5 Go-To-Market Issues To Avoid

Over the last three years, I have advised more than 50+ B2B companies on how to structure their GTM/marketing teams - and the same five issues keep coming up…the context here is the revenue range between $3M ARR - $20M ARR (albeit principles still apply in higher revenue ranges).

Here they are:

🔀 Siloing product, sales, and marketing 1. Customer marketing is still nascent as a hire within the GTM team. When hired, not many know what to do with them or how to KPI their outcomes. It’s one of the most critical roles for stopping churn and growing revenue in the AI world. Great customer marketers know how to build relationships, community, and growth within the customer base. As product marketing is critical for positioning/acquisition, customer marketing is critical for NRR and churn reduction.

The stat that matters:

Bain research shows that increasing customer retention by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

Forrester puts the cost of acquiring a new customer at 5x the cost of retaining one.

And in SaaS, where NRR is the growth engine, a 10-point improvement in net revenue retention is worth more to your valuation than doubling your new business pipeline. Customer marketing is the function that turns satisfied users into revenue. That perceived value is built by customer marketing. References, case studies, expansion stories, community, and advocacy. All of it.

Where AI makes this urgent:

AI is compressing onboarding, accelerating time-to-value, and making it easier for customers to switch. Switching costs are falling. The moat used to be integration depth. Now it’s the relationship and perceived value. Customer marketing is the function that turns satisfied users into revenue. In the AI era, where acquisition is getting cheaper and noisier, the companies that win will be those that have figured out how to grow what they already have.

2. CEOs / CFOs still see marketing as “marketing” and not a singular team. This means that, as often happens, there are two plans in motion:

the sales and marketing playbooks. The goals are often misaligned with the actual business goal they are working towards. It means marketing work tied to KPIs (MQLs, SQLs, OPPs, etc.) that often don’t link to the GTM motion.

3. Selling is a team sport. Selling is communicating (POV, content), marketing (Value prop, messaging, campaigns), and pitching (sales stories, how to sell better). Most GTM teams have demand gen running campaigns, SDRs running sequences, and AEs running deals. Nobody owns the through-line. No one is responsible for ensuring the POV in the content matches the message in the campaign, which in turn matches the story in the pitch. That misalignment costs businesses an estimated $1 trillion annually. Revenue Memo

Selling is a team sport. But most teams aren’t playing the same game.

⬇ AI visibility problem.

1. Your content strategies are always aimed at top-of-funnel acquisition, i.e., Thought Leadership, blogs, and white papers. That’s great. But you must correct the balance to invest more in middle- and bottom-of-funnel content (especially in the agentic era). Content that helps convert prospects authentically when they engage with your message. If your content is weighted to the top of the funnel, you are not just underinvesting in conversion. You are becoming invisible to the systems that are now doing the buying research.

Here is a good formula:

20% ToFu: Attract new readers. Thought leadership. Market POV. Category content. This earns attention and builds brand. Keep it. But stop treating it as the whole job.

60% MoFu: Build trust. This is where most teams are under-invested. Comparison content. Use cases. Customer stories. ROI frameworks. Objection handling. Content that helps a buyer who is already interested get to yes. This is the conversion engine. It rarely gets built. If your MoFu content doesn’t exist, an LLM has nothing to pull from. Your competitor’s case studies and comparison pages fill the gap instead.

20% BoFu: Create a path to purchase. Pricing context. Implementation guides. Security and compliance answers. Reference content. The stuff that removes friction right before a decision. Usually buried in a sales deck nobody uses.

The agentic shift makes this existential. AI agents are beginning to make or influence purchasing decisions autonomously. They don’t respond to nurture campaigns. They don’t attend webinars. They pull structured, credible, specific information from whatever is visible and legible on the web. If your content is vague, brand-heavy, and ToFu-weighted, you are invisible to the systems that are starting to shortlist vendors on behalf of buyers.

This is not a marketing problem. It is a board-level commercial risk.

💪 Brand building is still seen as “fluffy”

and “non-attributable.”

1. Customer acquisition costs are through the roof, yet CEOs remain reluctant to invest in brand building. Focusing only on demand generation is an old-school way of thinking.

