GTM Made Simple

I've taken two companies from zero to $10 million: Terminus, which raised over $100 million and exited to private equity for nine figures, and GTM Partners, a bootstrapped services business I'm running now. Same founder, completely different playbooks. In this video I share ten lessons from doing it twice, and the honest version of what building a business actually costs.

Some of it is counterintuitive: raising $100 million didn't put money in my pocket, but the bootstrapped company did. Most founders should never try to build a category. The better model in 2026 might be "service as a software," not software...

I haven't made a video about ABM in five years. New research shows 78% of ABM programs are still failing after a decade of tools, conferences, and billions in software spend. So I'm back.

I co-founded Terminus, helped build the entire ABM category, wrote the book, started the FlipMyFunnel movement, and then walked away because I thought the category had grown up. I was wrong. 

In this video I break down the real state of ABM in 2026 (widespread adoption, widespread failure), the five mega shifts that separate the 22% who are crushing it from everyone else, and s...

Here's the test that keeps CEOs up at night: put your website next to your competitor's, take both logos off, and see if anyone could tell the difference. If they can't, you don't have a differentiated point of view, and no amount of "faster, better, cheaper" will fix it.

This is question three of the go-to-market operating system, and it's the one most leaders think they've answered when they haven't. A real point of view is what let Salesforce build Dreamforce, HubSpot build Inbound, and Terminus create the ABM category. It's also why someone will pay far...

In this video, I break down 7 mindset shifts that elevate a 250K fractional consultant into a 500K fractional leader. Valuable processes like how you find clients, how you price, and how you think about your own positioning are factors you have to consider before putting in the work. It’s about translating your innate grit into operating at a higher level.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
 (00:00) Fractional Leaders and the difference between a 250K and 500K one
 (01:43) Being 250K is being reactive. Being 500K is being intentional.
 (03:26) Selling capacity vs. selling outcomes
 (04:31) Obsessing over your time vs. obsessin...

I stopped a CEO roundtable to share this data point: Gartner lost 70% of its value in two years, roughly $30 billion gone. It's tempting to laugh at that. Don't. The same force that gutted Gartner is coming for anyone whose value comes from packaging yesterday's insight, and that's a much bigger group than you think.

The uncomfortable question underneath the headline: if AI can do what you do in seconds, often for free, what's your actual moat? Product, features, and pedigree aren't it anymore. What survives is brand, community, and doing something genuinely different for a specific niche...

Someone in a recent CEO roundtable asked me what made me the entrepreneur I am today, after building multiple hundred million dollar businesses. The honest answer isn't a strategy. It's a conversation I had with my wife.

I was 35, we'd just had our second kid, my wife wasn't working, and I wanted to leave a stable path to become a co-founder at a company that could pay me close to nothing. In this video I share what she said that changed everything: she gave me one year to prove it had legs, or I'd go get a...

Every B2B founder is one product update away from becoming a feature of ChatGPT or Claude. The biggest threat to your retention isn't your competitor anymore. It's a $20 a month tool that does 80% of what your product does, with none of the friction. In this video I break down what a CEO said in one of my roundtables that stopped the whole room: customers are quietly canceling, not because they found something better, but because they found something good enough.

We've all built retention playbooks against competitors, battle cards, onboarding flows, customer success teams. But AI...

Most CEOs can't answer one question that decides everything: which products create the highest customer value? Not revenue, not cash flow, not hiring. This one. In this video I break down exactly how to answer it, using what I learned going from a $10 million company to a $10 billion one.

I ran marketing at Pardot when we got acquired by ExactTarget, then by Salesforce for over $2.7 billion. I watched Salesforce take the exact product we sold for a thousand dollars a month and sell it for fifty to a hundred thousand a year, because they understood customer value...

Most go-to-market plans fail, and it's not a marketing or sales problem. It's that CEOs treat go-to-market as an annual event instead of an ongoing process. In this video I walk through the exact process we take 3,000 companies through to run on GTM OS, live, step by step.

I break down the five valleys of death, how to find which stage you're actually in (problem, product, or platform market fit), the 15 go-to-market problems every company pulls from, the alignment assessment that surfaces where your team disagrees, and how to map your whole go-to-market onto one slide so...

Figma, Circle, eToro, and a wave of other 2026 IPOs are all down double digits from their peaks, averaging around 44%. They had the growth. They had the hype. What they didn't have was profitable revenue, and the market punished them for it. In this video I break down the most important go to market lesson of 2026 and the mistake most companies are about to make.

I walk through the difference between IPO growth and compounding growth, why net revenue retention and CAC payback decide whether your business survives, and the three numbers every leader on your team should...

My son's tennis old coach stopped everyone mid-drill and asked one question that applies to every founder, CEO, and leader I know, "Are you here to win?" 

In this video I break down what happened next, how the entire group raised their level in 15 minutes, and why it changed how I think about every sales call, campaign, and experiment we run.

The lesson isn't about tennis. It's about the standard you hold yourself to when the stakes feel low, because that's the standard you'll actually have when it's game time.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) A les...

