For a brief, intoxicating period, cheap capital and eager buyers masked weak commercial discipline across GTM. Then the music stopped.
Soon, it started costing $2.3M in sales and marketing (S&M) spend to generate $1 of new ARR, and CAC payback stretched to 20+ months. We tried to cut costs to manage the situation — S&M spend dropped from 40% to 31% of revenue, but growth dropped from 34% to 15% during the same period.
People thought it was a moment that might pass. They were wrong.
What we’re experiencing is a structural change in the market. Competition has increased and buyers of SaaS have become more conservative, which is showing up in sales cycles that are 38% longer than just a few years ago, and buying groups that have 10+ stakeholders. Not to mention that three-quarters of B2B buyer teams demonstrate “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process.
Such structural changes require fundamental change on our side. We have to evolve how we go to market to take this new environment into account. That means rethinking our strategic approach, with a renewed focus on excellent execution, genuine operational discipline, and innovation. Without it, the downward spiral will only pick up steam.
Apply Six Sigma to Revenue
Most companies carry significant waste. Much of it accumulates through well-meaning individuals making rational decisions that, in aggregate, only serve to dilute focus. The most common results: segments sprawl across too many verticals and geographies; marketing programs generate activity but not pipeline; and, sales capacity exceeds qualified demand.
This new GTM model demands that we get rigorous about removing structural waste. Start by retrenching unattractive segments, rationalizing low-performing marketing programs, and rightsizing sales headcount. This concentrates investment in higher-return areas and creates the option to either accelerate growth or expand EBITDA.
Hone Your Strategy
Once we’ve removed waste, we can move on to improving execution — sharpening focus in three key areas:
Get precise on who you serve. Under pipeline pressure, teams tend to broaden targeting and accept marginal accounts. Such gradual ICP drift effectively translates into lower win rates, higher selling costs, and increased churn — the opposite of what’s needed to secure sustainable growth.
Instead, you have the opportunity to turn your distinctive understanding of your customer into your new moat:Focus on ICP precision.
Deepen your understanding of your best customers through advisory boards, buyer community development, and structured win/loss analysis.
Turn this knowledge into account-level segmentation and targeting.
Fine-tune positioning to earn conversations. Too many companies are still taking a product-centric approach to their positioning, which puts the onus on downstream functions. In contrast, when you frame our point of view around the buyer’s critical business problem, you earn the opportunity to be the first solution the customer looks for. Statistically, this results in increased win rates, stabilized discounting, and expansion that’s structurally easier to manage.
As a step toward shifting from product-centric to buyer-focused positioning, ask yourself these three questions:What is broken or at risk?
Why solve it now?
Why this vendor?
Tighten pricing strategy and discipline. When companies tie pricing to how their customers realize value, they consistently recover 200–700 basis points of margin within 6–12 months. Yet, even the most finely tuned GTM pricing strategy is bound to fail without necessary discipline to stay the course.
Pricing discipline requires careful governing of the elements set within the strategy: discount controls, systematic annual increases, approval matrices, and regular review of price realization by cohort.
If Strategy Narrows the Game, Execution Wins It.
Once you’ve cut waste and sharpened strategy, it’s time to strengthen execution in each GTM function:
Evolve marketing from volume to authority. AI-native search has structurally disrupted SEO- and PPC-driven demand generation. The result is not more but better content: original research, proprietary data, and expert frameworks that establish genuine authority with your ICP.
Some important steps to take to demonstrate your brand authority:Optimize for answer engines, so your content becomes a source that AI cites.
Shift outbound to account-based orchestration, with tailored messaging by company and persona (i.e., messaging from both brand and key face of your organization).
Invest in intimate, high-touch events (e.g., executive dinners, roundtables, and practitioner workshops), as they’re found to produce the highest conversion rates of any channel.
Get ruthless about sales productivity. The Pareto Principle has never been more relevant: If 20–30% of your sellers are driving 70–80% of bookings, what are the other folks doing?
Now is the time to evaluate your team’s “skill and will,” drawing down data from CRM, email/calendar, and conversational intelligence to determine performance, activity, and methodology that’s driving your business. Then, shed underperformers and rightsize capacity to match real demand, doubling-down on tactics that distinguish high-performers from the rest (e.g., prospecting, rigorous discovery, hard qualification, multi-threading across the buying committee, champion enablement, objection handling, and value-based selling).Elevate your partner ecosystem. Partner-sourced opportunities carry the highest win rates across all GTM motions, with revenue attribution growing to 26–28%.
Start by defining your ideal partner profile, then invest significantly in select partners where mutual value creates genuine commitment to your business. Work to amplify co-selling motions with partners where you share mutual customers. And leverage near-bound pipeline: shared customer relationships, technology adjacencies, and mutual connections that generate warm introductions at scale.
Earn the right to grow by proving customer value. Expansion revenue is 3–5X more capital-efficient than new logo acquisition. Yet most companies allocate 70–80% of GTM investment to new logo activities, and promises made during the sale are rarely measured or communicated after it.
Winning companies close this gap by obsessing over value realization, measuring business impact, and communicating results back to the full buying committee — not just the day-to-day user. They then use usage, engagement, and sentiment data to target retention, expansion, and cross-sell actions surgically.
Use AI to Deepen Insights and Optimize Your Revenue System
Data scarcity is no longer a constraint to improving GTM productivity and accelerating growth — think of the many rich but fragmented layers of data around signals, product usage, sales effectiveness, intent, partner intelligence, customer health, and marketing engagement that your company has collected over the years.
The real challenge is gaining meaningful insights from those data points: Trapped in silos, they remain underutilized. But when unified, they offer a more complete view of the customer and the revenue system.
Winning companies are integrating AI into their GTM motions, both to unlock insights as well as to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and decision quality across the entire revenue funnel. The focus is on targeted use cases that reduce cost, increase conversion, and improve precision at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
The best teams sequence their AI strategy deliberately. They start with foundational “crawl” initiatives, data hygiene, meeting intelligence, sales administration, and content development that create immediate productivity gains. They then expand into “walk” use cases that improve execution and decision-making, including deal guidance, forecasting, customer health, and campaign optimization. Only then do they scale into “run” capabilities such as autonomous pipeline generation, customer onboarding and pricing optimization.
Will You Make Headway in This New GTM Era?
Not all that long ago, it was difficult to imagine GTM becoming more efficient. Any marginal wins through cost-cutting were quickly nullified by increasing competition, resulting in lower win rates and higher churn. It was a painful situation for many, with little light at the end of the tunnel.
But now, we have light! In this new era, we have an opportunity to fundamentally evolve how we go to market, creating something that’s far more efficient and effective than what was possible just a few years ago.
This is our chance to make GTM performance about much more than cost reduction. It’s about building a revenue system that performs better every quarter; being so laser-focused on strategy and positioning that our teams are the first to be called to the table; and, deploying AI with discipline, not just to improve performance but to help change the slope of growth and the margin curve.
This will require drastic and profound change — something that will undoubtedly hold many back. But those who embrace it will come away as big winners for years to come.
My hope is that this editorial can act as a guide for those of you who are ready to make positive change in your GTM motions.
About the author: AJ Gandhi is a GTM advisor to PE/VC-backed B2B software companies. Previously, he served as Chief Growth Officer at Marlin Equity Partners and held senior GTM leadership roles at Salesforce and RingCentral. He began his career in management consulting at Bain and McKinsey. His STEER diagnostic framework is used by PE/VC operating teams to evaluate and improve GTM performance across their portfolios.
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