Marketing is full of buzzwords and acronyms, usually not very well-defined. ‘Go-to-market’ (GTM) is certainly one of those terms – it seemed to creep into business language a few years ago, and many companies now use it, but few define it clearly.
Ask five sales and marketing professionals what GTM means, and you’ll get five slightly different definitions: some will describe a launch plan, some will talk about campaigns and channels, others will point to a sales process, and perhaps some to data flows.
None of these would be wrong per se. But they’re not exactly right, either.
And since I’m selling myself as a ‘go-to-market’ consultant, I thought it might be useful to explain what go-to-market actually is, what it shouldn’t be, and why broader thinking about go-to-market is increasingly important for B2B organisations.
Let’s go!
The problem with how go-to-market is commonly defined
If we look at how GTM is described by the B2B SaaS tech vendors, there’s some agreement but some differences. Each seems to capture key parts of the picture, but most anchor their definitions a bit too narrowly for my liking. For example:
- Salesforce frames GTM as a structured plan for bringing a product to market and generating revenue. Their emphasis is on defining customers, channels, pricing, and execution steps. The net effect is a clear blueprint… but one that seems to lean heavily toward planning rather than the full operating system.
- Cognism describes GTM primarily as a plan to launch a new product or service successfully. Their emphasis sits on defining the target market, messaging, and sales approach to reduce risk. Practical, commercially grounded… but anchored in launching new stuff rather than ongoing revenue operations.
- Adobe treat GTM as a product launch playbook, with a focus on messaging, channels, and timing. Again, the orientation is toward execution – what needs to happen to bring something new to market. Useful, but limited in how it defines the broader commercial system.
- Demandbase positions GTM as coordinated execution across marketing, sales, and customer success, often through an account-based lens. Their focus is on targeting the right accounts and orchestrating engagement to drive pipeline. I love account-based thinking in general, and this framing is strong on alignment and activation, but is perhaps leaning a little more toward just tactical execution rather than the underlying system design.
- Gartner present GTM as a plan for engaging customers and winning in-market against competitors. Their emphasis is on the buying journey, pricing, channels, and positioning. It brings a stronger strategic and competitive lens than others, but still presents GTM as a defined plan rather than a living, breathing system.
These definitions all describe important components of go-to-market, without fully capturing it in its broadest sense.
What go-to-market actually is
I regard go-to-market as ‘the system a business uses to turn demand into revenue’.
That means that go-to-market is at the same time:
- A commercial system for converting markets into money. System is a purposeful word. Good go-to-market thinking is ‘systems thinking’; and a holistic approach to planning and execution your commercial operations. It’s about building the engine that sits underneath successful commercial outcomes; so, not relying on heroic individual efforts from sales or marketing, but building repeatable, scalable processes and activities. Importantly, though, building the system is not an end in itself… go-to-market decisions always, always, always need to be anchored against a clear commercial purpose: driving revenue. If that outcome isn’t being achieved, one or more things within the system is likely broken.
- A set of interlocking decisions across the revenue lifecycle. Go-to-market is about both strategy and execution… and it’s therefore about choice. Making purposeful choices about who you target, how you position, how you plan to reach them, how you sell, and how you retain and grow. These choices all connect together, and ideally they’ll connect in a cohesive and complementary way.
- A cross-functional operating model that should evolve over time. Taking a broad view of GTM means it’s about aligning and unifying the activities of your marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams, and also constantly optimising them, through data and continuous customer insights, and in the face of the changing competitive environment. It’s not coincidental that the B2B SaaS tech providers are all talking GTM… data sits at the centre of modern GTM systems, enabling orchestration, visibility, and optimisation – and continuously raising the bar for what “good” looks like in execution.
What go-to-market isn’t (or shouldn’t be)
- Go-to-market is not a plan, deck, or launch moment. My problem with framing GTM against a new product launch is that GTM should be about how the business operates day-to-day, not just a one-off exercise or set of decisions required when you need to launch something new, or expand into a new market. If your GTM only gets attention during launches, you’re missing how it drives performance in the other 95% of the time. It should be embedded in how your teams work every day, not revisited once a year and then forgotten.
- GTM is not just marketing or sales activity. GTM decisions, motions, plays shouldn’t be completely owned by marketing, or by sales, or by product teams. Similarly, campaigns and pipelines are some visible activities within GTM, but are not the system itself. When those functions operate in silos, what you get is activity without cohesion, and that shows up in inconsistent performance.
- GTM shouldn’t be inherent, accidental or left to chance. Every business has an existing GTM approach… whether it’s been formalised and explicit designed or not. In many cases, it’s evolved organically over time, shaped by legacy decisions, individual preferences, short-term pressures. That often results in a fragmented system that kind of works… but not as well as it could.
Why go-to-market is becoming more important
So, why has go-to-market become a more prominent term? And why is thinking about GTM becoming more important?
- Buying is more complex and less linear. Larger buying groups, longer cycles, and more channels require coordinated systems, not siloed tactics. That means that functional silos are more costly, and misalignment between marketing, sales, and product now shows up directly in pipeline gaps and lost deals. Read more about key B2B trends here >
- Data and technology have raised the bar. The ability to orchestrate, measure, and optimise GTM exists – so underperformance is more visible (and also fixable). Organisations can now see where things break, which means there’s less room to hide behind activity or anecdote.
- Competitive advantage has shifted. In many markets, GTM execution – not just product – separates winners from the rest. When products are comparable, how you go-to-market becomes the difference.
Time to take a closer look at your GTM?
Your business has a go-to-market operating system, whether you’ve intentionally designed it or not. The question is whether it’s working as well as it could.
In many B2B organisations, it isn’t. Not because people lack effort or intent, but because the system itself hasn’t been clearly defined, aligned, or optimised. When that’s the case, growth becomes harder than it should be.
If any of this feels familiar, it’s probably worth taking a closer look at how your go-to-market actually works today.
That’s exactly what my GTM diagnosis is designed to do: give you a clear, independent view of what’s driving your commercial performance, and what’s holding it back, so you can focus on the changes that will have the biggest impact on growth.