgment. In most GTM teams, something was. When the cost of producing output falls to near zero, the quality of the thinking behind it becomes the only thing that separates signal from noise. Judgment is the new scarce resource. And judgment does not scale just because the tools have.

The single most consistent message from leaders who have actually made it to the first tier is not about technology. It is about the operating change. They talk about unlearning the bow tie habits of mind. About retraining managers to run flywheels rather than stages. About rewiring the reporting cadence so the board sees the motion, not a static snapshot of its output. The tooling, in their telling, was the easy part. The hard part was the thinking and the operating. We find this consistent to a degree that is almost monotonous. The companies that win do not start with the stack. They start with the people, the operations, and the evaluation. The stack follows.

Which raises the obvious question. If the foundation is what matters and most portfolios are not built on one, what is the cost of that gap over the next two years?

Durability compounds. Fragility compounds faster than anyone expects.

The gap between tier-one GTM and tier-three GTM does not stay where it is. It widens, quarter by quarter, in a way that is almost invisible from inside the company and becomes unignorable from outside it.

Durable GTM compounds for the same reason as any learning system compounds. Every campaign produces data that sharpens the next. Every customer conversation feeds the positioning. Every decision in the operating cadence improves the quality of the next decision, because the context that informed it is now in the system rather than in the head of whoever ran the meeting. A team operating this way gets better at its job as a condition of doing its job. The rotation of the flywheel is itself the learning.

Three layers have to move together for the compounding to start: operations, leadership, and board visibility. Most portfolios have none of the three fully installed. A handful have one. Almost none have all three. This is what we mean when we say there is an operating model gap.

The investor asymmetry hidden in all of this is what makes the next two years unusual. A portfolio approach to durable GTM is not just additive across companies, it compounds across them. Patterns from one portco sharpen the diligence on the next. The operating model that works in one vertical, stripped to its structural elements, transfers into another. The GTM leaders developed inside the system become the hires for the companies that need them. This is the kind of structural edge that quietly separates funds that post strong DPI from funds that disappoint at exit. The window to build it is open now because most investors are still treating GTM as each portco’s separate problem. Once that stops being true, the edge closes.

Which brings us to the claim we have been circling. The companies that build durable GTM in the next twelve months will earn their follow-on rounds, or their exits, on structurally different terms than the ones that do not. We believe this gap is about to become a diligence discount. Not priced in yet, but coming. The first serious buyer to ask “what it would cost to rebuild this company’s GTM from the foundations up, and how much growth would be lost while they do it?”, will get a different answer than they expect, and they will start pricing that answer into the bid. The rebuild itself is expensive. The twelve to eighteen months of soft numbers while it is underway is more expensive. Once one fund starts pricing in both, the others cannot afford not to. The discount, once it shows up, will move fast.

That is our thesis in one sentence. GTM durability is about to be a pricing input. The portfolios that invest in it now will find themselves on the right side of that shift. The portfolios that do not will be on the other side, wondering why the diligence conversations got harder and the valuations got softer.

Crossing the chasm starts with giving up on the hero

Recognizing the gap is the straightforward part. Closing it is where most portfolios run into trouble, because the usual closing move no longer works.

The usual closing move is to find a better CRO, CMO, or VP. Hire someone who has done it before, someone with the right logos on their Resume and the right references from someone the partner trusts, and let them rebuild the GTM motion. This instinct was entirely reasonable three years ago. It is no longer sufficient, because the market has stopped supplying the people. The pool of GTM leaders who have actually built an AI era motion around context, flywheels, cross-functional alignment and embedded AI is small. The pool is being bid up across every portfolio at once. The best people already sit on more boards than they can meaningfully operate, and their bandwidth for any one engagement is thinner than the LinkedIn profile suggests. Whatever the market looked like the last time you hired, it is tighter now, and the definition of AI-native that satisfied a board twelve months ago does not satisfy one today.

This is the chasm. Geoffrey Moore’s original framing holds up well here. The early adopters of AI era GTM got themselves across on founder intuition, one or two unusually capable hires, and a lot of rebuilding in flight. That move does not scale. The mainstream crossing requires treating the operating system itself as the asset and the leader as the operator of it. This flips the dependency that has quietly broken most portcos. The system does not collapse when the leader leaves. New leaders learn the system, not invent their own. Change management becomes possible because the end state is specified rather than discovered.

This is the harder move politically, because it asks the CEO and the CRO to admit that the right answer is not another hire. It asks the board to stop looking for the next savior. It asks everyone in the room to accept that the company’s GTM is a system they have to build deliberately, not a talent problem they can recruit their way out of. In our experience this is the moment most companies flinch. The savior hypothesis is comforting. It promises a clean handoff and an inspiring narrative for the next board meeting. The system-installation hypothesis promises months of uncomfortable work and a GTM leadership team that will need to unlearn habits they have been rewarded for for years.

The boards that get their companies across share one structural feature. They are inside the work rather than outside it. They see GTM operating health on something closer to a monthly cadence than a quarterly one. They see a forward-looking view of the motion, not a retrospective tour of the outputs. They understand which parts of the operating system are learning and which are stuck. This is a meaningful shift from the governance model most boards have operated for the last decade, where a few metrics were included in the monthly board report, with more detail provided for a quarterly board meeting. In the AI era, a quarter is a long time for drift to compound. Most boards we talk to might be looking at numbers monthly, but are still running the quarterly cadence because it is what everyone is used to, not because it fits the environment.

What this requires of the GTM leaders themselves is worth naming. The job has changed. It is no longer running a proven playbook with confidence. It is running a learning motion with rigor, building and killing experiments on faster cadences than anyone is comfortable with. It is protecting the team from the slop that AI has made so cheap to produce. It is closer to operating a trading desk than running a factory.

All of which points to a different starting move. Before the next hire, before the next tool, before the next agency retainer. Audit honestly. Look at the motion the company is currently running, the operating model underneath it, the board’s line of sight to the ground truth, and the plan, if there is one, for the motion the company will need to be running in two years. If any of those four looks thin, the problem is not a pipeline problem. It is a foundation problem.

Ten questions every board should be able to answer

The cleanest diagnostic for where a company sits against the argument above is also the simplest. Pick the next board meeting on the calendar. Walk in with these ten questions. Ask them plainly and listen to what happens.

What you are listening for is confidence. The kind that comes from a team that has already thought about the question, worked to find the answer and can defend it, not the kind that comes from a team pattern-matching to what the board probably wants to hear. Confident answers are short and specific. Unconfident answers are long and qualified. The difference is usually obvious inside thirty seconds.

The ten questions, in the order we would ask them:

1. How has AI changed our buyers’ behavior in the last twelve months, and what are we doing differently because of it?

2. Who will be our ICP and economic buyer in two years, and do we know what they care about today?

3. Is our category durable in the AI era, or is our positioning built for a market that is already moving past us?

4. Do we really understand why we are different in a way that our customers care about? Or do we have a positioning deck the agency rebuilt last quarter?

5. Do we have a GTM operating model built for the speed of the AI era, or are we mostly relying on established playbooks?

6. Is AI embedded across our GTM motion, or bolted onto individual functions where it mostly produces more of the same output?

7. What is our single source of truth for GTM performance, and who sees it in something close to real time?

8. Are we developing GTM leaders for the motion we will need in two years, or hiring for the motion that worked two years ago?

9. What GTM activity have we deliberately stopped in the last six months because it no longer works, and what did we learn from stopping it?

10. If our GTM leaders left tomorrow, would the operating system survive, or would we be starting again?

The questions are deliberately uncomfortable. They are written to find the places where a confident narrative has been papering over a structural gap.

Three bands, loosely:

Eight to ten confident answers is a durable GTM motion. The priority from here is compounding. Make sure the system keeps learning faster than the market moves, and make sure the board stays close enough to see when it stops.

Five to seven confident answers is a partially durable motion with specific gaps. The risk is that the gaps compound. The highest-leverage move is almost always fixing the weakest of the three layers: operations, leadership, or board visibility, rather than adding more activity on top.

Fewer than five confident answers means the foundation is not yet in place. Tooling and tactics will not close the gap. The work starts with how the team operates, how the board sees, and how decisions get made. Anything layered on top of a missing foundation is effort without impact, which is the most expensive kind.

What to do now

Three moves, in order, regardless of where the scorecard lands.

Audit honestly. Work through the ten questions with the team and the board together, not separately, and watch where the confidence drops. The gap is almost never where the numbers suggest it is.

Start with the operating model, not the stack. The AI tool the company buys next quarter will either amplify a strong motion or accelerate a weak one. That decision has already been made by the operating model underneath. Fix that first.

Shorten the board feedback loop. Quarterly visibility was built for an environment that no longer exists. Monthly is the new floor. Weekly, on operating health, is where the tier-one companies already are.

The companies that do this work in 2026 will not look different on the surface for a while. They will look different in the follow-on round.

Demand Karma helps VC and PE-backed B2B tech companies between $5M and $25M in revenue build GTM for the AI era. We run GTM Due Diligence that tells you whether the motion will still work in two years, and we install the Durable GTM Operating System that makes sure it does.

If any of this resonated, the next conversation is worth having.

Edwin Abl & Josh Morse, Demand Karma, 2026

It would help to not rely on sales-led growth to scale your business.

Every week I’m amazed by the reasons for no / slow growth between £2m - £10m ARR; it often results from bad sales hires or attrition. Unbelievably really, what a BIG problem that creates.

You see this in the investor update:

Promised 40% growth, but they’ve had a tough year because;

They hired a US head of sales which turned out to be below par (they’re still looking for a US head of sales).

2 (good) salespeople left

The problem? Most companies don’t know how to build the infrastructure for scale-up. Some do, but most don’t. And because of that, they rely on hiring salespeople. It’s risky.

Here are six steps to get you up and running to de-risk sales-led growth:

‍Step 1: Focus on creating a unique POV, know your ideal audience profiles and target your audience’s sub-segment.

‍The point of view of your positioning should be about motivating curiosity.

It should be about transferring your specific view and the significant challenges it solves.

If you can’t position your product/ service with a unique POV, you don’t have a good foundation for building awareness and demand.

‍Step 2: Salespeople don’t create demand, so hire into marketing or product ‍

Once you know your positioning and audience and have a decent run-rate of ARR, it’s time to scale. You go out and hire salespeople.

Please don’t do this.

Salespeople are not good at creating demand.

I know you’re excited and believe salespeople will deliver on building a market, but they won’t. It would be best if you started investing in the infrastructure of your GTM. This infrastructure begins with creating content in the first instance or product marketing to improve product positioning with the message to the market. Or product to engineering to help create a better product.

The marketing or hybrid product hire needs to focus on how to build an effective marketing strategy that creates brand awareness and the first stage of your demand funnel. ‍

Step 3: Create a system for your revenue funnel

Once you have in place the marketing basics, it’s time to create the actual customer journey and lifecycle for driving new business.

Start with how you convert brand awareness into lead flow/ engagement, and plan what resources you need to convert or engage further down the funnel. I.e. do you need more content, what content is required, top, middle, bottom, what channels are you optimising?

At this point, you should be building the architecture and testing heavily on how to make a customer journey.

Step 4: Build out your resource structure ‍

Once the first three steps are completed, the most complicated parts are done. And often it’s hard sometimes to see the impact on the lead flow. Because this is not demand generation, it’s the foundations of the building of your house; you don’t see the foundations.

Now it’s time to build out your resource structure.

At this point, you decide on SDR resources to help conversion pathways, demand generation marketers to build the demand creation process or product marketing to help develop the PLG model or refine your message. ‍

Step 5: If the systems start to work, hire sales-people ‍

You know, feel more confident there is a process for demand creation.

