Your GTM playbook worked at your last startup. But will it work again?

We've created a culture in B2B where having a GTM framework feels like having answers. Where hiring a growth advisor feels like buying traction. But here's what I've learned after years of building go-to-market strategies and advising startups:

Pretending otherwise is costing you deals, wasting your launch budget, and tanking your conversion rates.

The framework trap in go-to-market

Think about the last time you Googled "B2B go-to-market strategy" or "SaaS growth playbook." You probably found something clean. Maybe the T2D3 growth model. Maybe Bowery Capital's sales methodology. Something with stages and metrics that promised a clear path to scale.

Here's what that framework didn't tell you:

• It was created for a different product, selling to different buyers, at a different price point, through different channels

• The company that used it had brand recognition, sales infrastructure, funding runway, or market timing you don't have

• It worked for them once in specific conditions, which doesn't mean it works for you now

• It's designed to be teachable in a blog post, not necessarily effective in your market

GTM frameworks give you a starting point, not your growth strategy. The moment you stop questioning whether it fits your buyer's actual journey, your sales cycle, your unit economics, you've stopped doing strategy work.

Why advisors aren't the shortcut you think they are

Here's the uncomfortable part about the growth advising industry: startups that actively seek GTM help are already more likely to scale. Not because the advice is magic, but because seeking outside perspective is itself a success behavior.

Think about what it takes to hire a growth advisor:

You're self-aware enough to know GTM is hard. You're humble enough to admit your strategy might be off. You're proactive enough to invest before your ARR completely stalls. That combination of traits predicts success regardless of whose playbook you follow.

Here's what this means in practice:

I've seen startups pay $15K/month for advisors who apply the exact same "enterprise sales playbook" to every client, regardless of deal size, sales cycle, buyer persona, or competitive dynamics. I've also watched founders completely overhaul their go-to-market strategy based on advice from someone with an impressive LinkedIn headline, even when their customer data was screaming the opposite.

Advisors are often pattern-matchers who've seen similar problems before. But "similar" isn't "same." Your value comes from asking better discovery questions that surface what's actually happening with customers, not from having a pre-built answer.

What you're getting wrong if you're seeking GTM advice

Mistake #1: Coming with your strategy problem set in stone

You walk into an advising session and say: "We need to build an outbound sales motion."

But here's what you haven't considered: maybe outbound isn't your problem and your real issue is that your product-led funnel is leaking at onboarding. Or your pricing creates sticker shock before prospects see value. Or your ICP is too broad so you're burning budget on unqualified leads.

When you decide what the GTM problem is before the conversation starts, you're just hiring someone to validate your assumption.

What to do instead:

• Share the growth symptoms, not your diagnosis: "Our sales cycle doubled and win rates dropped 40% last quarter"

• Show the full picture: conversion rates at every funnel stage, CAC by channel, churn by cohort, sales call recordings

• Bring actual data: which channels are working, where deals stall, what objections come up, who's buying vs. who you thought would buy

• Say "Help me figure out what our customers and data are actually telling us" instead of "Here's the GTM motion I need to build"

• Be genuinely open to discovering your entire strategy hypothesis might be wrong

Mistake #2: Treating discovery as delay to execution

I've watched founders get visibly frustrated during customer discovery. "When do we get to the actual GTM work?" The discomfort is palpable. They want to launch campaigns, build sales processes, not ask more questions.

But discovery isn't wasted time before the real work starts. Discovery is the strategy work.

My clients often seem antsy during the first hour of questions. "When do we start doing THE THING?" I often feel this impatience. They want a playbook. They want to execute.

But the advisor who jumps straight to "here's your GTM plan" without understanding your customer insights is just applying their last successful playbook to your unique market.

What to do instead:

• Budget 30-40% of your GTM project time for pure customer discovery and data analysis

• Bring everything: conversion funnels, sales recordings, win/loss interviews, usage data, churn reasons, competitor intelligence

• When the advisor asks "Why do you think prospects drop off here?" treat it as progress toward better strategy, not distraction

• Resist the urge to rush to channel selection or hiring plans before you understand what actually drives conversions

• If you're not feeling slightly uncomfortable during discovery, your advisor probably isn't uncovering the real strategic gaps

What you're getting wrong if you're advising on GTM

Mistake #1: Running the same playbook on everyone

I get it. That product-led growth motion worked brilliantly for your last three clients. But your current client isn't them.

They're selling to different buyers, at different price points, through different channels. Different competitive landscape. Different product complexity. Different sales cycle. Different unit economics.

When you apply "the playbook" anyway, you're either going to waste their budget on tactics that don't fit their market, or worse, you'll actively harm them by making them ignore what makes their GTM motion actually work.

