Ameetess D.

GTM has become corporate cosplay. Most teams slap "𝐆𝐨-𝐓𝐨-𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲" on what's actually just a lead gen plan with better branding. Here's the tell: if your "GTM strategy" lives in a marketing deck and gets presented after the product roadmap is locked, it's not GTM. It's damage control with a strategic label. Real GTM isn't a campaign. It's a business decision. It answers questions most teams skip entirely: ◼️ Why does this deserve to exist in our portfolio? ◼️ What are we willing to not do to make this work? ◼️ Which buyer actually has budget authority - and do they know they have this problem? ◼️ Does our pricing model match how customers perceive value, or how finance wants to report revenue? ◼️ Can support actually handle the customer profile that's going to buy this? GTM coordinates product, sales, marketing, finance, ops, and support before launch - not after the deck goes to the board. What usually happens instead: Product ships. Marketing runs ads. Sales gets deck training. Everyone calls it GTM.Then launch day hits and: → The market doesn't understand the category → Sales can't explain why this isn't a feature → Pricing feels arbitrary → Support wasn't briefed on the actual buyer That's beyond a marketing problem. It's a coordination failure with good slides. Here's the deeper issue: Most GTM plans are still built with an old-school CMO mindset - brand first, quarterly cycles, impressions as the success metric. Modern GTM works differently: → Revenue systems, not awareness campaigns → Weekly iteration, not quarterly planning → Pipeline math (CAC, LTV, conversion rates) driving every decision → Every dollar of spend tracked to closed revenue The real test? If you can't explain your GTM strategy without saying "campaigns," "MQLs," or "funnel" - you don't have one. So: does your org actually do GTM, or is it just demand gen in a nicer suit? #GoToMarket #GTMStrategy #RevenueStrategy #RevenueSystems #B2BGrowth #GrowthLeadership #PipelineStrategy #MarketEntry #PricingStrategy #ProductMarketFit #ExecutiveLeadership #BusinessStrategy

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The board deck was green in March. Traffic on plan. MQLs on target. Two quarters later, the pipeline came in soft, and the room turned to, who else, the CMO. That sequence is playing out across B2B right now, and most are misreading it. The instinct is to blame the execution. The campaigns, the SDRs, sellers, and the marketing leader. One of them usually takes the weight of the hit. The wrong person pays for a problem they didn’t create. What’s changed is that the buyers left your website. Bain has zero-click as the default, with B2B traffic down 15-25% and software click-through rates down as much as 30%. Forrester finds buyers who research with AI are one-tenth as likely to click through at all. They didn’t stop researching. They research more than ever. They just stopped doing it where you can see them. Gartner now estimates that 70% of the B2B buying journey occurs in the dark funnel. Which means your demand model is forecasting from a leading indicator that accounts for less than a third of how buyers decide. The dashboard reports green on a layer that stopped mattering. And your pipeline confirms the truth two quarters too late. John Buten at Forrester calls it a visibility vacuum. That’s spot on, and it’s the story behind the traffic headlines. I wrote the new model for Field Friday this week. The argument: Your demand model assumes the funnel starts on your website. It doesn’t anymore. The piece walks through the four questions a board-grade dashboard answers, the one yours has gone blind to, what moves it, the math that turns the answer into a forecast a CRO can take to the board, and seven questions for Monday’s staff meeting. Link in the first comment. ⬇️ #B2BMarketing #CMO #CRO #GTMStrategy #DemandGen #MarketingAI

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The exit of two of the world’s biggest agencies from Openpath isn’t just a story about one marketplace. It highlights a deeper truth: transparency can’t be bolted on as a feature. When fee flows and inventory paths are opaque by design, no amount of “directness” messaging will rebuild trust. The industry is at a crossroads: either we accept that auditability requires architecture (immutable records, governance that removes conflicts of interest, and verifiable economics) or we keep repackaging the same dynamics with better branding. AI only accelerates the urgency. As automated decisioning takes more control over spend, buyers need to know the system itself is trustworthy, not just the sales deck. The open web doesn’t just need better players. It needs better infrastructure. Read my full comment in Performance Marketing World: https://lnkd.in/eYdpGKw9

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I've watched founders tear apart a landing page that was converting just fine. Sessions had spiked and orders held steady, but the conversion rate cratered. If that's you, take a look into who's browsing before you bust out the 🔨 . Great breakdown from Allegra Poschmann and the Pact team.