You can now look to hire salespeople or scale the sales function (you may have a few hires or still be doing founder-led selling).

The benefit of hiring at this point is you can feel better that the top-of-funnel system will be independent of a good/poor sales hire.

‍Step 6: Importantly, make sure you hire the right people

Ok, this is a no-brainer.

But again, most people get this wrong. You want resources quickly, you hire the wrong people, and it’s a problem six months later.

Invest upfront in getting the right hires for the sales function.

A few ways:

• Use modern assessment tools (not old-school psychometrics)

• When interviewing, use real-world scenarios, i.e. a favourite is to do a pretend sales forecast meeting and see how they’d operate week-to-week

• Ask candidates to send an email pitching your product/service, or a cold email

• At the interview stage, ask them to do your company pitch on a whiteboard

• Ask for at least two references from former managers (people don’t ask for references!)

• Use your networks to gain feedback on the candidate

• Put your own internal ‘Hiring Playbook’ in place, looking at competencies, attributes and behaviours (I have an example if you want to see one).

• A quick tip: The great salespeople I have met are intelligent, good listeners, thoughtful, curious, motivated to be an expert in their domain, and often introverted. Not the typical sales profile.

If you follow these stops, you’ll de-risk the result. Still, lots of execution is needed but an alternate way of thinking.

In 2023, it’s not optional to think harder about the infrastructure for scale-up; it’s mandatory because hiring salespeople won’t work. But saying that, if you want to avoid investing in the infrastructure, follow step 6 and at least hire ‘better’ salespeople.

I hope that helps.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Funnel‍

- Lead through Active (Should show volume, stage to stage conversion and overall conversion)

- MQL to Close Won (Snapshot of last month

- Stages:

- MQL

- SQL

- Demo

- Proposal

- Negotiation

- Closed Won

- Active

- Splits (volumes and conversion rates)

- Closed vs All

- Closed: Excludes deals still in the pipeline

- Lead source

- Segment by complexity

- Net new vs existing

- Size

- Estimate versus actual (3 & 6 month look back)

- By rep

‍Total Volumes

‍- Volume (trend over time: WoW, MoM, QoQ, same period previous year)

- Filters

- All (Open & Closed)

- Closed (Closed Won/Lost & DQ)

- Types

- MQL volume

- SQL volume

- CW volume

- Active volume

- MQL-SQL conversion %

- MQL-CW conversion %

- MQL-Active conversion %

- Splits

- WoW

- MoM

- Vs Target

- Lead source

- By rep

- Make it possible to select which conversion rate is plotted over time

- One line per rep

- Average sales cycle

- Lead source

- Segment by complexity

- Net new vs existing

- Size

- By rep

- Average order value

- Lead source

- Segment by complexity

- Net new vs existing

- Size

- By rep

‍Performance Management

‍- Staff, stack ranked

- Volumes

- Conversion rates

- Horse race chart

- Based on the number of closed wins

- Other data

- Number of touches per closed won/lost

- Average number of touches per opp by rep

- Total number of activities vs closed wins (correlation)

- Regression?

- Seniority of primary contact vs close rate

- Meeting show rate (does your scheduled meeting attend the meeting)

- Booked # of days out

- By rep/bdr

- Rep capacity

- Point in time analysis

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

So, the big problem with portfolio companies is that it’s often hard to understand their go-to-market (GTM) flywheel and how it works. When they explain it to you, it can feel complex, and they’re not aware of the pain points and blockages within their strategy and the execution behind that strategy.

This means that you often get an expert to provide a view of what works and what doesn’t and an understanding of whether that portfolio company is executing the right strategies. Most companies fail to get to the root problem or root causes because they don’t simplify how they acquire business and treat customers. They usually approach this through an audit process or by designing new go-to-market models. They believe this fixes the problem of how to get to the next stage of growth and evolve their marketing, go-to-market, and customer experience.

That doesn’t work because it doesn’t address the fundamentals or make it lean and simple to understand. Instead, I would encourage your portfolio companies to practice GTM Value Engineering. This involves visualizing the current bottlenecks within their process without immediately trying to diagnose or devise a strategy. It is about visualizing what’s happening, not diagnosing the problem.

Here’s how it works

Divide their thinking into two buckets. Bucket one is “How do customers happen?” That’s simple. What’s the process right now for gaining a customer? Process map that out and figure out where the problems are in that process and what can be done to scale it. A simple process map, similar to a technical one: this happens, then this happens, leading to customer acquisition.

The second part of the process map is understanding, “What do you do with customers once you have them?” A similar process map takes the customer journey from where they bought to what you do with them after they’ve bought. Simple steps: they sign here; this is their onboarding; this is how we treat them, and this is what we do with them post-signing.

By understanding how well your process aligns with your customer interactions, you can start to diagnose the bottlenecks. This approach can lead to an enhanced customer experience journey, opening up better upsell and cross-sell opportunities, reducing churn, and increasing customer retention. The potential benefits are significant, making this exercise a worthwhile investment for your portfolio companies.

‍‍Action action action:

Get your portfolio companies to perform this simple exercise:

• Create a process map for how do customers happen (right now):

  Break down the current steps for gaining a customer. Identify problems and potential scaling options.

• Create a process map for what you do with customers once you have them:

  Detail what happens after a customer signs, including onboarding and ongoing interactions, to improve their journey and align processes.

Once you’ve defined these processes, you can diagnose the strategy for moving forward, scaling, unblocking challenges, and improving revenue through a better customer experience.

Good luck!

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Over the last three years, I’ve had the pleasure of advising more than 50 scale-ups, conducting over 10 due diligence projects, and coaching and working with CEOs and chairs across the UK and US. Through this experience, I’ve gained valuable insights into the acute go-to-market challenges that most scale-ups face, typically those with revenues between $2 million and $25 million. While the challenges may follow similar patterns, the key to effective advising lies in understanding the unique context of each business.

No one piece of generic advice is relevant for every company. Many things are in play, like market dynamics, competition, category creation, product, people, positioning, messaging, and value proposition; there’s a lot in that mix.

The big problem most scale-ups face that I’ve worked with is often not centered on the root causes, and I’ll explain 15 of these specific learnings below with some actions that can reframe your thinking on how to solve root cause issues. Most scale-ups try to solve the problems in the same way. They have a top-of-funnel problem; they try to get more leads. They have a sales performance problem; they remove all the sales team and hire new salespeople. They have a marketing problem; they hire a marketing leader and invest in channels, paid advertising, and tactics.

These are all the common ways people try to solve scaling problems. And what I’ve observed while working with 50+ scale-ups is it’s good to reframe into the context of the root causes. These root causes are what I observed below in the 15 challenges and observations of go-to-market and the things I’ve learned over the last two years.

Learning number one:

You don’t have a lead flow or top-of-funnel problem; you have a messaging problem. One of the most common things I get asked to look at is whether this business has a top-of-funnel problem or a lead generation problem. The sales leader says there are not enough leads, and the assumption is that if they get a load of leads, the product is good, the service is so good, and the conversion rates are reasonable; they’ll convert to revenue. I hear this repeatedly, “Our conversion rates are 40%; we just need more leads.” And a specific story on this one: one due diligence program I worked on, they said their problem was too many leads. Now, once it got into the details, three months post-completion, that wasn’t the problem. The team assumed this was the problem, so why are deals not closing? However, once you got into the details, the problem was that 80% of the leads were lower quality, not the right ICP.

At the same time, there was no sales process for how you segmented leads. So, the sales team could have been more efficient in working on those, and that’s an example of what you commonly see as a lack of awareness of trying to find the real problem. And it’s often the case you don’t have a lead problem. You have a messaging problem. Write that down. You won’t fix your sales problem with more leads. The only way you’ll fix it is with better messaging. 99 times out of 100, the problem isn’t leads; it’s in your messaging.

Action: Reflect on your current messaging. How powerful is it? Because if you have the right messaging and clearly describe what you do, those words move people to action. With the right messaging, your marketing becomes effortless. So don’t think about the problem statement of “more leads.” Think about how you can improve your messaging.

Learning number two:

Execution is what matters. Execution is an undeniable point, which won’t surprise anyone. Still, in every single due diligence review I’ve done, it’s prevalent that the go-to-market plan seems logical or there’s a situation where you’re mid-cycle in the plan. You’re doing an audit, and everything in that audit seems logical. It’s got a good plan, sales strategy, and marketing strategy, but there’s a massive tension that’s not filtering through to results. When you talk to operating leaders, the fact that everything’s logical doesn’t match the performance of the business is a big problem of credibility for those leaders. There’s one thing you don’t want to be: someone confident and poor at execution or confident with a lack of results.

Action: The action here is to be clear on constantly trying to dig into where the real problem lies and try to solve those problems. Don’t rely on a plan or a strategy being logical. If there are poor results, scrap your thinking in many ways, go back to square one, and think about how you can make things simpler and narrowly improve results or get better at execution. Looking back on my career, perhaps I have indexed on strategy and planning and have realized from the last two years that it’s all important and crucial to get right. Still, you have to ensure things are getting done and you’re solving root-cause issues, not the wrong problems that don’t make a difference.

Learning number three:

Marketing bears the brunt of poor pipeline development. Although this is relevant in some capacity, the narrative must ensure marketing is seen as more than just a lead-generation entity within a business. Marketing powers the whole company in many ways. The marketing strategy is the strategy of the business. Marketing is everything because marketing includes selling, content, communications, messaging, and enablement. When scaling, many companies need to remember to recognize that the root cause of many of the business problems is marketing issues. Still, people sometimes need a different idea of what marketing can be and what marketing is.

Marketing is the entire strategy and should be tightly linked to the go-to-market (GTM) plan. It should be driven more than short-term activities that the chief revenue officer drives, and if the pipeline isn’t in the right place, there shouldn’t be an excuse to look at marketing. It’s across the whole team and the entire strategy, and people sometimes need to pay attention to this perspective. Marketing doesn’t need to measure every single metric. Ensure that the metrics you’re measuring align with the whole go-to-market function and what needs to happen in terms of KPIs.

Action: Review the role of marketing in the business and make sure that marketing is driving the entire strategy. And remember this: your funnel conversion problems and your top of funnel or your middle funnel may differ from what you think they might be. It could be down to poor marketing, sales execution, conversion, or customer experience driven by the marketing strategy. Ensure the broader scope of marketing is well-defined and embedded across your GTM strategy.

Learning number four:

Investors typically are skeptical of your differentiation and worry about differentiation and your message to the market. What’s true right now is every market is fiercely competitive. Within SaaS and professional services, every vendor says they do the same thing or perceive themselves to be different when they’re not. The presentation to boards typically shows value prop statements and messaging statements, but far too often, there needs to be more clarity on the state of the market, how you win, what makes you different, and how you message that to prospects. The “how you win narrative” must be improved in many instances, especially for investors.

Action: You may think you have everything figured out here, but go back and reflect on whether we are clear on differentiation. Do we know how we’ll win? Are we specific enough to carve a wedge within our market for our differentiated product? That’s the action to take away. Make sure that you have that really well defined, and then, at your next board meeting, make sure you include some of that narrative because that’s what the investors often lack and want to know.

Learning number five:

Everything is about people. You can have the best strategy in the world, the best plan, the best MarTech, and the best process, but the go-to-market teams that I see being successful are the ones where the people drive results. They’re digging into clear challenges, and they’re solving problems. So it’s a combination of being great problem solvers, getting work done, and having a plan that they understand, and then they’re looking to deliver against.