Here’s why you are scared to spend on building brand awareness:

↳ Hard to prove instant ROI, i.e., easier to spend on ads ↳ Attribution is a challenge, i.e., easier to see a lead from an event ↳ It’s not data-driven, i.e., can not use a model from day 1 to prove it works ↳ The lens is on the short term, i.e., only thinking about this quarter’s number Brand is critically important to success, but that doesn’t mean you need it in the old-school sense. Brand building is really “audience building” and “trust”-this is the most important point because “trust” is WHY people buy. A brand is about defining a differentiated POV, taking that to the world with regular distribution, and learning what your audience cares about authentically.

In the agentic era, this matters even more. AI systems don’t buy on brand sentiment. But humans still do. And humans still make the final call. The companies that win will be the ones that built real trust with real buyers over time, through content that was honest, specific, and useful at every stage of the journey.

🛌 Who to hire and why

1. There is often a misunderstanding of why a role exists. Too much defaulting to “we need a CRO” and “they’ll figure it out” is a great way to lose six months, same as the CMO hire. The most expensive GTM mistake isn’t a bad hire. It’s hiring the right person for the wrong problem.

I advocate for understanding the challenge/problem you are trying to solve. Get profiles with expertise or a hunger to solve those problems, with a focus on developing a more rounded skill set in the future, as they will have potential.

The question that should come first (at the board):

What is the actual commercial problem we are trying to solve?

Is it that we can’t articulate why we’re different? That’s a positioning problem. You need someone who has fixed positioning before, not someone who has managed large marketing teams.

Is it that we have pipeline but can’t convert it? That’s a sales process and messaging problem. A CRO with a demand gen background won’t fix it.

Is it that we’re losing deals to a competitor we should be beating? That’s a competitive intelligence and sales story problem. No title fixes that automatically.

The problem defines the profile. Not the other way around.

The board question worth asking:

Before approving a GTM hire, ask the team to answer three things in writing. What is the specific problem this person is being hired to solve. How will we know in ninety days whether they’re solving it. What does good look like in twelve months.

If those answers are vague, the hire will be too.

🖼 Non-bespoke GTM plays

1. Most people follow the same playbook. Most do not consider whether the standard playbook suits their go-to-market motion. It means you created the wrong strategy.

Don’t overcomplicate it. But you’ll often need to tailor elements of the GTM based on channel, i.e., channel vs. direct / segments, verticals, or industries. You must do this to win, as it will steer the focus toward the right outcomes, i.e., if you sell the enterprise, DON’T set a goal of 1,000 MQLs per month (believe me, this happens).

The AI imperative.

This is where most boards are sleepwalking.

The next generation of GTM is not a better version of the current playbook. It is a fundamentally reengineered motion built from the ground up around AI.

Not AI-assisted. AI-native.

That means the research, sequencing, personalization, content creation, objection handling, and pipeline management are designed as an integrated system in which AI handles the repeatable work, and humans handle the relationship and judgment work.

Most companies are bolting AI tools onto a broken playbook. A better sequencing tool on top of the wrong strategy is still the wrong strategy. Faster, maybe. But still pointed in the wrong direction.

The companies that will win aren’t optimizing the old motion. They’re asking a different question entirely. If we were building our GTM from scratch today, knowing what AI can do, what would we actually build?

That question should be on every board agenda. Most aren’t asking it yet.

Step back from where you are, roll up your sleeves, and reassess.

Don’t keep making the same mistakes everyone keeps rolling with in 2026.

It takes critical thinking and deeper reflection.

But if you spend time you’ll get to the right approach and better outcomes.

PS… If you want to know where your GTM motion stands in the age of AI...

And you’re simply looking for the fastest, clearest way to go from “we’re probably behind on this” to “here’s exactly what we need to fix and in what order”...

Without a six-month consulting engagement or a strategy deck that sits on a shelf...

Then the Demand Karma Agentic GTM Audit might be worth your time.

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Built for investors who want to know what their portfolio companies are actually sitting on. And for Chairman/CEOs who suspect the answer but haven’t had anyone tell them straight.

All the details are at the link below. Or just reply, and we’ll set up a call.

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