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Behind every great marketing team is a great agency partner (or several). As the CMO of Zappi, I hire agencies with the same care I hire an FTE for my team. Here's the reality most CMOs face: Your headcount is always going to be lean. Your budget is finite. Your internal team can't be experts at everything. And you need to move fast. This is where agencies become critical. They give you: ▶ Flexibility you can't get with full-time hires ▶ Scale up for a launch, scale down after ▶ No long hiring cycles when you need to move quickly ▶ Specialized expertise your team doesn't have ▶ Deep knowledge in specific channels ▶ Cross-industry perspective from working with multiple clients ▶ Access to tools and tech you don't need to own ▶ Speed that changes everything ▶ Faster implementation than building in-house ▶ Teams ready to execute immediately ▶ No learning curve on new platforms or tactics The best agency relationships aren't transactional. They're partnerships. The agencies that understand your business. Know your customers. Challenge your thinking. Bring ideas, not just execution. At Zappi, our agency partners are essential. They enable us to punch above our weight. To compete with companies 10x our size. To launch campaigns that would take months to build internally. The mistake CMOs make? Treating agencies like order-takers instead of strategic partners. (By the way... same mistake when insights teams are treated this way, too!) The best CMOs I know: → Share business context deeply → Include agencies in planning early → Give them room to bring ideas → Build long-term relationships, not project-based transactions Your marketing results depend on your team AND your partners. Choose agencies that align with your values. That feel like an extension of your own team. Who embrace similar ways of thinking. And that stand to help you learn and make you even better. Shout out to Avery Akkineni and our partners at VaynerX VaynerMedia (pictured with the wonderful and hilarious Rob Mayhew). 💚 Follow me (Nataly Kelly) for more CMO advice. #CMO #marketing #agencies

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Advertisers, Marketers & Employees are gonna hate hearing this… but it’s why we stay profitable. We typically 99% of the time pay no commission for the first six months. Here’s why: For the first 90 days, I’m training you. And I’m probably losing money on you. (This is on the affiliate side, not the agency side.) The next 90 days? I’m just making my money back. At the end of six months, we’re even. Only after that do we start talking commission. A lot of people hate this when they’re new. But it’s the reality of bringing someone up to speed: - You’re expensive to train. - You’re not producing real profit yet. - And if you quit in 3 months… dude I just paid to educate you for someone else. Once you’re contributing real ROI, I’ll gladly share upside. But until then your job is to focus on learning the craft and proving you can actually win. Too many companies bleed cash paying commission on top of training losses. It feels generous but it’s just bad math and worse business.

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Whether an agency search is consultant led or handled by the brand, I think we all, myself included, take for granted the amount of orchestration it takes to arrive at a fruitful pitch. Not like, the logistics. Although calendar jenga, travel schedules, and making sure people show up on time, where they are supposed to, often in random cities/locations, is a feat in and of itself. I'm talking about the orchestration around the dissemination of information from brand to agencies, so that those agencies... a) know what they are doing + the challenge at hand b) feel confident in what they are doing (and that they are a great fit) c) arrive at a pitch where they finish and the brand says 'holy sh*t, that was great!'. I'm talking about the orchestration around the dissemination of information from agencies to brand, so that the brand... a) knows exactly what the agency does well and how they would work towards solving the challenge at hand. b) feels reallllllllllly confident in their final decision c) watches a few pitches and thinks 'wow, holy sh*t, we could work with all these groups!" Taking a brief or an RFP and running with it may seem easy. For some, it is. I've become numb to it. If you're in marketing, you probably have too. A friendly reminder that is sure as sh*t is NOT easy. Pitches are HARD. WORK. oh yea...and if you win...you get the distinct honor of getting thrown directly into the fire...usually immediately :)

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