Action: The action here is if things aren’t going to plan, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got the wrong strategy. It could mean the wrong people in the context of that business. That means you fail to get the execution that you need to hit the plan, and people’s decisions are always hard. And believe me, investors are just the same as CEOs, who want to avoid high turnover and churn of people in a business. But you must be constantly aware that the biggest lever to your success as a CRO, CMO, or CEO is the people within the company—having good people, having the right plan, focusing on the right priorities, and having a great culture. If you combine those, you’re more likely to be on how to win.

Learning number six:

Everyone has a funnel conversion problem. As I mentioned in Learning One, perhaps the funnel conversion problem is down to messaging, positioning, value proposition, and the root causes of your go-to-market, not the data market. How to solve a funnel conversion? There are different ways to do it. You can either do it from a process standpoint, which means reviewing your processes, ensuring everything is good from a data perspective, and ensuring that the insights you’re presenting show the accurate representation of your funnel, which should highlight where the funnel conversion problem is. The conversation at the board can be much more pointed towards solving problems.

So, from a table-stakes perspective, ensure your process is clean and clear. The other problem with funnel conversion can be the capabilities of sales or marketing. Another problem is poor execution against the customer experience in the customer journey, driven through marketing. These are the typical three issues.

Action: The action here is trying to highlight the funnel conversion problem and make sure you solve it in the right way and take action on it. At most board meetings, people come to me and say, “There’s a funnel conversion problem.” I try to solve that question through one of the above “Use Cases” and figure out if it’s a process problem or a specific issue within the funnel. I often see GTM failing to execute well against this challenge; keep that from happening.

Learning number seven:

People need to think about what works to scale. Let me explain. The overall goal of a business is to scale. That’s why investors put money into the company, and that’s why you, the CEO, have ambitions to have a good exit. Or you want to change a market, you want to scale something, and you want to be successful. But often, what happens is that when people think about scale, they start to dig into the wrong things. I mean by that, to take outbound marketing, for example, as a tactical use case. When you’re looking to scale, people over-index on using tools and automation and only use numbers in a sheet; they need to remember the most important thing is targeting the right people, having good messaging, and doing human things that don’t scale to improve conversions. And it can be a scary situation when the business across the board is looking to do things that scale—in product, in engineering, in marketing, in sales—when they haven’t been in the correct order of steps to set up the scaling process to be successful. In that last example, you can scale outbound successfully once you feel confident you’ve got the right messaging. You can scale the sales team once you think you have a process for creating demand in your funnel.

Action: The action for this one is to ensure you don’t get too far ahead of yourself. Scaling is the overall goal, but think about the order of steps you need to take to pull the trigger on scaling at the right point. You’re far more likely to be successful with the scaling process because you have the fundamental things in place.

Learning number eight:

The mindset is shifting from sales-led growth. Four or five years ago, people only considered how to hit their plan by hiring more sales reps. Unfortunately, that still happens in some cases. Over the last six months, I’ve heard numerous narratives of people coming out of the board meeting saying, “Oh, we didn’t hit plan because the VP of sales didn’t work out. We didn’t hit the plan because the two salespeople didn’t work out.”

This is still happening, but people are starting to realize that you need to create demand before you hire salespeople. And how do you create demand? You do that through marketing. You do that through the founder, CEO, thought leadership, and content. You do that by creating a lean marketing process and infrastructure to scale or create demand, and more CEOs, chairs, and investors are starting to realize that this is the way forward rather than relying on salespeople because salespeople are not good at creating demand. They are good at converting demand into revenue.

Action: So the action here is, what’s your demand creation process? Do you have one? Do you have a marketing infrastructure for demand? If you don’t, you’ll be reliant on hiring salespeople to create demand doesn’t work, and this is a lesson for me. It will work if you have the right salespeople and develop the process or structure around demand creation and audience building for your proposition or the problem you solve.

Learning number nine:

It’s incredible that people still default to mainly talking about their product or service. People know, across the board, in many cases, that the key is tapping into the pains and the gains of an audience or who they sell to and creating valuable content that either focuses on those pains or those gains and is distributed in front of them regularly. However, it’s still commonplace for many companies to either need a plan for an effective content strategy or a plan for evangelizing the pains and gains of their prospects. They don’t have a content plan at all. Their website, or what they talk about, is all about their product and themselves. You may think you’re talking about the challenge, but take a step back and think if you are because, in most due diligence projects I do, the company focuses messaging on its product and how great it is. They still need to tap into the key psychological factor of selling, which is how to reframe a problem in someone’s head, how to sell against it, and how to tap into that problem and be the one that solves that problem.

Action: Please go and review how you’re talking about your proposition. Are you too product-led? Are you talking about the customer’s problems? Review that on your website, on your sales collateral, and on your marketing messaging. Nobody cares about your product. People care about their problems being solved. Write that down.

Learning number ten:

Most people need help with a differentiated point of view. Most companies, whether service companies or product companies, again struggle with being clear on their differentiation, and if you struggle with being clear on your differentiation, that causes so many problems—from what your marketing messaging will be to how well your sales team talk to prospects, convert prospects and convert into revenue, and it makes the competitive market that you’re in and the category battle super tough because you’re not precise.

Most people feel that their differentiation is in their product. But although that’s true at one level, I believe it all starts with the differentiated point of view that you have either as the CEO or as the business overall to the market. Suppose you figure out your differentiated point of view to start with, based on how you want to reframe the conversation in your market, and you have a clear and firm position with that differentiated point of view. That’s the starting point of thought leadership, which leads to a straightforward sales story. Most people don’t think of it this way.

Still, I’ve seen those who have a differentiated point of view at the start are much more confident and clear about threading differentiation into that point of view and having a powerful narrative from your thought leadership at the top of the differentiated point of view, right into your marketing messaging and how you angle your differentiation, and then right into your sales story, where you can be much more explicit about where you fit in the market and your differentiation.

Action: The action here is to go and review or go back and think about whether you have a differentiated point of view at the moment. If not, go away and work on creating one. Once you have a confident, differentiated point of view, you have the foundations for creating a solid marketing messaging and strong sales story that will help you sell more, resonate better with the market, and also help you build an audience because the people who build an audience are the ones who have a differentiated point of view.

Learning number eleven:

Companies still need to leverage customers better. In nine out of ten GTM plans I review, there’s always minimal detail on the customers and the use cases with the customers and the markets in which they play. It’s all predominantly based on strategy, tactics around demand gen, sales process, or sales plans, but the content does not include use cases; the content does not include customers. The strategy and the plan are not based on the customer. And although this seems unbelievable, it’s true. It’s a significant lesson I pass on every time—your number one strategy should be selling and serving customers and creating a great experience once they’ve bought from you.

Once you’ve figured out that flywheel, you can do everything off the back of it, and many people struggle with go-to-market, top-of-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel. The only way you solve getting more business and selling more and being more effective at converting deals is through an obsession with landing new customers and turning those new customers into advocates and doing an excellent job for them because there’s a real trend these days within the go-to-market strategy, which is called modern word of mouth. Modern word of mouth is a thing that is happening in forums and communities all over the world, where people are recommending products and services all the time to their peers. The reason it’s called modern word of mouth is because this was more manual before. Now, it can be leveraged on a larger scale because it’s on digital platforms, with access to more people who see that information. But the only way you’re going to drive modern word of mouth is through delivering excellent success outcomes for your customers.

Action: The action here is to stop using the excuse of, “Oh, we can’t get any customer stories.” Go and rethink how you engage with a customer; go and replan your entire strategy around your customer’s success. If you do that right, you can use that customer story or the use case, and then you should be embedding all your marketing and storytelling around the customer story or the use case. It’s much simpler doing that than creating stories from scratch or content from no basis of use case.

Learning number twelve:

People have tons of metrics but don’t often pick the right ones. Marketing can sometimes be very guilty of this; not to pick on marketing, but because they’re pressured to show every metric, they overload CEOs or boards with too many metrics. And you compound the problem by having too many metrics with a lack of results, which hurts credibility. The wrong metrics can apply within the sales team and other functional areas.

Action: The action here is to assess what metrics you’re reporting, especially marketing and sales, and make sure they align with the levers that really make a difference within the business. These levers are also the levers that the investors or the CEO are interested in because they know they link clearly to how the company can scale and build. Learn what metrics are important and what people want to know, and keep the rest to yourselves.

Learning number thirteen:

The services-to-product pivot. Many companies want to go with the product because the multiple on exit can be better or because of the perception that a product business is more valuable. However, one lesson I’ve seen over the last few years is that many service companies think about pivoting to products and, in most cases, fail because of the divergence or focus prioritization. You’re providing a different outcome and service to your customers. It presents a go-to-market challenge as well because selling a product versus selling a service is different, and you’ve got to recognize that because the way you angle the problem you’re solving is different. And there’s a litany in a graveyard of companies who have tried to pivot, been unsuccessful, either gone out of business, or returned to being a services company.

Action: If you’re thinking about doing this pivot, recognize it will take a long time and plan ahead for that. Or just recognize that you can potentially build a great services business if you’re doing the right thing, and it might not be the best thing to do to build a product business.

Learning number fourteen:

Prioritization and initiatives. When I do a mid-cycle review—and by mid-cycle review, what I mean is you may not be operating to plan, and you’re looking to dive into inefficiencies in your go-to-market program—the leading root cause fundamental that comes out of that every single time is that there’s too much going on. There’s a lack of prioritization for suitable go-to-market activities.

There may be too many channels spread too thin with a not big enough team, lack of execution against one or two channels, i.e., doing content or events well from a sales standpoint, trying to sell to 10 different markets with an unclear value prop in each market, and also a lack of ability to say no to new initiatives at every time. And so every quarter, there’s a new initiative. Every few months, there’s a new initiative. At the same time, there’s a lack of execution against what’s happening in the present. Part of my process is to help the marketing leader, CRO, or CEO be honest about what is to be clear on and work through those priorities.

Action: If you are feeling overwhelmed and there are many priorities happening, there are 66 OKRs, so take a step back. Perhaps, you know, go and do a strategy day with the leadership team and try and pick out the core three levers that you need to focus on right now that will be the things that can help you focus and keep things more uncomplicated to make sure that you’re more likely to hit plan. Slim down the marketing. Think of lean marketing, lean selling, and focused strategy. The companies I’ve worked with who have gone away and done that have gone on to do great things and have been much more precise in building and scaling their businesses.

Learning number fifteen:

The classic sales and marketing alignment. Most have discussed an excellent alignment game in every situation I’ve covered. They’ve talked well about how they get on with the CRO and how they get on with the CMO. But then, once you get into the details of an audit or something else, you see a disconnect between what sales are doing and what marketing is doing, and there’s still, albeit the narrative is now about go-to-market being one team. A part of it is education because there’s sometimes still a lack of awareness on the marketing side for salespeople or the sales wants, needs, and demands of that role.

Conversely, there still needs to be more awareness of what marketing is from the sales side. And it’s on both sides to educate each other and help each other understand how that problem can be fixed and solved. The companies that are doing well, and this is super obvious, are the companies with strong, strong, and decent sales and marketing alignment. Strong alignment means working on the same page, having accountability for each other’s respective areas, respecting each other’s areas, and each team trying to help each other solve problems together, not solve problems in different ways.

Action: The action here is to reflect on your current sales and marketing alignment and try to be, first principles, thinking about what good looks like, how we work well together, and getting people together. Don’t just say you’re in alignment; I’ll give you a use case on this. Recently, I did an audit, and both sales and marketing leaders said they were in alignment, but ultimately, this was just for face value. When you dig in, you find out the sales leader was saying there was alignment, but fundamentally, there wasn’t, and the marketing leader struggled to create that alignment.