What to do instead:

• Start every engagement with: "What makes your market, buyers, and economics different from typical SaaS?"

• Fight the urge to recommend a growth strategy just because you know it works somewhere else

• When you recognize a pattern ("This looks like a classic PLG motion"), ask "Does this pattern actually apply here given your ACV, buyer, and sales cycle?" before sharing it

• Make your advice specific to THEIR customer data and unit economics, not your previous client's success story

• The best compliment isn't "You gave us a great framework," it's "You helped us understand what our customers and data were actually showing us"

Mistake #2: Solving the GTM problem too fast

The client comes with what they think is the problem: "Our conversion rates are terrible."

You immediately see what you think is the REAL problem: "Your trial is too short for your product complexity."

So you jump straight to: "Here's how you should restructure your funnel..."

But you just deprived them of the most valuable thing: understanding WHY this is the problem and HOW to diagnose GTM issues themselves in the future. Your engagement ends, they face a new growth challenge, and they're back to guessing.

What to do instead:

• Ask them to walk you through their full customer journey: how people discover them, evaluate them, buy from them, and renew

• Make your thinking process visible: "Here's the pattern I'm seeing in your funnel data... what do you see?"

• Guide them to the strategic insight rather than handing it to them: "Who's converting fastest? What do they have in common? Where are others dropping off? What's different about them?"

• Say "What would happen if you focused your GTM on this segment instead?" rather than "You should focus on this segment"

• Focus on teaching them how to extract insights from their own data and customers, not just giving them this quarter's tactics

• The goal is for them to leave saying "Now I see what our data was telling us" not "You told us what to do"

This applies to way more than advisors

Here's where this gets really practical for anyone reading this: you don't need to hire a growth advisor to fall into these traps.

Starting a new role? You're probably tempted to apply the GTM strategy from your last company. That content-led motion that drove 10K MQLs per month at your previous startup? Might completely miss the mark at your new company where buyers don't search for solutions because they hear about them in industry communities or through sales outreach.

Joining a new marketing team? Don't come in with your channel strategy already finalized. You don't know the customer acquisition history, the failed experiments, or which segments have been tested and abandoned. Review the data and talk to customers before you propose your GTM plan.

Trying to improve conversion rates? Before you Google "SaaS funnel optimization framework" and implement what you find, ask: "What makes our buyer's journey unique? What are our customers actually doing in our product versus what we designed them to do? Where are they really getting stuck?"

The pattern is the same whether you're an external advisor, a new hire, or a founder trying to scale:

GTM frameworks are thinking shortcuts. Sometimes you need shortcuts to move fast. But when shortcuts become your default approach, you stop building the judgment to read your market.

Growth advisors are skillful pattern-matchers who can spot what you can't see from inside your company. But when you outsource your thinking entirely to their playbook, you stop learning how to extract insights from your own customer conversations and data.

The marketers and founders who build real traction aren't the ones with the most frameworks memorized or the longest list of advisors on their cap table. They're the ones who:

• Use GTM frameworks as hypothesis starting points, then customize ruthlessly based on customer insights and data

• Seek advice on their customer research interpretation and data analysis, not just their execution tactics

• Stay curious about whether their ICP assumptions, channel strategies, and pricing hypotheses are wrong

• Build their own strategic judgment from customer conversations and funnel data instead of renting someone else's playbook

You know that feeling when you try to force a growth strategy that worked at your last company? That friction you feel when channels don't perform or messaging doesn't land? That's your market trying to tell you something.

Listen to it.

Now try this

If you're working on your own GTM strategy:

Pick one initiative you're planning (channel launch, pricing change, sales motion, whatever). Before you execute:

1. Write down your hypothesis: "I think [X] will work because [Y]"

2. Challenge it with your data: Pull your last 20 deals. Do they support this hypothesis or contradict it? Look at your highest LTV customers. Would this strategy attract more of them or different people? Check your funnel drop-offs. Would this fix the actual leak or optimize something that's working fine?

3. Ask the uncomfortable question: "What would I see in my data if this hypothesis was completely wrong?"

If the data doesn't clearly support your hypothesis, pause. Do more discovery before you build.

If you're advising on GTM:

Before your next client call, try this:

1. Write down your initial diagnosis based on what they've told you so far

2. Spend the first 30 minutes purely on discovery. Avoid the urge to solve. Instead, get them talking: "Show me your dashboard. Walk me through what you see." "Pull up a few recent deal timelines. Let's look at what actually happened." "What surprises you most about your conversion data?" "What have you already tried? What happened?"

3. Compare your notes: How different is the real problem from your initial diagnosis?

The goal isn't to stop using frameworks or seeking growth advice, but to stop treating them like they're more important than understanding what your customers and data are actually telling you.