Why 68% of Go-To-Market Leaders Miss Their Targets (And How to Fix It)

As I worked through the 2025 Denamico marketing strategy, I revisited a recent RevOps Champions episode with Sangram Vajre, co-founder of GTM Partners, where he shared a startling insight: 68% of go-to-market leaders aren't hitting their numbers due to a fundamental lack of clarity and alignment at the executive level.

Vajrie says, "Everyone is working so hard. Teams are smaller, budgets are shorter, the sales cycles are longer. All of these are true. And in spite of that, the reason you actually are not there is not because you're not smart, not because you don't have enough money, not because you don't have teams – it's because you don't really know your north star. You haven't really gone through what we call the eight question analysis for your business to be aligned, to be clear about those things.”

You don’t have to take these steps in order, but you need to understand and be thinking about each one. Doing so helped me and I hope it helps you too!

Go-to-Marketing Operating System

“It's a framework. So these frameworks are supposed to help you facilitate a very educated conversation without saying we got a marketing problem. We got a sales problem. We got a CS problem No, what you have is a go-to-market problem,” Vajre explains. 

1. Total Relevant Market (TRM)

Purpose: Identify best-performing segments, customer cohorts and future possibilities. 

Vajre explains, "When it comes to actually hitting your numbers most likely you want to focus on a few segments that you know you're going to hit that number. And that's what we call TRM, Total Relevant Market... Companies would do way better if they can understand and reduce the scope of how many different directions they go about to get their ICP and focus on TRM."

Putting TRM in Action:

• Audit current customer data to identify actual vs aspirational segments
• Map customer revenue and/or profitability to reveal highest-value segments
• Create ideal customer profiles based on data, not assumptions

2. Marketing Investment Map

Purpose: Identify your highest-value products, sequencing, GTM types and motions. 

"This is my personal favorite for many reasons,” Vajre says enthusiastically. “Specifically because I don't think most companies do that at all. You're trying to find that perfect match where you create a great product that works and you know it's great and you're passionate about it and there is a segment that is also very passionate about it." 

Putting Marketing Investment Map in Action:

• Evaluate product or service performance by segment and revenue
• Score current offerings against market needs and gaps
• Develop pricing strategy aligned with value delivery

3. Brand & Demand

Purpose: Develop a brand strategy and point of view to create and harvest demand.

Vajre elaborates, "We combined brand and demand into one pillar and the reason we did that is because our whole research showed that... brand drives demand. Most people have tried to keep brand separate and demand separate. All of our research showed that brand and demand actually goes hand in hand."

Putting Brand and Demand in Action:

• Document your unique point of view and differentiation
• Align content strategy with buyer journey stages and personas
• Implement tracking to measure demand source effectiveness

4. Pipeline Velocity

Purpose: Building repeatable, scalable throughput and efficiencies to meet targets.

“All of our research shows that the pipeline is stalled,” Vajre says. “The timeline is too long. And one of the big reasons we find that to be an issue is because if you don't have a proper process of accelerating pipeline, your business is actually going to go in a really negative direction quickly because your cost of acquisition is just going to be through the roof.”

Pipeline Velocity in Action:

• Map your current sales process and identify bottlenecks
• Set clear conversion metrics between pipeline stages
• Create standardized playbooks for common scenarios

5. Customer Time-to-Value

Purpose: Create and manage a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers.

“Customer time to value and customer expansion really focus on what we call NRR, Net Revenue Retention,” says Vajre. “If a company has over 100% or 120% NRR, you know it's a healthy business. You know that your customers are staying with you. You know that you can … take bets in the marketplace because you don't have to always worry about acquisition.”

Putting Customer Time-to-Value in Action:

• Document customer onboarding and implementation process
• Define measurable success metrics with customers
• Build feedback loops between customer success and product teams

6. Customer Expansion

Purpose: Create strategies for driving expansion in your current customer base. 

Putting Customer Expansion in Action:

• Identify customers who have growth potential
• Create early warning system for at-risk accounts
• Develop standardized expansion playbooks

7. Revenue Operations

Purpose: The analytical information needed to power and hold your teams accountable

Vajre shares, "We actually debated quite a bit to put RevOps in the center of the operating system … because we believe that it's like the nervous system of how go-to-market should run."

Putting RevOps in Action:

• Audit current systems and data quality
• Establish single source of truth for key metrics
• Document and optimize core revenue processes

8. Leadership & Management

Purpose: The care and coaching required to motivate, educate, and enable your people

"This is all about the rhythms. How do you create a go-to-market dashboard? How do you actually have go-to-market meetings? And how do you create what we call clarity over certainty so that you can drive your business forward."

Leadership & Management in Action:

• Create GTM dashboard for executive alignment
• Establish regular GTM review cadence
• Define clear ownership of GTM metrics

When asked why some companies scale and others don’t, Vajre replies, “I think the lack of frameworks, the lack of a unified view of how and what problems you're solving, going back to clarity around that, alignment around that, because you could have the right answer and still fail, 100%. And you could have a half baked answer, but clear and aligned with your team. You'll go further faster hands down like that for the research shows. That's what I've seen personally.”