What Growing Companies Get Wrong About Go-To-Market, and How to Get It Right
- Jasmine Cortez-Vera
- Apr 15
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 16
Introduction
In high-growth B2B organizations, go-to-market is often treated as a milestone, something that gets planned, polished, and launched.
A product launch date gets set, and each team begins preparing their part, often without consulting one another. By the end, Sales teams receive leads without context or clarity on the customer journey. Marketing focuses on activation, but isn't always looped into downstream conversion data. Ops is expected to support execution, often without full visibility into planning decisions.
But GTM isn’t just a launch. It’s a motion. And when that motion lacks shared goals, clear handoffs, and systems that scale, it slows momentum across the funnel.
What Is a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy?
Forrester defines a go-to-market strategy as:
“The map of decisions that an organization makes to determine how it will leverage its resources to deliver its offering portfolio to buyers to maximize revenue, advance strategic goals, and secure and sustain a competitive advantage.”
Gartner describes it as:
“A plan that details how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy their product or service and to gain a competitive advantage.”
At mPowered Collective, we see GTM as an ongoing collaboration between Marketing, Sales, and Operations, a system that aligns strategy, execution, and measurement across the entire revenue engine.
3 Mistakes Growing Companies Make in Their GTM Approach
Mistake 1: Treating GTM Like a One-Time Event
One of the most common missteps is anchoring go-to-market around a product launch initiative, setting a date and coordinating activities around it, without designing a system to sustain the motion beyond that moment.
What to do instead:
Build a go-to-market operating rhythm. That means cross-functional planning earlier in the process, shared milestones, and intentional feedback loops that keep Sales, Marketing, and Ops aligned beyond launch.
Mistake 2: Teams Aren’t Aligned on Success
Even in well-run organizations, different functions often operate with misaligned success metrics:
Marketing: Pipeline creation, buyer journey acceleration, and campaign performance
Sales: Revenue, quota attainment, deal velocity
RevOps: Forecast accuracy, funnel visibility, and enabling data-driven decisions
When these metrics aren’t connected, execution breaks down. Teams optimize in isolation and momentum suffers.
What to do instead:
Define and align on a shared view of performance across the revenue engine. That might include pipeline velocity, marketing-influenced revenue, or sales cycle length, but what matters most is clarity and accountability across functions.
Mistake 3: Tools Don’t Reflect the Way Teams Actually Work
The issue today isn’t having too many tools. It's underutilization.
Disconnected platforms, low adoption, and manual workarounds are quietly draining efficiency.
What to do instead:
Audit your tech stack. Map what each tool supports, and where the gaps in usage or adoption exist. Then simplify. Focus on alignment between tools and real workflows, not just feature sets.
How to Build a Scalable GTM System
At mPowered Collective, we believe great GTM isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about building the foundations for growth. That starts with three core principles:
1. Clarity over chaos. When your teams know what they’re driving toward and how success is measured, decisions move faster.
2. Systems that scale. Repeatable frameworks, shared workflows, and performance cadences help your team execute with consistency, even as complexity grows.
3. Integrated execution. Marketing, Sales, and Ops should co-own GTM. When they move in sync, execution becomes smarter, faster, and more measurable.
Ready to Strengthen Your GTM Motion?
Whether you're preparing for a new initiative or trying to improve the performance of your existing motion, mPowered Collective helps you build go-to-market systems designed for clarity, momentum, and measurable impact.