Best of LinkedIn: Go-to-Market CW 32/ 33

Across this edition, the strongest thread is that go to market keeps getting treated as a function or a launch event when the posts that hold up are the ones treating it as a system. The failures cluster in the same three places every time: an ICP that was written down once and never checked, teams that built their own playbooks in isolation, and AI applied to a process that was never audited in the first place. The fixes that worked, from a peanut butter brand in Lagos to a fintech onboarding product at TransUnion, all came from someone stopping to name the actual constraint before adding more activity.

Date

August 20, 2026

Go-to-Market

Thomas Allgeyer

Methodology: Every two weeks we collect most relevant posts on LinkedIn for selected topics and create an overall summary only based on these posts. If you´re interested in the single posts behind, you can find them here: https://linktr.ee/thomasallgeyer. Have a great read!

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If you prefer listening, check out our podcast summarizing the most relevant insights from Go-to-Market CW 32/ 33:

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What Go to Market Actually Covers

Peter Floer: GTM spans Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and Partnerships as one system, not Sales alone
brendan short: GTM is an umbrella term across sales, SDR, marketing, product and pricing, not a rebrand of sales
amit deshpande: GTM is the commercial operating system that turns a validated offer into predictable revenue
Charmon Stiles: GTM is business wide alignment around the customer, not just launch execution
Klaus Warkentin: a product launch is a date, a go to market is a process across product, brand and the commercial network
Vladimir Malik: GTM readiness spans eight dimensions, from market evidence to channels, enablement and measurement

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ICP and Targeting Discipline

Nicki Doggart: five tests, from value and market opportunity to repeatability, decide which focus area deserves the bet
Christine Castro: B2B buying committees average 6 to 13 stakeholders, yet most ICPs are built around one or two
Douwe Wester: scoring 24 customers on fit found nine worth more than the other fifteen combined
Koen Stam: a last checked date on ICP assumptions exposes drift nobody has touched since Q1
Anastassia Olenick: YETI, Liquid Death and Lovable all gave up a segment, real segmentation is a refusal that costs something
Remy Piazza: a 10 billion dollar TAM disciplined down is often 5,000 companies and a 300 million dollar relevant market
Hila Lauterbach: product market fit and go to market fit diverge most visibly around the 2 to 5 million dollar ARR stage

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Cross Functional Alignment and GTM Debt

Justin Gerrard: clear ownership and a month of pre launch alignment lifted revenue 45 percent on flat spend
Carolyn Dilks: an account progression framework proves marketing impact without a perfect attribution model
Cody LaHoste: independent answers to "who is our target customer" exposed sharp misalignment before any strategy work
Sangram Vajre: a 19 million dollar company stayed stuck because sales, marketing and CS never agreed on their best customer, GTM debt
Dr. Rania K.: a strategy is only implemented once the old scoring, CRM and forecast rules stop running the old version
Jörn Petereit: naming an owner and a response SLA on top accounts beat spending a euro on new campaign budget
Deepinder Singh Dhingra: GTM systems measure individual activity while a deal is really a buying group reaching agreement

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Sequencing Growth: Hiring, Motion Choice and Expansion Timing

David Turewicz: hire a GTM Engineer to build the system before an SDR, then a second GTM Engineer for RevOps
Daryna Radiichuk: across 450 software companies, 51 percent hired sales first and 31 percent hired marketing first
Adam Lee: K12 territory planning needs TAM quality, buying propensity and procurement difficulty, not just student counts
Yury Larichev: median B2B SaaS CAC payback hit 16 months in 2026, with PLG at 8 months against sales led at 19
Patrick Honcoop: AgTech companies that design distribution alongside the product beat those that bolt it on after launch
Alon Even: expanding into a new market before the current motion is repeatable means running two broken motions at once
Jack Daly: the average startup VP of Sales lasts 18 months, and repeat replacements usually mask an ICP problem

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Regional and Vertical Go to Market Realities

Kay Dosu: Village Goods' premium peanut butter failed in Nigeria on climate shelf life and a misread on purchasing power
Teddra Thomas Burgess: federal deals are typically decided 12 to 18 months before a solicitation ever posts
Wachirawuth Rattiwarakorn: APJ spans roughly 48 countries, so quota and pricing plans imported from San Francisco tend to fail
Maísa D.: translating a sales cadence into Portuguese or Spanish is not LATAM localization
Giora Gil-Ad: roughly 9 percent of the 2022 Israeli cohort reached Series B in two years, down from 25 percent in 2018

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Metrics, Funnel Discipline and Revenue Engineering

Maja Voje: underpricing is one of six recurring GTM mistakes, since unpaid usage is not product market fit
Bill Stathopoulos: a TAM Mapping Playbook with a 7 part ICP matrix took SalesCaptain to 3 million dollars ARR
Jani Vrancsik: Growth Today reached 1.5 million dollars in revenue with no paid ads and 85 percent inbound led deals
Rob Young: pouring more leads into a leaky funnel just makes the leaks more expensive
Louis Fernandes and Reggie James: 95 percent of eventual deal winners are already on the buyer's Day One shortlist
Kyle Poyar: across 230 software companies, founder led pricing typically breaks after roughly 5 million dollars ARR
Anis Bennaceur: build versus buy objections rose from 2 percent to nearly 8 percent of deals in a year

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AI, Agents and GTM Engineering

Michael Saruggia: mapping the TAM with Clay and Claude doubled qualified conversations per rep without new headcount
Alex Vacca: the 2026 average cold email reply rate sits at 3.43 percent, against 13 percent for signal triggered sends
Praveen Shahi: automating GTM without auditing ICP and data accuracy just scales the existing problem faster
Matteo Fois: generic signals like funding rounds are noise now, a Series B draws roughly 40 congrats emails in a morning
Jonathan M K.: Gartner expects 40 percent of agentic AI projects cancelled by 2027, and only 2 percent of AI SDRs survive year one
Ramzi Musa: 75 percent of US B2B tech buyers now finish their purchase journey in under 12 weeks, against 11 months in 2024
Andrew Riesenfeld: 1 in 13 companies with hiring surges are now staffing for GenAI skills, up from 1 in 17 six months ago

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Thanks to Peter Floer, brendan short, amit deshpande, Charmon Stiles, Klaus Warkentin, Vladimir Malik, Nicki Doggart, Christine Castro, Douwe Wester, Koen Stam, Anastassia Olenick, Remy Piazza, Hila Lauterbach, Justin Gerrard, Carolyn Dilks, Cody LaHoste, Sangram Vajre, Dr. Rania K., Jörn Petereit, Deepinder Singh Dhingra, David Turewicz, Daryna Radiichuk, Adam Lee, Yury Larichev, Patrick Honcoop, Alon Even, Jack Daly, Kay Dosu, Teddra Thomas Burgess, Wachirawuth Rattiwarakorn, Maísa D., Giora Gil-Ad, Maja Voje, Bill Stathopoulos, Jani Vrancsik, Rob Young, Louis Fernandes, Reggie James, Kyle Poyar, Anis Bennaceur, Michael Saruggia, Alex Vacca, Praveen Shahi, Matteo Fois, Jonathan M K., Ramzi Musa and Andrew Riesenfeld for contributing insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: