Traditional vs. Modern Go-to-Market

I'm going to start by getting on my soapbox: by and large, our clients don't have particularly strong go-to-market functions. Most of them are lower mid-market or even small to medium businesses with limited resources. And here's the thing—a lot of companies evolved their businesses over years, but they haven't evolved their go-to-market functions in line with that.

This isn't something that happened overnight. The market has been shifting for years. But I don't think a lot of companies have kept pace with those changes, and it's costing them. Significantly.

What We Actually Mean by Go-to-Market

Before we get into the differences, let's define what we're talking about. Go-to-market is the way a company brings its products or services to the right customers and communicates its competitive advantage. It's not just marketing. It's not just sales. It involves all manner of stakeholders—marketing, sales, product, customer success, finance—and each of those different functions plays a role in defining what a go-to-market strategy looks like.

From where we sit in marketing, we're very focused on messaging and campaigns and finding the right distribution channels. But sales has their discovery calls, their sales funnels, their nurture processes. Product is thinking about what features to invest in, how to leverage AI, how the actual offering evolves. Customer success is focused on upselling, growing accounts, getting feedback from customers that tells us why they bought and what problems they have. Finance is setting pricing that's competitive, profitable, and makes sense for usage patterns.

All of this is part of go-to-market. It's a very, very broad topic.

The Traditional Approach (And Why It's Failing)

Here's what traditional go-to-market looks like, and I'd wager this describes a lot of companies you know:

Growth is driven by sales, and the theory goes that if you have more sales reps, you'll have more revenue. More resources equals more results. It's a relatively linear funnel where the expectation is that everyone goes through the sales process in this very prescriptive way. You provide an experience that suits that expectation, even if it doesn't quite match with what the actual customer experience is, given the complexity of the way that people interact with products and services now.

There's heavy reliance on direct sales. Not really leveraging communities, not selling through influencers, not thinking about ecosystem building. Within teams themselves, there are silos. Marketing and sales don't talk to each other. There are manual processes everywhere. And there are annual planning cycles—businesses are stuck in this idea that you have to plan year to year when it's really just a number on the calendar. It doesn't make sense to wait until the end of the year to make changes. You should be more responsive to what's going on in your business.

In terms of metrics, it's very much activity-based rather than outcome-based. People are focused on what are people doing—are they making calls? Are they delivering MQLs? Are they sending emails? We're less focused overall on the big results that we want to drive that are actually going to move the needle for the business.

What Best-in-Class Looks Like Today

Modern go-to-market is almost the opposite of all of this. It's much less linear. There are multiple different motions going on at the same time. You need distribution across multiple channels. You have to be present everywhere. You have to give customers multiple opportunities to interact with you, and you have to build more of an ecosystem, a community around your product, your service, your people. You need to make sure you're always present in that conversation.

When it comes to teams, AI is obviously a huge part of that. You should be continuously optimizing your team. Everyone should be unified, working together and pulling in the same direction, rather than being siloed and accountable only to their own or departmental goals.

The metrics should be more focused on the actual outcomes for the business—the things that are going to move the needle. You can still look at things like calls and MQLs and emails sent. Those are leading indicators and carry some weight in predicting the business's performance. But ultimately what we really should be focusing on is the outcomes—what we are delivering for our clients in really quantifiable, hard terms. Because that's the only way to prove ROI and make sure you keep earning your spot on the team.

Why This Gap Matters (And What It's Costing You)

Only 8% of companies report that they have strong alignment between sales and marketing. I'm a skeptic about statistics like these, but we see this complaint quite often from marketing leaders—they send leads off to sales, they don't know what happens, they don't get feedback. That relationship, when you can fix it and improve it, is a huge net positive for the business and also for the success and influence that the marketing function itself has.

A trillion dollars—apparently—is wasted by sales and marketing inefficiencies. That's a suspiciously round number from the Harvard Business Review, but the principle stands. And a study from Forrester found there's a 32% improvement in year-on-year revenue growth when go-to-market functions are aligned and all these different stakeholders are pulling in the same direction.

This is a big topic. It touches a lot of different areas. It's very important for the performance of the business.

The Reality of Making the Shift

Here's what I didn't want to do: say "this is what the top 50 or 20 companies in the world or the highest growth startups are doing with go-to-market," because that's not realistic or achievable for most companies to get to that state overnight.

What we need to think about is a more balanced approach—how we can help companies move toward building stronger go-to-market functions and motions. Ways that we can challenge their thinking, get them to think differently about the way they're approaching things today instead of just doing things the same as they always have been.

This requires experimentation. Everything that's changing in SEO, in search, in social, in communities—all of that applies here. Those are all components of go-to-market strategies, and there's a lot that's changing right now and will continue to change over the coming year.

Where to Start

The gap between traditional and modern go-to-market isn't something you close overnight. It requires patience, investment, and often significant behavior change—which we know isn't easy.

But the first step is recognizing where you actually are. Most companies think they're more evolved than they actually are. They think having a CRM means they're data-driven. They think sending email campaigns means they're doing marketing automation. They think having both a marketing team and a sales team means those functions are aligned.

The reality is usually much messier. And until you're honest about that reality—about the silos, the manual processes, the activity metrics that don't correlate to business outcomes—you can't start moving toward something better.

Build a Go-to-Market Strategy That Actually Works

Traditional go-to-market approaches are failing because the market evolved and most strategies didn't. At Winsome Marketing, we help companies move from siloed, activity-based functions to unified, outcome-driven go-to-market strategies that actually drive revenue growth.

Ready to close the gap? Let's talk about where your GTM strategy actually is—and where it needs to go.