Every AI company right now is stuck in problem market fit, and most CEOs have no idea. They think revenue means product market fit. It doesn't. In this video I break down the difference between the three stages every company moves through: problem market fit, product market fit, and platform market fit, using what we've learned assessing over 2,000 companies since the MOVE book.

I'll walk through the moment I told a friend his $25 million business was worth less than a competitor doing $5 million, why there's zero loyalty in AI right now, and what it actually takes to...

There are 8 questions every company needs clarity on to build a real go-to-market operating system, and most businesses never sit down to answer the first one. In this video I walk through how one question took our business from $0 to $1 million in revenue in 9 months, with no marketing team and no sales team.

I break down the exact process: how we turned advisory work into three revenue streams, how three people each built half a million dollar businesses using the same process, and why "where can you grow" is the wrong question compared to "where can you...

If you can't say what you do in one sentence, that's why your fractional pipeline is dry. Most fractional CMOs and CEOs describe themselves like an HR job title, and the market doesn't pay for job titles. It pays for outcomes for a specific kind of company.

In this video I break down the three positioning angles that separate fractionals who are fully booked from ones still chasing DMs: industry, stage of business, and who you actually serve. 

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Why nobody's hiring you right now
(01:00) Why I never called my own business "fractional"
...

Everyone's blaming AI for the wave of layoffs hitting tech right now, but the AI layoffs data tells a different story. I dug into PwC's research on over 1 billion job postings and found something that changed my mind too.

In this episode I break down the two tracks the job market is splitting into: roles where AI amplifies human judgment (seeing 2x job growth and 42% faster pay), and roles getting commoditized into scripts and playbooks. I also share what I'm hearing inside my weekly CEO roundtables, including one leader who's hiring aggressively from competitors while everyone else...

I get asked all the time how to grow a business, and my honest answer is: I've never done it alone. From Pardot's exit to Salesforce, to building Terminus, to GTM Partners today, every real jump in growth happened because I found a partner who complemented what I wasn't great at.

In this video I walk through three different business partnerships (and one family story) that all prove the same point. If you're trying to do everything yourself, marketing, sales, product, ops, it's not impossible, but it will take you years to get what a real partnership...

Your product is no longer your moat. AI is making product parity faster, cheaper, and more universal than any point in the last 20 years. Whatever your engineers built, someone can replicate it. 

The real moat, the one that actually protected Salesforce and the one we built at Terminus, was never the product. In this video I break down the three things that replace product as your competitive advantage: category, community, and system. If you can't name your moat in those terms, you don't have one.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Why product stopped being a moat
(00:34) What AI...

I took two companies from $0 to $1 million in revenue in just 9 months. Once with Terminus in 2014 and again with GTM Partners in 2021. One was funded, one wasn't. One was an up market, one wasn't. 

The 8 questions I'm sharing here are the reason both worked.

These 8 questions are what I ran every major decision through at both companies, and they're what I walk hundreds of CEOs through inside GTM OS today. The answers will be different for your business. The questions are the same.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) The $0 to $1M story and why it happened twi...

Most go-to-market plans fail, and it's not a marketing or sales problem. It's that CEOs treat go-to-market as an annual event instead of an ongoing process. In this video I walk through the exact process we take 3,000 companies through to run on GTM OS, live, step by step.

I break down the five valleys of death, how to find which stage you're actually in (problem, product, or platform market fit), the 15 go-to-market problems every company pulls from, the alignment assessment that surfaces where your team disagrees, and how to map your whole go-to-market onto one slide so...

Profitable revenue and momentum revenue are not the same number, and confusing the two is what kills businesses that look healthy on paper.

In this video, I break down the OpenAI growth trap, why 99% of companies can't afford to run their GTM the way the top 0.01% does, and the four questions every CEO needs to answer to know if their revenue is actually building something or just burning cash faster.

(00:00) The OpenAI number that should scare every CEO
(00:49) What I keep hearing in CEO roundtables
(01:25) Growth without great unit economics is just expensive...

Most companies don't fail because of bad products or bad marketing. They fail because they're stuck in the muddy middle and don't know it.

In this episode, I walk through the three business zones every CEO needs to understand: the winning zone, the competitive zone, and the instability zone. I show you what separates companies that can charge whatever they want from the ones getting eaten alive by cheaper competitors, and how to figure out exactly which zone your business is in right now.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Why most companies fail: not knowing their zone
(00:33) Th...

The companies using AI just to cut costs will be gone in a few years.

I break down what the companies actually winning with AI have in common, why growth is not optional right now, and why James Clear's systems principle from Atomic Habits explains every company you've watched fall apart in the last two years.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Three GTM headlines nobody is connecting
(00:14) News 1: 2X raises $400M to build a GTM operating system
(00:45) News 2: Rackspace cuts 750 people to pivot to AI
(01:02) News 3: HBR — 83% say GTM is critical, only 38% can execute
(01:30) The...

Clay generated 6 million LinkedIn impressions in three months without running a single ad. Here's what they actually did and why it works.

Most B2B companies spend 70 to 80% of their GTM budget chasing demand. Clay flipped that. I've seen this playbook before. I ran it at Terminus ten years ago when we built the ABM category from zero, and watching Clay do it now with the GTM engineer role is the same pattern at a different moment in time. In this episode I break down the two moves that drove Clay's results, how they connect to Pillar 3...