Unfortunately, the marketing leader sometimes can feel second-rate to the CRO or the salesperson, so they can be subservient and accept that position. As the marketing leader, you’ve got to be the one. It shouldn’t just be on you to push alignment. So, you know, if you’re the investor or at the board level, make sure that whoever is in charge in terms of the CRO or CEO has an appreciation for marketing and that they understand that the activities and actions they should be doing should be thoroughly integrated and focused on the same things.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

If you’re an investor or CEO of a scaleup, you probably hear at every board meeting or in general that you have a pipeline problem—it’s a top-of-funnel issue. We don’t get enough leads, or our pipeline is flat. If we had more leads, we’d close more business—a linear relationship, right? As the CEO, you could communicate that to investors, or the CEO might get that narrative from the CMO / CRO.

You may need to reframe the problem. It could be that you have a messaging problem. Write that down and think about it. Challenge your current thinking around how strong and compelling your messaging is to your audience. In short, the issue often lies in your messaging—it’s not that people aren’t seeing it; they don’t feel compelled to act.

I have learned that many companies respond by doubling down on marketing spend or feeling like they need to add more channels or do more (classic: let’s do more outbound). They start running more ads, email campaigns, or attending more events, all with the idea that revenue will follow if more people hear about the product. It’s tempting to think the problem is just reaching—but it’s not. The real issue is whether your messaging lands with the people you need to convert. More exposure won’t fix a message that isn’t clear or compelling.

Let’s say you’re running LinkedIn ads targeting decision-makers at tech companies. Your ad gets a ton of impressions but no meaningful clicks or conversions. Why? The messaging is too generic—it’s either talking about your product’s features or repeating industry buzzwords without addressing the core pain point your customer is dealing with.

For example, you might say, “Our platform integrates with all your tools.” That’s fine, but does it address why the customer cares? Not really. What needs to be added is the connection to their problem. They may be struggling with wasted time managing data across platforms, and that integration could save them a few hours a day. That’s what they care about.

Rather than focusing on increasing awareness, start by refining your message to hit exactly where it matters. Be specific about the problem your audience is trying to solve, and lead with that. And remember, it’s anchored in the real reason people buy—they don’t buy a workflow tool; they buy time and convenience.

For example, instead of the generic messaging above, say something like:

“Wasting time jumping between apps? Our platform cuts admin time in half by integrating all your tools into one view, so you can focus on scaling your business.”

Now, you’re speaking directly to an audience frustrated with inefficiencies in their tech stack. You’ve connected the value of your product to a specific pain they feel, which makes it much more likely they’ll take action.

Action action action.

Here’s what you can do today to make sure your messaging is as sharp as it needs to be:

1. Review your last five marketing emails, ads, or sales collateral

Do they focus on your customer’s problem, or are they just talking about what your product does? Edit each one to lead with an apparent problem your audience is dealing with and how your product/service solves it. The goal is to be short, compelling, and simple enough to understand. Is the message strong enough to challenge someone to take action? Think hard about that one.

2. Interview your customers

Ask your best customers why they use your product and what pain points it’s solving for them. Use their words to refine your message—nothing beats matching customer languaging to make your messaging specific and relevant.

Here are two great questions to ask*:

1. Why did you buy NOW?

2. Why did you choose US?

If you ask these questions during onboarding, post-contracts, or even a few months after closing, you’ll get amazing insight that can be incorporated into your messaging.

3. Simplify your call to action

Make sure your messaging creates action for the prospect because your message creates the feeling of action. Whether booking a demo or scheduling a call, please don’t make your audience think too hard about what to do next. At the same time, think about your messaging to get the prospect to “the next step” that seamless and persuasive messaging. Don’t try to sell everything “all at once.” Think of your messaging as building next-step layers in the sales funnel.

By focusing on your customer’s real problem (it seems so damn obvious, but often we forget this because we know getting clear on your messaging is super hard). Then, clearly show how you solve it and build the “root cause” issues into an interesting POV, so you’ll create messages that drive meaningful results without wasting your marketing budget.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Have you ever wondered why your potential customers walk away from a sale, even when you think you’ve presented them with the perfect solution?

The truth is most companies fail to understand how the human brain makes buying decisions, but with a few key insights into the psychology of buying, you can create powerful, buyer-centric approaches that will help you close more deals.

I found this formula many years ago, but it’s still relevant today. You need to focus on the “6 whys” - “The small strategic commitments of a sale” (specific commitments must occur more than others in the brain - to say yes, what do we need).

The six commitments that every sales process should focus on are:‍

1. Why should I change? The foundation (we struggle the most with this one, status quo bias, and if we don’t solve this, we’re irrelevant). Focus on problems, the scope/ cause, and consequences and provide provocative insights. Most salespeople don’t search for problems - they don’t act as problem finders but focus too much on the solution. They don’t dig enough into the problems of the buyer. A psychiatrist study shows - ‘The first problem the patient brings you is never the real problem’.‍

2. Why now? The longer someone takes to make a decision means they will not take a decision. You need to be clear on why it is essential to do something now - this helps to speed up the sales cycle; you need to make it easy and less risky.‍

3. Why your industry solution? Most don’t understand your REAL competition, the broader market piece. What’s happening in the market? We’re too obsessed with our proposition.‍

4. Why you and your company? Know your buyers will have multiple options. You must be succinct in the solution and 10x differentiators you will deliver. Everyone wants to make wise decisions; everybody has many options, whether you know it or not.‍

5. Why your product or solution? Avoid cost leader. Look for distinct value, how you are different and does the buyer care. Competition is not static; look for distinct value. How can you make it matter to them? Think about their journey. Connect the dots, make it about the person - no one cares about you or your company.

6. Why spend the money? 2 buying motives, desire for gain and fear of loss. We’re inferior at the fear of loss, how to position to figure out what they’ll lose. Addressing why spend the money. Reveal how the buyers avoid loss with you - when there is no apparent connection to avoid the fear of loss, you will struggle. Don’t complicate buying decisions; the human brain can only handle so much.

A BIG final takeaway.

Base your sales process on creating “next step layers”.

Science shows that small incremental commitments are the most effective way of closing - not a final big close.

You will be more successful if you base selling on science and the six commitments.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

You see this in the investor update:

‍Promised 40% growth, but they’ve had a tough year because:

• The CRO didn’t work out.

• The CRO cost us above $300k.

• The CRO hired the wrong people.

• The CRO didn’t improve deal velocity at all.

The problem? Most companies don’t know what they want from the CRO, the org design is wrong, and you don’t do enough due diligence (i.e. potential psychometrics). It’s risky.

When you consider the CRO to be a crucial cog in building your marketing and GTM engine, it’s critical to get it right. The interface between sales, marketing, customer success and rev ops is fundamental to the orchestration of the machine.

Here are some tips on what type of profile you need:

<$1M ARR: Look for people who are passionate about what you are doing. Don’t look for a sales leader who is TOO strategic. You are looking more for a focused executor who wants to learn. In this phase, most sales (in general) will be founder-led. Think about someone that complements you, the CEO/founder, someone you can trust, train, and help get deals done. This person will need to think more day-to-day (but wants to go on a journey with the business). They’ll be ambitious and hungry and look for those good at ‘prospecting’ - essentially a trait lacking in many account executives and sales leaders. I’d suggest looking for someone insatiable about learning new tactics for improving outbound sales/ marketing who can help educate you in getting better outcomes quicker. They’ll more likely be a Head of Sales than a CRO.

$2M-10M ARR: In this revenue bucket, you need a sales leader who balances execution and strategy in parallel. It would help if you found someone with the right balance. They’ll love the growth phase and demonstrate capabilities of building structures, playbooks, governance, motivation, strategy, execution and more. However, they can get involved in tactics and hands-on execution in the short term. They don’t get too bogged down with complexity but build agile processes that adapt. They should be obsessed with helping the customer achieve the impact they bought the product for and learning from them to scale marketing’s impact. They’ll want to work closely with customers. Two critical things they’ll need is the ability to help CEOs move away from Founder-led and not be too siloed tactically with a strong appreciation of marketing. If they don’t, you want to achieve sales and marketing alignment, let alone repeatable growth.

>$10M ARR: Look for a CRO (and at this stage will be a proper CRO) who can execute proven processes. Look for a leader to orchestrate and take teams to the next level. We don’t want every sale to be like magical art. Sales are repetitive, especially when you are over 10 million AEE. The CRO will love building new segments, categories, revenue streams, positioning pivots and complex growth plans. They’ll know that creating a flywheel GTM engine with a “one commercial engine” mantra is the basis for success and scalability. They’ll be great with customers. They’ll be great at building teams and fostering ‘high performance’. They’ll also have a degree of gravitas that sets them apart as the CRO to take you to $50m+.

TL;DR

• Below 1M ARR, look for sales leaders who can execute and complement founder-led.

• 2M-10M: look for business-oriented CROs who balance strategy, execution and GTM alignment.

• Above 10M: look for a CRO that can execute, scale teams, build new segments, make new sales motions, create alternate sales routes to market (direct/indirect) and build on processes for the next level.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Most board meetings have a request to look at funnel conversion.

You either have a top-of-funnel problem (primarily) or a middle or bottom-conversion issue. Compounding this issue are sales and marketing leaders tending to go away and get back into the day-to-day.

Guess what?

From a high level, the problem never gets resolved. Couple this with the tension that navigating the road to enhancing funnel conversion can feel like a maze. But let’s simplify the journey with some straightforward, actionable insights you can get started with today.

The first step is fine-tuning MQL Definitions.

Let’s start with a clear look at what qualifies as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) across your channels. It’s about pinpointing the moments that genuinely signal interest/ intent—whether engaging via an event, webinar, or showing consistent interest across your digital platforms. Identifying these moments accurately is the foundation for moving leads effectively through your funnel. The big mistake everyone makes is classifying all MQLs as the SAME. I’d create a Google sheet with a breakdown of each channel to understand channel conversation, then assess the criteria in each channel that determines an MQL (for example, attendance at a webinar is NOT an MQL in itself but often labelled that way).

For you CEOs and investors, it’s essential to understand the differentiation in MQLs per channel to avoid making assumptions that all MQLs are the same.

The second step is aligning Sales and Marketing Efforts.

Moving on, it’s crucial to understand how your sales team handles MQLs. This isn’t just about quantity; it’s about quality and fit. Analysing your AEs’ (Account Executives’) conversion success can reveal valuable patterns. Some AEs may excel with certain types of leads due to their approach or expertise. Recognising these nuances enables you to route leads more strategically, ensuring they land with the AEs best suited to nurture them toward a close. Ensure you train AEs and SDRs in the type of MQL, as this affects the approach to conversion. An example of this would be if the MQL is from thought leadership, you may need a soft approach to that prospect, whereas if it is a direct inbound, you can be more direct.

Most AEs are one-dimensional and don’t cater for types of leads - well, top AEs do, and that’s why their conversion rates are better. You can sometimes solve conversion rates at the rep level (it happens) because the quality of your AE can make or break funnel conversions, especially in the middle to bottom.

The third step is evaluating your Content and Message.

Content plays a pivotal role in guiding potential customers through your funnel. Conducting a content audit can shed light on which pieces resonate at different stages of the buyer’s journey and where gaps may exist.

The aim is to produce content that addresses your target audience’s specific challenges and needs. It’s not just about creating endless top-of-funnel but solving your customers’ problems through content designed to help make a buying decision. These would be case studies, actionable use cases, market maps and pain/gain content angles specific to your buyer. In short, content must be tailored to build trust (trust is brand); if you do right, you’ll create more traction with your content while building trust and credibility, paving the way for more effective conversions.

