Every function has data that supports their GTM perspective. Nobody has the whole picture.
Do we have the right strategy, and is the plan focused and achievable?
In plain terms: this is not cost reduction. The spend is approved and being made. Build one view of your go-to-market, then decide what to keep, start and stop. What’s going well, what’s not, and what is being missed entirely.
OBSERVATION
From upstairs, a strategy that is wrong and a strategy that is not being executed look the same.
So the wrong thing gets fixed. Usually, the strategy or the message.
WHERE THIS STARTS
GTM Diagnosis
Structured interviews across leadership and every go-to-market function, reduced to the few initiatives that move the needle. A day, a week or a month.
Michelle Demarco, CFO, enVista
“As a finance person working with salespeople all the time on what their goals are, hitting their target numbers or forecasts - it gave me the data to say, there actually is opportunity here for you. It's not just a salesperson coming back saying, well, we can't do that because of this reason. Like, well, actually, the data shows that you can.”
- A new CEO or CRO is in seat and inherited a growth plan nobody can defend.
- Two quarters have been missed, and the explanations do not agree with each other.
- The board asked why growth stalled and the answer took four slides and satisfied nobody.
- A senior go-to-market hire is about to be made against a problem that has not been diagnosed.
- There are sixty things on the go-to-market priority list and all of them are important.
- CAC is rising, payback is stretching, and headcount is still going up.
Why this happens: every function can see its own part, and nobody owns the whole
It is rarely that the data is missing. Marketing has its funnel, sales has its pipeline, product has its market research, finance has the model, and each is defensible on its own terms. What nobody has is the view across all of them, because that requires empathy for each function. So the argument becomes a contest of theories, each backed by real numbers from a different silo. The best debater wins. The cost of that shows up when growth slows, and so does the harder question, which is not only where growth is stuck but what you are not going after at all.
Cost
Effort and spend diluted across segments you cannot win.
Revenue
Growth plateaus while headcount and spend keep rising.
Cost
Good initiatives die from lack of focus rather than lack of merit.
Risk
Board conversations turn defensive instead of directive.
Risk
A senior hire fails against a problem nobody diagnosed.
What you would need
- One view of the whole go-to-market, built from the data your functions already have, rather than one function's view of it.
- A comprehensive framework that covers the entire GTM lifecycle
- Synthesis that reduces dozens of findings to the few initiatives that actually move the number, and names the blind spots nobody raised.
- Segmentation that translates into both sales territories and investor materials.
- A governance cadence that keeps us on the chosen few.
- Someone with empathy for every go-to-market function, because they have sat in those seats: individual contributor and CMO in marketing, individual contributor and CRO in revenue, alongside product management and engineering, and a finance degree underneath all of it. No function's answer is taken at face value and none is dismissed.
What you would measure
- Win rate in targeted versus non-targeted segments
- the percentage of pipeline and bookings inside target segments
- selling capacity coverage against SOM
- initiative completion against the keep / start / stop list
- and the segments you decided to go after, being gone after.
This is the Align part of the work: your whole go-to-market telling one story, starting with agreement on where growth actually is. It is your goal; we get there together, and my expertise is in the helping.
Two reasons this works
Works at Every AltitudeI move from board-level strategy down to the specific words a seller says to a buyer, and back up again, in the same engagement. Interviews run at board level and at seller level, so the diagnosis is grounded in what is happening in live deals rather than in what leadership believes is happening.
Risk: you find out which of the two failure modes you actually have, because someone was in both rooms. Cost: one partner instead of a strategy firm plus a training vendor plus an enablement contractor. No translation loss and no second discovery process. Revenue: what is learned in the conversation corrects the strategy, instead of the strategy being corrected a year later by the miss.
Built for Your Motion, Not Delivered From a BinderThe six-part audit structure is adapted to your model, your dynamics and your GTM motion rather than applied as a generic scorecard. The structure is portable; the content never is.
Cost: no rework cycle, no shelfware, no second attempt twelve months later against a scorecard that did not fit. Revenue: the findings are executable, because they are built against your product-market and your organization’s dynamics. Risk: you are not handed someone else's diagnosis with your logo on it.
Any provider handing you content that could belong to another company has not done the work. The audit framework has been run against multiple businesses in multiple industry segments.
Proof: enVista
The situation
A generic offering in a diluted market, growth ambitions, and no leadership agreement on where to concentrate. Every function had data supporting its own view; nobody had the whole picture. The market model that went to investors bore no relationship to how sales territories were drawn, so finance and the field were effectively running two different companies. They were about to hire a product marketing leader into an undiagnosed problem.
The work
The result
62 raw recommendations distilled to six prioritized initiatives. Explicit agreement on which retail segments to attack and which to leave. Strategic focus and field execution became one document rather than two competing ones.
Questions people ask
What is a go-to-market audit?
Structured interviews across leadership and every go-to-market function, run against a six-part evaluation framework (means, market, math, message, medium and management) and then synthesized down to a keep / start / stop list your leadership team can argue about. At enVista that was 25 interviews and 62 raw recommendations reduced to six prioritized initiatives with a governance approach attached, so the focus survived the readout.
How do I know if it's a strategy problem or an execution problem?
Two questions separate them, and you can answer both this week. First: does your leadership team agree on what problems you solve and who you solve them for? If the answer is no, it is a direction problem, and everything downstream (the message, the training, the coaching) will be built on that disagreement and will fail for a reason nobody can name. If the answer is yes, ask the second: if you sat with your best rep, would you hear the story you want told? If no, it is a message problem. If yes, it is an execution problem. From the executive suite the three look identical, which is why the diagnosis is worth buying separately from the fix.
How long does it take, and what do we get at the end?
The output is a keep / start / stop synthesis of the current strategy and execution state, an initiative set that focuses energy on the needle movers, and a governance cadence handed to your leaders.
Duration scales with the organization. A day for a small company, where the deliverable is primarily verbal and what you leave with is the focused initiative list and the cadence to run it. A week where a formal deliverable is produced. A month for a larger company that may have multiple operating segments.
Who do you interview?
Leadership and every go-to-market function, not one function's view of the whole. And people with varying levels of seniority. The point of the range is that it makes the diagnosis credible to the people who have to act on it. That is why the question I ask before starting is “who would need to be interviewed for the findings to be credible to your leadership team?” If the answer is a list of three people who already agree, the audit will not change anything.
We are about to hire a senior go-to-market leader. Should we wait?
Not necessarily, but know what you are hiring against. One organization was about to hire a product marketing leader into an undiagnosed problem; the conversation with the CEO and CMO turned out to be about what underlay their need to grow, not about the role they had posted. A diagnosis before the hire tells you which seat you actually need and gives whoever takes it a mandate rather than a mystery. It is also cheaper than a failed senior hire, by a wide margin.
What would it be worth to walk into your next board meeting with one view of the whole go-to-market rather than four functional theories?
That is the last question I ask in discovery on this problem. It can be the first one we talk about.
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