LiquidMind | Insights

  WHY YOUR GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY IS FAILING BEFORE LAUNCH By the time most go-to-market plans fail, the failure has already happened. It just hasn't shown up in the numbers yet. The launch event, the campaign, the sales push — those are where the failure becomes visible. The actual cause sits weeks or months earlier, buried in an assumption nobody stress-tested. Here are the four that do the most damage, and they're rarely the ones teams worry about. Assumption one: "We know who this is for" Most teams can describe a target market. Far fewer can describe a target buyer with enough precision to write their internal monologue on a Tuesday when the problem you solve becomes urgent. "Mid-market operations leaders" is a market. "The ops director who just got blamed in a leadership meeting for a process failure nobody flagged in advance" is a buyer. The gap between those two levels of specificity is where GTM plans quietly fail. A broad market defin...

Author: Bryan Smeltzer Most go-to-market plans fail in the first 90 days, and not for the reason people assume. It's rarely a bad product or a weak message. It's sequencing — teams trying to do everything from week one instead of building in the order that actually compounds. Here's the framework I use with clients launching into a new market, category, or segment. Days 1–30: Get the foundation unmistakably clear The first 30 days are not for campaigns. They're for certainty. Before a single ad runs or a single sales deck goes out, three things need to be locked: Who exactly you're for. Not a broad market — the specific buyer who has the problem acutely enough to act now. If your team can't agree on this in one sentence, nothing built downstream will hold together. What you're the only credible option for. Positioning isn't a tagline exercise. It's identifying the one claim your competitors can't make as convincingly as you can, and buildin...