The audit will uncover if you have a value prop, positioning, messaging and offer problem - the root causes affect your conversion. It’s the case many forget that content is a vast lever (it’s not about tactical levers often but the root cause, i.e. ICP - message - value prop - offer).

Practical Steps Forward:

1. Define Your MQLs: Ensure you understand what actions or engagements qualify a lead as an MQL across all your channels. This clarity is essential for focusing your sales team’s efforts effectively.

2. Evaluate AE Conversion Performance: Consider which AEs are most successful at converting MQLs and why. Use these insights to refine your lead routing process and sales strategies.

3. Undertake a Content Audit: Review your content’s alignment with each funnel stage. Ensure your content strategy is finely tuned to meet your target audience’s needs at every step of their journey. Leverage Expertise: If you have team members adept at translating product features into customer solutions, empower them to create content. Short, problem-solving videos or articles can significantly boost your content’s impact. Focus on pain/gain content to help move buyers in the journey.

Following these foundational steps drastically increases the likelihood of you being on the road to better conversions.

Remember, it’s about taking small, actionable steps. Not trying to pull ten tactical levers at once.

The following step is picking off each channel linked to the customer journey.

Get going!

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Nothing is more rewarding than seeing a company take your advice, make a few changes, and watch everything start to click into place.

Because let’s face it: even companies with great products can hit a wall if their sales and marketing teams are out of sync. It happens more often than you’d think, and the reasons behind it aren’t always obvious.

That’s precisely what happened with a company I worked with recently; let’s call them “Company A.” They reached out for help because their revenue numbers were stuck despite generating what seemed like a mountain of leads. They were putting in the effort. The original problem statement was “we have too many leads” (sounds too good to be true!!), but the results weren’t coming.

The Real Problem Underneath

When I started digging in with Company A, it was clear there was a lot of hard work happening but little impact. Marketing was churning tons of leads and feeling great about it, while sales were frustrated because most of those leads weren’t converting. Leadership/board was caught in the middle, scratching their heads and wondering why there was no revenue lift when the problem statement was “we have too many leads.”

Step one: “The Root Cause Reset” is a fresh approach to reframing one’s thinking from the assumed problem to the real problem.

Here’s what we uncovered after some serious diagnostics:

1. Chasing Volume Instead of Quality: The company was obsessed with numbers, thinking more leads would fix everything. But most of these leads weren’t qualified, and sales were drowning in dead ends. The real problem wasn’t how many leads they had but whether they were the right leads.

2. No Clear Priorities: Marketing and sales were both super busy but without a clear plan that tied their efforts together. Marketing just cared about filling the pipeline, while sales needed a real strategy for which leads to prioritize. It was chaotic.

3. Misaligned Focus: Both teams were tackling different problems. Marketing was all about top-of-funnel growth, assuming it was a conversion issue, while sales didn’t even realize the process issue they had. There was no organization for lead flow. The lack of a shared goal meant everyone ran fast but in different directions.

Finding Clarity and Focus

Once we understood what was going wrong, the next step was simple: get everyone on the same page. Here’s what we did:

1. Clarity on Activities: We stopped the chaos of “more is better” and focused on getting more ICP leads. Marketing started thinking more about quality than numerical numbers, what I’d call “less marketing,” tailoring their campaigns to attract higher-quality prospects, and sales got a plan for which leads to go after first.

2. Clarity on Outputs: We shifted from separate metrics to shared goals. Instead of marketing patting itself on the back for lead volume, we looked at lead quality and conversion rates together. Now, both teams were working toward the same outcomes.

3. Clarity on the Core Problem: We made sure everyone understood the real challenge: it wasn’t just about filling the pipeline but about making there were leads with higher intent, more aligned to the right ICP, with processes to organize good-quality and poor-quality leads in the funnel. Once everyone understood this, the teams started collaborating instead of pointing fingers.

The Transformation

In just three months, things turned around in a big way:

• Better Process, Results: Sales started closing more deals because they worked with leads in a more defined structured qualification process. The lead-to-opportunity conversion rate shot up.

• Shorter Sales Cycles: Because the leads were better qualified, the time it took to close deals dropped by 20%. Sales reps were spending their time wisely instead of chasing lost causes.

• More Predictable Revenue: With precise goals and more efficient processes, the company’s revenue became more predictable. The leadership team could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

And here’s the best part: it wasn’t just about the numbers. The teams were happier, communication improved, and everyone felt more confident about the company’s direction. When you get the basics right, the rest falls into place.

How to Implement “The Root Cause Reset”

1. Identify the Real Problem

   Analyze your sales and marketing to pinpoint the core issue holding you back—poor lead quality, misaligned messaging, or inefficient handoffs. Is it a pipeline problem or a messaging problem?

2. Align on One Clear Goal

   Get your teams on the same page with a shared objective that directly addresses this problem. Make it your North Star for the next 90 days.

3. Simplify and Focus

   Strip away any unnecessary activities—zero in on what will solve the root issue, and stick to that plan without adding distractions.

Commit for 90 Days, and stay disciplined. Resist old habits, focus on the fix, and watch how much progress you can make when everyone is aligned.

Why This Matters

Having an objective perspective can be a game-changer for investors dealing with slow or stalled progress in a portfolio company. Often, the problem isn’t a lack of effort but a lack of knowledge of the “root cause” of the issue.

Change happens when you identify the root cause, align the team around a clear goal, and work together to fix it. It sounds simple, but executing this well is challenging; it needs a push.

The takeaway from Company A is that genuine change comes from focused, deep thinking into “root causes.” It’s not about doing more; it’s about doing the right things together. When a company achieves this clarity, growth speeds up, and the path forward becomes more transparent for everyone involved.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Investors often need help understanding marketing metrics and their context, creating confusion and tension between CEOs, marketing leaders, and themselves. You’re thinking about money in, money out, growth, valuation, and returns, but the marketing data presented doesn’t align with that framework.

Every week, I hear the same types of questions:

1. Pipeline clarity: Do we understand the pipeline? Is it healthy? What’s valid, when will deals close, and what needs attention?

2. Customer health scores: Do we know what’s red, amber, or green? How do we interpret this for customer success and marketing?

3. Clarity on activity: Are we doing the right things? Are we signing enough customers within our ICP?

4. Lead quality: What do these metrics say about the quality of leads, and what can we do to improve?

This disconnect causes investors to interrogate CEOs, CEOs to miscommunicate with marketing leaders, and marketing leaders to overcompensate with too much irrelevant data. The relationship between investor, CEO, and marketing becomes strained because there’s no alignment or shared understanding of what the metrics mean for the business.

You usually solve this by asking the CEO for more metrics. The problem is that the CEO doesn’t always fully understand the context of marketing metrics. Next, more metrics are created, compounding the issue and creating even more confusion.

At the same time, the marketing leader is often left out of the direct communication loop. Instead of being able to clarify what’s needed, they make assumptions about what to present. This results in reports with irrelevant or incomplete data that don’t address your questions.

Adding more metrics doesn’t solve the core issue. Instead, it often makes things worse:

• Communication gets lost in translation.

• Marketing leaders feel misunderstood and try to solve the problem by overloading you with more data, leading to more confusion.

• You begin to question whether the marketing team focuses on the right activities.

And here’s the key point: although marketing is the Master of Business and drives revenue, you cannot attribute every single thing marketing does directly to revenue. For example, you don’t expect HR, Finance, or Product to justify every action in terms of revenue. The same should apply to marketing.

Here’s another important consideration: do you have a top-of-funnel problem or a messaging problem? These are two very different challenges, and they inform the type of metrics you need to see. If the marketing leader presents funnel metrics without providing insight into whether the messaging resonates in the market, you may focus on the wrong things.

1. Open a direct line of communication with the marketing leader.

Be clear about what confuses you and what you need to understand. Spell out what a “dream outcome” looks like for your understanding of marketing’s contribution. But also appreciate that not everything can be neatly measured or directly attributed to revenue.

2. Set clear expectations for board reporting.

Right now, marketing leaders are making assumptions about what to share—often guided by the CEO. Instead, establish a clearer communication process. For example, agree on the following framework:some text

• What’s not working?

• What challenge can we set for ourselves to hit?

• What’s the metric to track progress?

When everyone agrees, marketing can focus on producing relevant insights and metrics that help.

3. Focus on leading indicators, not just lagging indicators.

Leading indicators help you predict future performance and pipeline health. Examples include:

• Conversion rates

• Early-stage customer engagement

• Event attendance

• Net Promoter Score trends

• MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)

• Demo requests

• Trial activation rates

• Campaign testing velocity

Make sure the marketing leader provides the context for these metrics. What do they say about the pipeline, messaging, and overall market response?

Action, action, action:

1. Agree on North Star metrics. Sit with the CEO and marketing leader to decide on the key metrics. These should clearly show whether the business is on track. Don’t leave it to the marketing leader to guess what you need—this wastes time and doesn’t solve the problem.

2. Prioritize leading indicators. Metrics like demo requests, pipeline velocity, and early-stage engagement offer early warnings of future success or issues. Ask for their context, not just the raw numbers.

3. Align around the real problem. Don’t assume every issue is about funnel performance. Ask whether the problem is with top-of-funnel leads or if the messaging isn’t resonating. These require different solutions and different metrics to track. Without alignment, you may be focusing on the wrong things.

To wrap up:

To solve the problem of unclear marketing metrics:

1. Open communication channels with your marketing leader.

2. Simplify the metrics you ask for by agreeing on what matters most.

3. Educate yourself on how marketing works and the context behind its metrics.

This will strengthen the relationships between investors, CEOs, and marketing leaders, ensuring everyone is aligned and working toward the same goals.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

The other day, I reviewed a portfolio company’s 2025 strategy deck. Although the deck used all the right buzzwords—AI transformation, vertical SaaS expansion, and product-led growth—something felt off. That’s when I realized we’re all at risk of making a classic mistake: following someone else’s “proven strategy” instead of trusting our strategic instincts.

I’ve learned an expensive lesson after working in venture capital for the last four years and with growth-stage CEOs. Every time a business ignores intuition in favor of market trends, it pays twice—once for lost market opportunity and again for wasted resources and team alignment.

The Problem with “Market Best Practices”: When I reflect on the most significant strategic missteps I’ve seen, there’s a common thread: companies following “proven playbooks” despite leadership’s gut feeling that something wasn’t right for their specific market or company stage.

The enterprise sales motion that worked for every other B2B SaaS company felt wrong — and it was. The product-led growth strategy that transformed a competitor felt off — and it was. Each time leadership hesitated, they should have listened to their instincts and made quicker decisions with room to iterate.

Other companies’ successes prove that their strategies will work universally. But strategies don’t always transfer; first principles do.

Think about the last time you saw a portfolio company take strategic advice that didn’t fit. Maybe they:

• Rushed an AI strategy because “everyone’s doing it.”

• Expanded internationally too early because “that’s the playbook.”

• Pivoted to enterprise because “that’s where the margins are.”

If you’re honest, you probably knew it wasn’t right from the start. But market momentum and peer pressure can drown out strategic intuition.

Trust Your Market Knowledge

The most successful pivots and strategies I’ve seen came from trusting seasoned business instincts:

• A B2B SaaS company staying focused on SMB (when everyone pushed enterprise)

• A B2B SaaS company staying focused on continuous messaging improvement (while others chased feature expansion)

• A HR SaaS company building slowly and in deeper verticals (while competitors spread across markets)

Every time, the market said they were wrong. Every time, their strategic intuition proved correct. Not because they were more intelligent than everyone else. Their intuition was correct because they deeply understood their specific market dynamics.

