7 Mistakes You’re Making with Your Go to Market Strategy (and How to Fix Them)

You’re missing target, so everyone is doing more: more campaigns, more features, more sales activity. Yet the pipeline stays thin or deals keep stalling. A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is how you decide who the business serves, why they should buy and how you reach them. When results disappoint, the strategy is often not entirely wrong; it’s too unfocused to repeat. That gap between more effort and less progress is one of the most common reasons why saas companies miss revenue targets.

The causes usually sit in three places: the wrong customer, the wrong message or the wrong motion. These seven mistakes are ways those problems show up.

1. You build the strategy around the product

The business knows its software inside out. It can explain the features, the roadmap and the use cases. But that knowledge can pull the strategy towards what the product does rather than what a buyer urgently needs to change.

When product capability becomes the starting point, targeting expands to include anyone who might use a feature. The team then struggles to explain why one type of customer should act now, and product decisions are shaped by a mix of requests from customers with very different needs.

Fix it: Start with customer evidence. Look at recent wins, losses and customers who get strong value. What was happening when they started looking? Which outcome mattered enough to justify a purchase? Build the strategy around that recurring problem, then decide which product capabilities make the business a credible choice.

2. You chase ideal customers instead of Perfect Customers

An ideal customer profile can become a description of everyone who sounds plausible: a sector, company size and job title, followed by a list of exceptions. It tells the team who could use the product, but not who has the conditions and urgency to buy it now.

A Perfect Customer is a more useful choice. The question isn’t just whether a company could benefit, but whether there’s a strong fit between the buyer, the business problem and the value you can deliver. That means being specific about the Economic Buyer, the organisation and the Visceral Pains that make the current situation hard to tolerate.

Fix it: Compare a handful of customers who bought and got value with deals that stalled or went nowhere. Look for evidence of a shared buying trigger, a clear owner and a problem that was already costing the business something. Use that evidence to make your profile narrower. Our guide on how to uncover Perfect Customers for your software can help you work through the profile.

3. Your message describes features, not the problem

Buyers rarely start a search because they want a particular feature. They start because something in the business isn’t working: a process is slow, a risk is growing or a result is harder to achieve than it should be. If your opening message is a product description, the buyer has to do the work of connecting it to their situation.

That’s a difficult job to ask of someone who’s still deciding whether the problem matters enough to address. A broad claim such as “a flexible platform for modern teams” leaves the buyer to guess who it’s for and why they should care.

Fix it: Put the buyer’s problem first. Describe the situation they recognise, its consequence and how the software changes it. Keep features in the story where they provide evidence or explain how the result is achieved; don’t make them the reason to buy. Clear positioning also matters when buyers use AI to shortlist vendors, as we explain in how B2B software buyers use AI to shortlist vendors.

4. You spread the pipeline across every possible segment

A large addressable market can make a broad pipeline feel sensible. But when the business pursues too many types of customer at once, it gets too little evidence from any one of them. Sales conversations differ, marketing messages multiply and product feedback pulls in several directions. The result is activity without enough repetition to learn what works.

Fix it: Choose a launching-customer sweet spot where the business has a credible route to value and a good reason to expect a buyer will act. Focus enough selling and marketing effort there to learn whether the message, qualification and sales process hold up repeatedly. Expand when you have evidence of repeatability, not just because another segment looks possible.

A Market Map and Face Book can help turn that focus into a practical list of target organisations and buyers.

5. Sales, marketing and product operate as separate motions

Sales says the leads are weak. Marketing says Sales isn’t following up. Product says the roadmap is full of one-off requests. Each team may be describing something real, but the blame loop makes it harder to see where the customer journey is actually breaking.

What the team calls a weekly disagreement is usually sales and marketing misalignment, with product drawn into the middle of it. A GTM motion isn’t three departments doing their own work in parallel. It’s the connected way the business identifies buyers, earns their attention, helps them make a decision and delivers the promised value. If the customer hears one story in a campaign and a different one from a salesperson, trust is harder to build. If product never hears what blocks deals, useful evidence gets lost.

Fix it: Agree on the customer, the urgent problem, what makes an opportunity qualified and what happens at each handoff. Review lost deals and customer feedback together, so marketing, sales and product are working from the same evidence rather than defending separate metrics.

6. You confuse activity with progress

A saas growth plateau rarely looks dramatic from the inside; it looks like a flat quarter that each team explains with a different reason. When growth slows, it’s tempting to add more: another campaign, another channel, another training session. But more activity doesn’t fix an unclear customer, message or sales process. It can make the underlying problem harder to spot by producing more noise and more competing explanations.

Fix it: Look for where suitable opportunities stop progressing. Check how many fit your chosen customer, what happens between stages, what objections recur and why deals are lost. Then tie each new activity to a specific uncertainty: for example, whether a sharper problem-led message creates more qualified first conversations. If you can’t say what you expect to learn, the activity may not help you make a better decision.

7. You treat symptoms instead of diagnosing the cause

A low-converting pipeline can lead to a familiar sequence: buy more leads, rewrite the deck, hire a trainer, ask Sales to work harder. Sometimes one of those changes is useful. But without understanding why buyers aren’t moving, each risks treating a symptom while the cause remains in place.

The cause may be a weak fit between the target customer and the product, a message that misses the buyer’s real concern, or a sales motion that creates friction. Those problems can overlap, and internal teams may see different parts of them. The aim isn’t to find someone to blame; it’s to identify where the system breaks down and fix it with the people doing the work.

Fix it: Trace a few recent opportunities from first contact to outcome. Compare what the buyer needed, what they heard, who was involved and where momentum changed. Use the pattern, not the loudest opinion in the room, to decide what to change. An outside diagnosis can help when the business is stuck in competing explanations, but it should lead to practical work alongside the team, not another report that sits on a shelf.

Run this test this week

Ask your leadership team and a few people close to customers to complete this sentence independently:

We sell [what] to [whom] who struggle with [which problem].

Then compare the answers. If people describe different customers, problems or reasons to buy, the business doesn’t yet have one working GTM strategy. Start with the gap. Test the answers against customer conversations and deal evidence before changing campaigns, hiring or product priorities.

A clearer go-to-market strategy doesn’t mean doing everything at once with more discipline. It means choosing the customer and problem the business can serve best, then building a repeatable way to reach and help them. A go to market strategy saas founders can hand to the team has to be narrow enough to test this quarter, not just broad enough to describe the ambition. If you want a structured way to work through those choices, try the free Selling Software Algorithm Builder.