4 Red Flags in Your Current Go-to-Market Strategy (and What to Do About Them)

Even great products struggle when the go-to-market (GTM) strategy isn’t pulling its weight. If your pipeline is stalling, your campaigns feel disconnected, or your messaging isn’t landing, there might be some bigger issues under the surface.

Here are four common red flags I often see in early-stage and growth-phase companies, and what you can do to fix them.

1. Your messaging is product-first, not customer-first

The red flag: Your homepage and sales materials are loaded with features and technical details, but not enough about the actual problems you solve or why it matters.

What to do instead: Build your messaging around pain points, outcomes, and use cases. Translate features into benefits, and make sure every slide, page, or asset answers the question: “Why should I care?”

2. Marketing and sales are operating in silos

The red flag: Marketing is generating leads that sales doesn’t follow up on, or sales is reworking materials because “they don’t speak the customer’s language.”

What to do instead: Create regular feedback loops. Have marketing sit in on sales calls. Use shared tools (like Gong or Slack threads) to gather real buyer insights. Let sales guide campaign priorities, and enable them with materials that actually get used.

3. You’re chasing too many segments at once

The red flag: You’re trying to sell to enterprise, mid-market, and SMB, plus five different industries, all with the same messaging and resources.

What to do instead: Prioritize. Focus on your most responsive ICP (ideal customer profile) and build one solid motion that you can scale. Tailor your messaging, content, and outreach to one vertical or persona until it’s working, then expand.

4. You’re launching features, not solutions

The red flag: You’re announcing new features, but they don’t drive pipeline or stick in conversations with prospects.

What to do instead: Every launch should be positioned around a clear business problem. Package new capabilities into solutions or use cases that make sense to buyers, and build a GTM plan that includes enablement, storytelling, and follow-up.

Final Thoughts

If any of these sound familiar, you’re not alone, and the good news is that these aren’t hard to fix. A strong GTM strategy isn’t just about launching, it’s about listening, aligning, and communicating clearly at every step.

Need help identifying and correcting your GTM blind spots? Let’s talk!