The Evidence in Outcomes

• The SMB-focused company now dominates their niche with 70% margins

• The messaging-focused company achieved 3x higher conversion rates than competitors

• The HR SaaS became the category leader in their chosen verticals while others struggled to differentiate

Each success came from trusting market knowledge over market trends.

The Bottom Line for 2025: Your strategic intuition is built on years of pattern recognition. Often, it’s worth more than the latest market analysis or consultant recommendation.

Before finalizing 2025 strategies, ask these questions:

• Does this strategy align with what we know about our market?

• Are we doing this because it’s right for us or because it’s trending?

• Does this build on our core strengths or chase someone else’s?

When you feel that hint of doubt reviewing 2025 plans, pay attention. That’s not risk aversion — it’s pattern recognition trying to tell you something.

Your competitive advantage is your strategic intuition backed by market knowledge and operational experience. Use it.

Remember: It’s better to be right on your terms than wrong following someone else’s playbook.

As you review those 2025 strategy decks, trust what you know about your market, companies, and strengths. More than any market trend, that knowledge will guide you to the right decisions.

Our intuition is truly a gift. Use it.

And that’s all for this today...

I’ve recently launched a GTM accelerator program for 2025 to help implement this mindset into your business across the go-to-market.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

In the last three weeks, I’ve had this exact conversation with three CEOs and investors.

“We don’t have enough pipeline. Top of funnel is the real problem.”

It always plays out the same way.

Not enough inbound leads. Outbound isn’t converting. The pipeline looks thin, and everyone starts panicking about growth. The instinct? Push more volume. More cold emails. More paid ads. More LinkedIn outreach.

But that’s not the real problem.

The Real Problem: Your Messaging Isn’t Landing

If top of funnel isn’t working, it’s almost never a volume issue. It’s a clarity issue.

So I always ask:

• What do your best customers say when you ask them, “Why us? Why now?”

• If I read your cold email or saw your ad, would I instantly understand why it matters?

• Are your top-of-funnel channels bringing in the right people, or just noise?

Because here’s the thing: If your messaging isn’t landing, pushing more volume just means getting ignored at scale.

More Leads Won’t Fix It‍

Most companies assume they just need to generate more leads. But more of the wrong leads won’t get you anywhere. Here’s what actually happens:

1. Your best prospects don’t engage because your messaging isn’t clear or relevant.

2. Your sales team wastes time on bad-fit leads because top of funnel is stuffed with people who were never going to buy.

3. You think it’s a pipeline problem, but really, it’s a positioning problem.

So you throw more effort (and budget) at a system that isn’t working.

What to Do Instead

Before you double down on volume, fix your messaging first.

1. Talk to your last five customers.

   Ask: Why did you choose us? What made you buy now? Then use their exact words in your outreach.

2. Test that insight on past prospects.

   Go back to accounts that went cold and re-engage them with a fresh take based on what your best customers told you.

3. Try it in real conversations.

   Use it in upcoming meetings, re-engagement emails, and nurture sequences from marketing. See what clicks, what gets a reply, what sparks a real conversation.

Your Next Step

If you’re an investor, ask your portfolio companies:

• What messaging is actually landing?

• Have you validated it with real customer conversations?

• Have you reviewed whats working, how do we know whats working and whats not working?‍‍

If you’re a CEO, try this:

• Stop framing it as a top-of-funnel problem - it’s a messaging, positioning, languaging and system issue.

• Ask your last three customers why they bought (or get insights from the CRO / CMO)

• Take that insight and test it with accounts that went cold.

• Use it in your next round of nurture emails and re-engagement outreach. See what happens.‍

‍

Before you assume it’s a pipeline issue, make sure people actually understand what you do. Fix that first. Then scale.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Last week, I spoke with a founder whose SaaS company is on track for $5M ARR. They were frustrated, stuck at what felt like a glass ceiling. Despite ramping up ad spend and bringing in a VP of Sales, growth has been painful. The founder said, “We’re doing everything right—so why aren’t we scaling?”

It’s a question I hear often from portfolio companies. Founders believe that scaling is about adding more fuel (especially wanting to create the “marketing machine”)—bigger budgets, more hires, new tools. But the truth is, scaling doesn’t happen by doing more of what worked at $1M ARR. Scaling happens when marketing leads the business.

After working with 50+ growth-stage companies, I’ve learned this: marketing isn’t just a support function—it’s the master of business. The companies that scale efficiently are the ones where marketing drives strategy, aligns teams, and shapes the customer journey. The ones that fail? They treat marketing as a supporting function, something to “fix” after product and sales hit a wall.

Think about the last time you saw a portfolio company stall. Maybe they:

• Scaled their sales team before figuring out who their best customers were.

• Burned through cash on ads without clear messaging or targeting.

• Tried to pivot to enterprise customers because “it worked for our competitor.”

It’s a familiar story: growth is tough because marketing wasn’t leading.When marketing leads, here’s what happens:

• The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) becomes the foundation for everything—product, sales, and messaging.

• The core of the business is prioritized—differentiation, POV, value proposition, messaging and positioning.

• Teams stop chasing “any customer” and focus on attracting the right ones.

• Every acquisition dollar (well nearly) is spent on channels that work, reducing CAC and increasing ROI.

• You create a balance between long term and short term thing.

But when marketing is secondary, everything becomes reactive. Sales spend time chasing bad-fit leads. Product teams build features no one asked for. Marketing becomes an order taker for sales without space to build the business. Here’s the shift I want your portfolio companies to make: treat marketing like the engine of growth, not an expense.

Marketing should:

• Define the ICP and align it across the company.

• Lead customer research to understand pain points and decision-making.

• Own demand generation, setting sales up with qualified leads instead of wasting time on unproductive outreach.

The lesson? Scaling isn’t about adding more fuel. It’s about focusing the foundations of an engine—and marketing is that engine. The master of business is marketing. And the master of marketing is in the “root causes”.

‍The Root Causes Behind Effective Marketing

‍Here’s the deeper truth: marketing isn’t the master of business because it runs campaigns or builds ads. Marketing is the master of business because it works on root causes.

‍Scaling doesn’t come from working harder—it comes from addressing these root causes:

1. Who Are You Selling To? (ICP)

2. Why Should They Care? (Value Proposition)

3. How Do You Reach Them? (Messaging & Positioning)

4. How Do You Close and Retain Them? (Customer Journey Alignment)When these root causes are addressed, marketing becomes the engine of growth. Every other function—sales, product, customer success—works better because of it.

‍This Week’s Tangible Prompt

‍‍If you’re a CEO, investor, or chairman looking to ensure marketing drives real value in your company or portfolio, here are three prompts to guide your thinking this week:

1. For Alignment: Is marketing leading the definition of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and are all teams (sales, product, and customer success) aligned around it? If not, what’s the first step to fix this misalignment?

2. For Differentiation: What makes your company’s product or service different, and is this clearly reflected in your messaging, acquisition strategy, and positioning? If customers can’t see it, how can marketing clarify it?

3. For Strategy: What is your company’s biggest challenge (the “root cause”) right now—lead quality, sales conversion, or retention—and how can marketing take the lead in solving it?‍These aren’t just tactical questions—they’re strategic shifts. The goal is to make marketing the leader, not the follower. Companies that embrace this mindset stop chasing growth and start building it.

‍The key here is to position marketing as the engine of growth—not just a function that supports product or sales. Founders who empower marketing to define the ICP, optimize acquisition channels, and align teams around customer needs are the ones who scale efficiently. Marketing doesn’t just execute—it directs the business. Push your CEOs to make marketing the master of their strategy this week. Onwards.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Every week, I see the same problem play out. As an investor, you get handed overly complicated marketing plans and struggle to make sense of them. It feels like a tangled mess of strategies, channels, and projections. I know that feeling because I’ve been there. After reviewing over 50 go-to-market plans in due diligence over the last four years, one truth stands out: there is a luxury in doing less.

Even when I was a CMO, I misunderstood this. I thought complexity meant sophistication. I thought detailed plans and multiple strategies would impress the CEO. But here’s the reality—CEOs don’t want complexity. They want clarity. They want to know there’s a simple, effective system in place that delivers results.

And here’s where it gets worse: Most companies don’t have a clear focus on what actually needs to happen at each stage of ARR. Under $1M? Under $5M? Under $10M? Under $20M? Each stage requires different priorities, yet I see companies trying to build scalable systems before they’ve proven their ability to execute. That’s how businesses get stuck.

So, what happens next? As an investor, you apply pressure. You push for detailed plans. You want to see a roadmap that covers every possible angle. CEOs feel that pressure and pass it down to their go-to-market leaders. The result? Overcomplicated bottom-up and top-down strategies that look impressive on paper but collapse in execution.

And here’s why that doesn’t work. Focus, time, and execution are the most valuable resources in a business. The moment you dilute them with complexity, results suffer. Marketing teams lose confidence because they’re stretched too thin. Execution slows down. Prioritization gets lost. Instead of accelerating growth, companies stall.

Here’s what I would do instead. Simplify the system. I tell companies under $5M or $10M ARR to follow a seven-step approach:

1. Sell and serve 10 customers (or 20-50, depending on your market size). Don’t overcomplicate with inbound, outbound, and multi-channel experiments. Just focus relentlessly on getting those customers.

2. Prove the channel works. What drove those 10 sales? Identify the repeatable process.

3. Upgrade your operating model. Now that you know what works refine it to make it more efficient.

4. Build the scalable line. Once you’ve nailed a repeatable process, layer in people, tools, and processes that support scale.

5. Prove the team can execute. At this stage, build a high-performing team that can consistently deliver results.

6. Scale channels and organizational structure. Once execution is proven, expand into additional channels and grow the team appropriately.

7. Hit your number. By following the steps in order, you hit the next milestone and are ready to repeat the cycle on a larger scale.

8. Repeat process 1-7 for your following revenue milestones.

This Week’s Tangible Prompt for Investors & CEOs

For Investors: One of investors’ most significant mistakes is pushing their portfolio companies to scale too soon. You want to see a detailed plan, but you need to understand whether they have clarity on their next milestone. Instead of asking for an exhaustive strategy document, ask these questions:

• Are they clear on their next milestone? It is not the grand vision but the next step they must take.

• Have they demonstrated that they can successfully sell and serve a cohort of customers? If not, why?

• Are they focused on proving what works, or are they trying to do everything simultaneously?

Encourage your CEOs to focus on execution at the right stage. Scaling too soon wastes resources and creates unnecessary complexity that takes years to unwind. Your role as an investor isn’t to push for expansion before the foundations are in place; your role is to ensure companies have the discipline to execute at the right pace.

For CEOs: One of the biggest challenges you face is the pressure to scale. You feel it from investors, the board, and even your team. The result? You overcomplicate the go-to-market strategy. You create too many channels, moving parts, and plans that look great in theory but fail in execution.

Here’s the mindset shift you need: Instead of asking, “How do we scale?” ask, “How do we sell and serve our next 10, 20, or 50 customers?”

• What’s the single most effective channel right now? Instead of optimizing across five or six different channels, focus on the one already working.

• Are you clear on why customers are buying? Is your positioning nailed down, or are you constantly tweaking it without understanding what resonates?

• Are you building your team too early? Too often, I see companies hiring ahead of need instead of proving they can execute with the current team. Focus on proving execution before expanding.

