Finding Go-To-Market Fit
Closed deals in the market where nothing was closing.
- Win rate from 1-in-12 to better than 1-in-2
- One region built from zero past $100M+
- Deal size 6x larger
The motion never caught. Or the playbook was borrowed, and it does not fit here.
There are two versions of this problem and they wear the same face.
The first is the true cold start: a new market, a new region, a new vertical, and nothing works yet because nothing exists yet. No demand engine, no playbook, a win rate you do not say out loud.
The second is sneakier: the borrowed playbook. Somebody ported a motion from another market, another company, another era, and assumed it would travel. It did not. I have inherited exactly this: a cold start wearing a warm playbook, an org assuming a headcount-heavy motion from another region would port over. It would not.
Both versions fail the same way: the company argues internally about strategy while the market already knows the answer.
- 01You launched a market, a region or a vertical and the motion never caught
- 02The playbook works somewhere else, which makes it harder to admit it does not work here
- 03Win rate in the new segment is a number leadership rounds up before saying
- 04Every pipeline review turns into a debate about ICP
- 05The plan for fixing it is the same plan that did not work, run harder
The rebuild starts by admitting nobody in the building knows the customer yet. Then we go ask. Fifty buyer conversations become the tiebreaker for every argument that follows. Not my opinion against the playbook: the buyer's voice against everything.
ICP pointed at the market you can actually service, not the raw TAM. Motion split by deal size and complexity so reps stop running one play against every buyer. Each vertical carries its own qualification and value story, because different buyers proved they need different reasons.
The test of a real motion is whether it runs without you. The goal is a playbook the next market can run without me in the room.
The honest caveat: every cold start I have run taught me something the previous one did not. The method transfers. The answers do not. Anyone selling you the answers before the interviews is selling you their last market.
The companies are on LinkedIn. Here, the work speaks without the logos.
Built one region from zero into 15 markets past $100M+, the number-one region in the country at 185%+ average attainment across three years, and the launch play became a blueprint reused for 20+ market entries.
Took an underperforming region about 5x from a cold start, win rate from roughly one in twelve to better than one in two, deal size six times larger, off 50+ buyer interviews.
The market did not go cold, the model did: found the new model in the field and relaunched the whole company around it, from monthly churn to a real annual SaaS profile.
- ×Not market research that gets filed in a drive folder.
- ×Not a strategy deck.
- ×The output is a running motion with a team on it, and a playbook written so the next market does not need me either.