Go To Market clarity

When a business tells me it has a “go to market issue”, it’s almost never about social, SEO or a website that needs a refresh, it’s normally that nobody can answer these three questions:

• Who is this really for?
• Why would they choose you?
• Why now?

It’s a pattern I’ve seen more than once when I’ve started working with new clients. The marketing team is busy, the agency is delivering marketing output, the website is full and sales are having good conversations. But the pipeline is soft, deals drag and nobody quite agrees on why some leads convert and others don’t.

Which isn’t a performance gap, it’s a clarity gap.

Example 1: “We sell to everyone” (so nobody hears you)

One client came to me convinced they had a demand problem. Plenty of traffic, decent engagement but low conversion.

When we stripped it back, the issue wasn’t demand at all, it was positioning.

They were trying to speak to:

• Enterprise buyers
• Mid-market operators
• And smaller, fast-moving teams

All on the same homepage.

So their messaging that sounded impressive meant nothing to anyone. Once we made a decision on who the product was really for, two things happened almost immediately. Sales conversations got shorter and the marketing team didn’t need to argue about what to say. No big sweeping changes, just fewer people and clearer messaging.

Example 2: Features everywhere, outcomes nowhere

Another business had a well engineered product that was complex, capable and genuinely impressive.

Their GTM problem was that they were marketing it the same way it was built. Focusing on feature by feature.

The website read like internal documentation, sales decks assumed far too much context and marketing content explained how it worked before explaining why it mattered.

We flipped the model:

• Start with the commercial outcome
• Then the problem it removes
• Only then the capability

Suddenly, buyers could place themselves in the story.

GTM isn’t about explaining everything, it’s about explaining the right thing first.

Example 3: Sales and marketing telling different stories

I’ve seen this in more than one business. Marketing has a different message to sales, and then add in a founder who’s got their own message on top. It’s not because anyone is wrong, just that nobody is aligned on the core narrative.

In one case I saw sales were winning deals despite marketing, not because of it. They were reframing the offer on calls because the website wasn’t doing the job.

That’s not a sales problem, that’s a GTM failure upstream.

Once we aligned around:

• One primary customer
• One core problem
• One clear “why us”

Sales stopped improvising, marketing stopped guessing and conversion improved without touching spend.

Why this keeps happening

Most GTM work fails because it’s treated as a launch exercise. Starting with a big workshop, forming a deck to present to the rest of the business and then everyone goes back to business as usual.

In reality, GTM is an operating discipline with fewer decisions, clear trade-offs and repeated reinforcement. And crucially, someone senior owning it.

This is where fractional leadership often makes the difference, not by doing more marketing, but by removing ambiguity.

A simple GTM test

If you want to sanity check your own GTM plans, try this:

Ask three people in your business – founder, sales and marketing, to answer this in one sentence:

“We help ___ do ___ so they can ___”

If you get three different answers, you don’t have a channel problem, it’s a clarity problem.

Most companies don’t fail at go-to-market because they lack effort, they fail because they avoid making hard choices, and clarity is a choice.