The goal is to remove unnecessary complexity and focus on execution that drives actual results. Investors, push your portfolio CEOs to embrace the luxury of doing less. CEOs resist the temptation to overcomplicate their strategy and double down on what works.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Intro: The Foundations of High Performance

There’s much debate about how to build high-performing teams. Various approaches include creating the ‘right’ daily habits, hiring on EQ instead of IQ, building soft behavioral skills, and the role of a leader in creating bonded-driven groups.

Scores of books have been published on the subject. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve read 100+ books on leadership and 100+ books on self-development and learned through ups and downs in the field. I’ve been fortunate to work alongside great leaders and world-class operators like Sir Clive Woodward (the only winning Rugby World Cup coach for England) and learned from their approach.

This is where I first learned about an analogy called Sponge vs. Rock. In essence, it’s the same theory as growth or fixed mindset. I learned from Sir Clive on leadership: you must build a group of individuals with a growth mindset (sponge) and bring them together in a shared vision.

This is your foundation for building a world-class team.

Image: Medium

There is a distinct, overwhelming list of tactics, playbooks, and strategies you need to be successful - how do you create a high-performance environment with consistent results? With the changing macroeconomic environment, effective leadership is more important than ever. Some of the playbooks that worked previously now need adapting and refinement to deliver results in the present. Covid has had a further dramatic effect on management and leadership because of employees working remotely. It’s even harder than ever.

Whatever your understanding of leadership, the fact remains that when you arrive as a new CMO / CxO, you’ll likely be presented with the core challenge of building a team.

This might mean improving outcomes with an existing team or building a new one. You’ll likely start very small if your business is Series A / Series B. This is an exciting problem to have. You can create a culture and team dynamic entirely from scratch.

Regardless of the scenario, nurturing a high-performance environment remains one of the biggest obstacles to sustainable growth. Perhaps that’s why so much literature is published on the subject.

Perhaps that’s why, although there are playbooks to follow, its application is ultimately based on you and your traits.

What are the prerequisites for transforming a ‘losing’ team into a ‘winning’ team or a newly formed team into a high-performance machine? We will cover this.

This post introduce you to the structure, processes, and behavioral leadership qualities you’ll need to implement this and build a great team. I hope to distill ideas and concepts that have worked for me. Albeit I was never perfect, at all - I tried my best!

‍Step 1: Clarity

In my experience, the key ingredient in every high-performing team is clarity.

What do I mean by clarity?

Create clear expectations in the minds of your team around their roles and behaviors, and regularly share the exact direction you wish to set.

Clarity creates the right environment for individuals to act independently and purposefully without your presence. Without clarity, expect inconsistent results.

For some, creating clarity amongst a new team might seem straightforward. As a new CMO, you can embed the right culture with your first hires.

But training one or two people is easy because you have time to explain your purpose and the behaviors needed and inspire new hires with a clear vision.

The problems come as your team grows.

How can you properly train a team of 5? or 10? 50?

Do you have enough time to explain your vision to everyone? You need to. You also need a process for scaling.

As the team expands, it’s your responsibility as a leader to build processes that create clarity for the entire team. This clarity should exist with or without your presence.

Use the tools at your disposal to put clarity at the center of your management. Think about:

• Every email interaction and communication rituals

• Weekly meetings and 1-2-1s

• How Slack and other instant tools can be used

• Informal in-person conversations

• Cadence of daily coaching and skills development

• Coaching methodologies

• Recruitment and onboarding effectiveness

When you make your first hire, every additional team member further strains the clarity. The more people you add to the team, the more conscious you must be of clarity disintegrating.

Look out for lapses of clarity amongst your team roughly 6-10 weeks after you hire. Most colleagues will feel clear about what they need to do during the initial onboarding phase. As the team grows, expect that clarity on roles and expectations will become muddied.

After 6 weeks or so, a new hire might begin working independently on projects. This often creates uncertainty in their minds. They worry about whether they’re hitting the right goals, which lessens clarity amongst the group. This unclarity can spread to the entire team if you’re not careful.

Find out when this ‘honeymoon’ phase ends for your new team members, and think carefully about how to start supporting high performance to support them from the outset.

It’s your job to ensure your team continuously has clarity about their role, expected behaviors, and the direction you set for the department.

Always ask this simple question:

What am I making confusing for you?

Recommended reading:

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‍L. David Marquet’s book is a fantastic guide to creating clarity in teams.

‘Turn the Ship Around!’ focuses on a naval commander who turned the worst-performing submarine into the fleet’s flagship. The commander instills clear guiding principles on people’s operations and work. He focused his leadership on the legacy the group wished to leave, creating a clear future vision of the team’s achievement.

Create clarity in your team’s mind, and your vision will fall into place. Although you’ll never have 100% clarity all the time, it’s a leader’s job to reinforce openness and discussion week after week.

Let’s look at how you can begin that process:

Homework: A checklist to deliver clarity

Creating clarity is easy when you approach it in four key stages:

1. Interview stage

Think ahead now—how will you share clear expectations during the interview? Be frank with candidates. Share the expectations output. You will measure how people fail in their roles and what good looks like, and discuss your vision of what high-performance (in your view, looks like) looks like. Be super transparent about what it’s like to work for you.

This connects the individual, you, and the team from the interview stage. It also ensures you find the right fit. A tip I often deploy is to put people off the role/company as much as possible - everyone wants to work at a startup or scaleup. But do they? It’s not as cool as you think - the work is highly pressurized and relentless, and it’s only imaginable when you’ve had first-hand experience. You can’t comprehend the experience otherwise.

2. Create a team book

Write a guiding manual for your team. This should cover:

• Your philosophy, personality, and expectations of how you work.

• Your team structure, expected behaviors, and roles.

• How your team fits within the organization.

• Your vision, goals, and aspirations.

I called this document ‘Hi, I’m Edwin.’ It was to each new team member on the first day they join. It was then shared regularly to reinforce the culture.

Share this with new hires to generate excitement about the team and why they were chosen. This also creates an easy-to-share process for creating clear expectations from day one. New hires know what they need to do and how to act.

3. Create team guiding principles

Lots of companies already have shared values. But what about your team? Create shared values specifically for your department. These should relate to what’s important to you. What is your desired team culture? What behaviors will you need to foster to get you there?

This document should be simple and easy to understand while also being linked to the overall business culture.

4. Process

Design a process first for how you will onboard and lead your team. This creates clarity. Don’t hire a team then design a process for managing performance afterward - this will confuse you.

How will you continually reinforce your goals? Think about how you can embed the language of your team’s behavior every week.

Set yourself reminders on how and when you need to interact with the team and add the specific language you want to use and the exact outputs you want to see.

Remember, your job as a leader is continually reinforcing your team’s expectations.

Poorly performing teams often result from leaders who don’t deliver clarity.

Step 2: Karma and Well-being

Team well-being is the second most important issue to clarify when creating a high-performing team. First and foremost, you have to remind yourself of serving others in support of their well-being. Even though you (as we all need support) will need it simultaneously,

Wellbeing means different things to different people, but for me, it’s about focus, energy, and purpose. A bias towards outputs, not activities. Notice I don’t say to have fun or enjoyment: let’s face it, the job is not always fun. People are too obsessed with that narrative. Although, it is good to have fun if you can!

High-performing teams often have a good work-life balance and high well-being scores. Low-performing teams might be unproductive because they are overwhelmed. They lack clarity and do lots of activities but do not feel like they have momentum. Momentum is an individual and team friend.

Your role as a leader is to protect the group from being overwhelmed.

We should ditch the ‘hustle’ mentality. It’s dated, and it doesn’t work.

For your team, set yourself the following goals:

• Coach individuals in smart working practices do not pressurize to do more “hours”

• Prioritize every team member’s work-life balance

• Encourage self-reflection and “pausing”

• Avoid digital interaction overload

• Foster digital minimalism

• Encourage learning

Don’t expect your team to be online 24/7. Instead, take a more realistic approach. Encourage focus, not long hours, but also ensure that your team gets plenty of time to reflect. It’s common for teams to be running so fast that they often pause to understand the value of their outputs and what they are trying to achieve.

Build a team where well-being is discussed. Care about how your team works and what they deliver. Treat mental health seriously, approaching it with the same tact as you would any other well-being issue. If you pressure your team to overload, expect to see increasing mental health problems and falling productivity.

Understandably, CMOs and CEOs focus on productivity, always making a presumption of poor productivity because nothing is ever fast enough. Well-being seems secondary. Luckily, we’re learning that well-being is, in fact, central to focus.

Solve wellbeing issues by being clear about output and supportive towards colleagues’ lives. Build a regular cadence of communication with your team around wellbeing, and it won’t be an issue.

The workplace has evolved beyond 9-5, and so must you. Today, we work smarter and focus on output over input.

Homework: How to prioritize well-being

To prioritize your team’s well-being, you must look at your own.

‍Reflect on yourself for a moment.

• Is well-being a principle you believe in?

• Are you genuinely concerned for your team’s well-being?

• Do you find conversations about mental health challenging or part of a normal working relationship?

You might wish to re-evaluate if well-being isn’t important to you yet.

Motivating younger generations in the workforce starts with a commitment to understanding mental health and wellbeing. If you ignore this issue, it will worsen.

Start thinking about processes and systems you can introduce to uplift the well-being of your employees. A talented, happy team will be the ones who get you results.

‍Create your philosophy.

• How would you like to communicate the importance of well-being to your team?

• Is your team currently well-balanced? If not, how can you encourage healthier habits?

• How would you like your team to treat the issue of mental health?

• What could you do to motivate the team to treat wellbeing differently?

• What treats could you introduce that focus on wellbeing?

During your 1-1s

Aim to foster open working relationships with your direct reports.

• Enable regular, informal discussions to see how they’re feeling

• Show that you care by asking open questions and sharing conversations around wellbeing. Share personal stories about how you coped with your learning.

• Get to know individuals so that they feel comfortable talking to you.

Ask these questions:

• What am I making confusing?

• How can I be useful to you?

• How can I support you as you take responsibility for yourself?

• In the past month, what have you been happy about?

• In the past month, what have you been less happy about?

• What questions do you have for me?

And a few out of this list:

• How do you feel about your goals for this quarter?

• Any feedback for me?

• How could I be a better manager for you?

• What can I do to make your professional life better?

• What’s the biggest problem of our organization?

• What don’t you like about our product?

• What would you like to improve next quarter?

• What would you like to achieve by the end of the year?

• What would you like to learn?

• How is your team doing?

• What would you like to be better at, and in which areas would you like to grow?

• How do you feel overall after X+ months/years at [your company name]?

• If you were me, what would you do differently?

• What are the things you’ve done since you joined that you’re the proudest about?

• Can I invest more in your growth?

• In the next month, what would you like to do differently from last month?

• What’s the split of your time today between X/Y/Z? What would you like to spend more/less time on?

Step 3: Why Process & Structure Matter

With the foundations of clarity and well-being, you can build a high-performing, happy, and focused team.

But you can’t get great outcomes without robust processes for monitoring and tracking progress.

If you want to create consistent results, you must accept that you cannot sporadically apply aspects of management as a leader. Monitoring and measuring when you feel like it will cause disturbances in performance, output, and clarity. Accept that you need a formal process.

Your process checklist

Think about:

• What tiny next steps, micro-milestones, and outputs for the team

• What outputs do you need? Revenue, projects, etc

• How will you regularly foster team well-being?

• Weekly, monthly, and annual team meetings

• Weekly rituals to foster connection

• 1-2-1s, how you manage them

I’ve found it a huge help to have a timeline and roadmap of your management process and personal operating system so that the team understands the value of consistency.

Step 4: Upskilling & Relentless Learning

Upskilling your team should be an ongoing process. The skills required to be effective in modern marketing and revenue teams are constantly evolving (at an extreme pace).

