Go-to-market for technical B2B products
GTM is not a department. It's a discipline that runs through every function: how you define who you serve, how you reach them, how you sell to them, and how you keep them. After 17 years doing this in technical SaaS, here's how I think about it.
What go-to-market actually means
The term gets used for everything from launch plans to sales hiring. What I mean by it is more specific: the work of creating a repeatable, evidence-based path from product value to customer revenue.
That work sits at the intersection of ICP definition, positioning, sales process, and customer success. None of those things work in isolation. A sharp ICP without a sales process produces good conversations that don't close. A sales process without clear positioning produces deals that churn.
ICP: the foundation of everything
Most GTM problems trace back to an ICP that was defined too broadly, too early, or without enough evidence. 'Series B SaaS companies with a developer audience' is a starting point, not a profile.
A useful ICP answers three questions precisely: which companies are most likely to buy, who inside those companies feels the pain most acutely, and what does that pain cost them in concrete terms. The third question is the hardest and the most important.
ICP definition is not a one-time exercise. It should be revisited every time you see a pattern in won deals, lost deals, or churn. The companies that get this right treat ICP as a living document, not a slide.
How I approach ICP work
I start with the deals that already closed and the customers who stayed. Not surveys or personas, but real conversation analysis. What made those customers say yes? What problem were they solving that felt urgent enough to act on? What would have made them leave?
From that, I build hypotheses that get tested in real outreach, not validated in workshops.
Positioning: the work nobody wants to do
Positioning is the decision about what you are and, more importantly, what you are not. Technical founders often resist this because narrowing feels like leaving money on the table. In practice, the opposite is true.
A product positioned for everyone is trusted by no one. The more precisely you define the problem you solve and for whom, the more your target customers feel you understand them, and the easier every downstream decision becomes.
Where positioning breaks down
Most positioning problems come from one of three places: defining the category too broadly, describing features instead of outcomes, or building around what the product does rather than what the customer gains.
The fix is rarely clever copy. It's going back to the evidence: what do your best customers say about you, in their words, when they recommend you to someone else?
Sales process: from founder-led to repeatable
Most early-stage technical companies run a founder-led sales motion that works well until it doesn't scale. The founder is the best salesperson because they have context, conviction, and credibility that nobody else has yet.
The transition to a repeatable process is not about removing the founder from sales. It's about capturing what makes the founder effective and making it transferable: the qualification criteria, the discovery questions, the objection handling, the closing moves.
What a repeatable process looks like
It starts with explicit qualification criteria, not intuition. It includes a discovery framework that consistently surfaces urgency, budget, and decision process. It has a pitch that can be delivered by anyone on the team with the same level of credibility.
None of this requires complex tooling. It requires discipline and a willingness to learn from what actually works in real conversations.
Customer success as a GTM asset
Customer success is often treated as a support function. In a well-run GTM motion, it's a strategic asset: the place where you learn what's actually working, what customers value most, and where the next ICP evolution is coming from.
The metrics that matter are not NPS or ticket volume. They are retention by segment, expansion revenue, and the proportion of customers who become active referrers. Those numbers tell you whether your GTM motion is working end-to-end.