Yet many CMOs might be expected to reinvigorate a large inherited team. This team might comprise a mixture of roles, individuals, and skill sets, and that’s a daunting prospect for some.

As with many things, however, starting with your behavior is the best way to effect change.

As leaders, we should be constantly upskilling ourselves and our teams.

Learning is a mindset - something to be enjoyed and embraced, not avoided. As such, it needs to be a daily event for you. Here are some ideas on how to build capabilities in your people:

• Creating a regular cadence for team members to track their improvement

• Daily coaching that builds a habitual learning environment

• Hiring external trainers/mentors

Encourage and foster daily learning habits.

Smart leaders will not leave training to chance; instead, they will see it as a way to foster awareness of behaviors and raise capabilities in individuals every day.

The sheer speed of change in the modern work environment demands continuous improvement. So make your upskilling strategy a daily priority, and use it as a force for positivity amongst the team. With the right approach, you’ll boost morale, reduce staff turnover in the long term, and improve results. Your success as a leader is how well you build people’s capabilities (write that one down!)

Homework: The three tiers of upskilling

Yourself

• Start upskilling yourself first. Be obsessed with learning.

• Choose a broad range of interests, and commit to investing time daily.

• Be curious, and you’ll encourage the same from your team.

I used to write a daily motivational email and set up a devoted Slack channel for sharing knowledge. My first action for the day is to send out a link, article, or helpful piece of content that my team would enjoy.

The idea isn’t to force people into learning but to encourage curiosity about skills, behaviors, and approaches to work.

Your team

• Coach individuals through the process of developing their skills

• Have regular upskilling conversations on a 1-2-1 basis

• Learn people’s specific challenges and goals

You might think you don’t have time to coach your team individually, but I built upskilling elements into the structure of my regular meetings with direct reports.

Look for opportunities to find common challenges among colleagues. Could these groups work together and coach each other? Peer learning and cohort learning are proven techniques.

Hired help

Find mentors and coaches for your team. Having permanent help within the team can greatly benefit the company. Leaders are time-poor, and employees value external mentoring. Well the high-performers certainly do.

Step 5: Team Connectedness

The final component of building high performance is connectedness.

‍Image: Jostle

As your team grows, how can you mesh individuals together?

Typical Go-to-marker teams consist of multiple roles and responsibilities, including

• Sales development reps

• Account Executives

• Customer Success

• Demand Generation Marketers

• Digital marketers

• Developers

• Content marketers

• Public Relations

• Account and client-facing executives

• Social media / creative

The issues we have discussed (clarity, well-being, process, and upskilling) get you to a certain point. Beyond that, though, the key ingredient is team connectedness.

You don’t want to build a group of individuals focused on their performance. As the business grows, this leads to high staff turnover, and people are only vested in their interests. We all are, but we love being part of a journey and team.

Aim to create energy in your team environment. A shared sense of purpose, drive, and connectedness is the key to bonding people.

Grow the team together

“Under poor leaders, we feel like we work for the company.

With good leaders, we feel like we work for each other.”

—Simon Sinek

Humans crave connectedness to purpose and meaning. This is a crucial facet of building high performance in any team.

Homework: Ideas for bonding and trust

Traditional ways of bonding teams don’t work like they used to.

When you think more carefully about wellbeing, would team drinks create the right culture? Going for beers every Friday seems old-fashioned in 2019 when roughly a third of 16-24-year-olds choose not to drink.

Create a structure for team connectedness

What could you do weekly with your team for 1-2 weeks to create connectedness? How can you use each team meeting to drive connection, such as icebreaker games at the start of the meeting? If that’s not your thing, decide how you can make meetings more fun (from the perspective that people value them, they are productive, and they drive team cohesion).

Create roles for Responsibility

As the team grows, find leaders in the group who naturally gravitate to building on the culture part of the team. These people can organize regular team bonding ideas - for example, Thursday morning breakfasts or group fitness activities. Anything that sets the appropriate tone for your vision.

The more people you can get to relate to each other, the better connected the team will become. How can you encourage different individuals to understand others’ perspectives? Think about building a weekly or monthly program of varied activities and methods. The best team exercise I ever did was to sit team members opposite each other (with me) and rotate like musical chairs every 2 minutes around a question. Each team member answers this question to one another.

‍That question is, “How do I make you feel?”

Make connectedness an ongoing experience rather than a one-off.

END: Personal Philosophies

There are four levels of employees:

• Level 1 — You do what you are asked to do.

• Level 2 — Level 1 + You think ahead and solve problems before they happen.

• Level 3 — Level 2 + You proactively look for areas of opportunity and growth in the business and figure out how to tap into them

• Level 4 — Level 3 + You help others do that either by coaching, mentoring, or by taking on projects

Show this to your team, and make them understand how they can develop themselves and the teams around them. People always found it quite eye-opening.

Throughout my career, I have taken a statement from a previous CEO, who always reminded us, ‘Don’t be the person moaning at the water cooler.’

What he meant in practice was that moaning does not help scenarios and doesn’t give the perception of someone who is negative. I fully agree. At the same time, I believe it’s important to be positive regardless of situations—see the best in things, not the worst. It serves you better, and it serves the people you work with better.

It serves the business better. Plus, it’s just a better outlook on life.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.

Companies under $15 million ARR constantly struggle with differentiation. I see this issue repeatedly. They aren’t clear on how they’re different or why they are better (focus on being different, not better), and they struggle immensely to position themselves effectively. In the crowded SaaS marketplace, differentiation becomes critical, especially when you lack significant brand exposure or market awareness. Without it, you’re fighting an uphill battle, making it challenging to close deals and set yourself apart from competitors.

Why is differentiation critical? First, your market messaging suffers without clear differentiation because your team isn’t aligned around a clear, compelling POV. Second, it becomes nearly impossible to cut through market noise. You lack a unique insight—a secret others haven’t discovered or don’t believe. Successful companies are built on these unique insights that can’t easily be copied. Third, your sales team struggles because you don’t have a clear differentiation or a strong point of view. They have a pipeline but face a massive drop in conversion rates because they can’t effectively articulate why your solution is better.

For example, I’m currently working with a SaaS company with an ARR of around $4 million. They have decent pipeline coverage and conversion rates, yet they experience an alarming drop—from the opportunity to closed-won, the conversion rate plummets to around 11%. This sharp decline happens because they lack tangible differentiation, a clear point of view, and effective sales enablement. PS: please don’t make your differentiation be “ease of use” - I see that too often!

Here’s how most try to solve the problem: Most companies never tackle this issue seriously. It sounds contrarian, but they’re so caught up in daily operations that they rarely focus on defining their differentiation. Solving this internally becomes impossible because of too many opinions, a lack of effort in solving the issue, and no alignment to create agreements. Some try to solve this by hiring positioning or messaging consultants, which is how people approach the challenge.

Here’s why that doesn’t work: Despite investing in these external consultants, companies typically end up with complicated 40-50-page slide decks filled with positioning frameworks and numerous messaging options. Yet, CEOs and boards still struggle to understand their differentiation clearly. Internally, there’s rarely alignment; everyone holds their viewpoint based on their function. Customer success, sales, marketing—each team sees the differentiation differently. Unless the CEO succinctly communicates a unified message, you get chaos. The sales team then improvises their versions of differentiation to close deals, leading to inconsistent, fragmented messaging.

Here’s how I would solve it instead:

Step 1: Identify your ingredients for differentiation.

1. Product Differentiation

• Feature Superiority – A must-have feature others don’t offer (e.g., Notion’s block-based editing).

• Workflow Innovation – A more intuitive, streamlined, or faster way to get things done (e.g., Linear’s issue tracking).

• AI/Automation – A proprietary AI-powered workflow or decision-making capability.

• Speed & Performance – Faster execution compared to alternatives.

• Ecosystem Integrations – Deep, native integrations with mission-critical tools.

2. Market Positioning Differentiation

• Serving a Specific Niche – Dominating an underserved segment (e.g., ConvertKit for creators vs. Mailchimp for everyone).

• Industry-Specific SaaS – Purpose-built for a vertical (e.g., Clio for legal firms).

• Regulatory & Compliance Focus – Security, privacy, or compliance as a key value driver (e.g., Vanta for SOC 2 compliance).

• SMB vs. Enterprise – Tailoring the product and pricing for a specific company size.

3. Business Model Differentiation

• Pricing Strategy – Usage-based, per-seat, freemium, flat-rate, or hybrid pricing models.

• Customer Success & Support – White-glove onboarding, proactive support, or premium consulting services.

• Self-Serve vs. Sales-Led – Removing sales friction through self-serve onboarding.

4. Go-To-Market Differentiation

• Community-Led Growth – Building a movement around the product (e.g., Webflow, Figma).

• Product-Led Growth (PLG) – A seamless free-to-paid conversion (e.g., Slack, Calendly).

• Sales-Led Growth – A structured outbound motion that others don’t use effectively.

• Content & Thought Leadership – Owning a category through content marketing.

• Channel & Partner Strategy – Leveraging partnerships, affiliates, or resellers.

5. Brand & Messaging Differentiation

• Unique Point of View – Challenging the status quo with a clear stance (e.g., “No-code will replace developers”).

• Storytelling & Narrative – Compellingly framing the problem and solution.

• Memorable Branding – A distinct voice, identity, or market presence.

6. Data & Network Effects

• Proprietary Data – Insights competitors don’t have (e.g., Gong’s sales conversation intelligence).

• User-Generated Content – A network of contributors (e.g., Notion templates, Webflow showcase).

• Marketplace or Ecosystem – A thriving ecosystem around your platform (e.g., Zapier’s integrations).

Step 2: Distill your differentiation into one clear, practical sentence.

Take inspiration from successful examples:

• Uber’s early positioning was: “You push a button, and in five minutes, a Mercedes picks you up and takes you where you want to go.”

• Facebook’s early positioning: “Type someone’s name and find out a bunch of information about them.”

This format—”You do X, and Y happens”—clearly captures your differentiation.

Step 3: Keep your execution simple.

If you’re under $5 million ARR, skip the extensive positioning decks. Instead, create clear, actionable messaging anchored in your unique insight. Ensure your entire team consistently communicates and thoroughly understands this messaging, especially sales.

Action action action:

Investors, this week’s tangible prompt:

Encourage your portfolio companies under $10 million ARR to prioritize differentiation. Instead of spending months and thousands of dollars on complex positioning exercises, push them to dedicate a week or two to clarify and test their unique differentiation. Ask them:

• Are you clear on your unique insight or secret?

• Have you distilled your differentiation into a concise statement?

• Have you tested this messaging with customers to see how it resonates?

CEOs, your tangible prompt:

If you already know your differentiation, summarize it clearly on a single slide and ensure everyone internally is aligned around it.

You can use this structure:

• Use Case

• Competitive Alternative

• Problem

• Product Category

• Differentiation Summary

• Differentiated POV

• Unique insight or secret (to reframe the buyer’s psychology)

If you’re unclear or fuzzy, dedicate focused internal time or seek external support—but keep it simple. Work directly with customers (ask “WHY US,” “WHY NOW,” etc.), and don’t get too obsessed with strategic narrative, convoluted stories, or worrying about it being “right.” Keep it as simple as you can and rapidly iterate to clarity. Avoid complicated decks.

Here’s the bottom line: Getting your differentiation right isn’t just nice to do—it’s essential. It sharpens your messaging, aligns your teams, and dramatically improves your ability to close deals. Don’t overthink it—clarify, simplify, and execute. Your market will reward you, your teams will thank you, and your results will speak for themselves.

Originally posted on edwinabl.com.