You don't have a marketing problem. You don't have a sales problem. You have a go-to-market problem and most CEOs never see it coming.

In this episode I break down what go-to-market actually means (most definitions are wrong), why the CEO is the only person who can own it, and the 8-question GTM Operating System I've used across Pardot, Terminus, and GTM Partners to help hundreds of companies get unstuck. If you're hiring to fix symptoms, this will change how you think about your business.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) The problem most CEOs misdiagnose
(01:45) Why hiring mo...

Context switching kills focus, but it doesn't have to. In this video, I share the exact system I use to stay mentally prepared for every meeting on my calendar before it ever starts.

The strategy is simple: rate every meeting green, yellow, or red. When a hard meeting is sitting on your calendar days out, you're already thinking about it, solving for it, and walking in prepared. No more reactive back-to-back meetings with zero thinking in between. If you want to show up as a better leader, CEO, and person in every room you walk into, this...

Most sales teams treat a $10K deal and a $300K deal exactly the same way. That's why they keep losing the big ones.

In this video, I break down how the entire GTM strategy has to change based on deal size, why trust is the only currency that matters at $300K, and how an executive roundtable closes deals that a webinar never will.

(00:00) Why most teams sell every deal size the same way
(00:18) How to close a $10K deal on content alone
(00:30) The $50K relationship rule: don't sell until they follow you back<...

Starting today, this show is Go-To-Market Made Simple. New episodes drop every weekday, pulling from CEO roundtables, founder hackathons, closed-room conversations, and the research 100,000+ people already read at runongtmos.com. The premise is simple: product isn't the moat anymore, anyone can copy it. Your go-to-market is what's actually yours.

Welcome back if you were here for FlipMyFunnel or MOVE. Same feed, same mission, simpler than ever. Subscribe and share it with someone building something that deserves to be seen.

Let's get moving.

Learn more at runongtmos.com/move.

Go-to-market shouldn't be this complicated. But most businesses make it that way, and it's why most marketing campaigns fail, most launches flop, and most companies never land on a go-to-market motion that actually works.

I'm Sangram Vajre. I've built two $200M+ companies, written three books on go-to-market, and designed a GTM operating system that over 3,000 companies operate on today. If I've learned anything, it's this: go-to-market is the business. Keep it simple, and it scales.

This is Go-To-Market Made Simple. Every episode, you're getting a backstage pass to three things I work on...

Most marketers, if you asked for the number one thing you’d really want to understand in their field, will probably roll their eyes, look at you like you’re stupid and say something like: “Your buyer persona,” or even, “The market, duh.” 

And most marketers would be wrong… 

What you need to understand more than anything else is your product.

In this Takeover episode, host Amber Khan speaks with Dirk Schart, Chief Marketing Officer & President at RE’FLEKT, who is championing product-first marketing—an approach that cre...

With so many CMOs becoming the CEOs of their respective companies, it’s time to ask the question for those CMOs looking to follow the same steps: What are the actionable steps to get there?

In this replay episode, we speak with Jeff Perkins, CEO at ParkMobile, about his journey from CMO to CEO and his big lessons that every marketer should know to become CEO.

What we discussed:

Who owns go-to-market has been our big question so far, but how about what makes up a solid go-to-market strategy?

In this episode, Sangram sits down with Muhammad Yasin, marketing expert and host of the Agile Marketing Podcast, to dive into all the aspects of a successful GTM strategy. Muhammad discusses how marketing isn’t the only contributor to GTM strategy, each department is a building block that contributes to overall success.

This is a #MOVE podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here. Check out themovebook.com and you will find all th...

Ask a group of go to market leaders who owns go to market, and most will say the CEO. But this leader? He confidently says otherwise.

In this episode, Sangram sits down with Kyle Lacy, SVP of Marketing at Seismic (formerly CMO of Lessonly, which was acquired by Seismic) to dive into his answer to the big GTM question. Kyle confidently says that marketing owns go to market, and he’s sharing his reasoning–from his passionate standard for BDRs reporting up through marketing, to the power of brand on an entire customer lifecycle.

Why in the world would I have someone on my podcast who hates my book?! Well, it’s because he isn’t wrong in his reasoning!

Christopher Lochhead–author, entrepreneur, advisor, and VC partner–absolutely loves category creation, and he’s got dozens of stories to prove exactly why he’s such a champion of it. He’s sharing these stories (and his very hot takes on the MOVE framework) with us on this episode.

This is a #MOVE podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here. Check out themovebook.com and you will find all...

Where can we grow the most? It's the first question most GTM leaders ask themselves...but hold up! There's a reason this one comes last...

In this week's Author's Cut episode, Bryan and Sangram dive into the last (but not least) letter of the MOVE framework: the "E" for Expansion. Listen in to learn how to know when it's time to expand, where you should expand your business, and how you can measure KPIs that matter.

This is a #MOVE podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or...

There are important processes that every go-to-market leader should have in place to know they’re on the right track.

Do you know what they are?

In this episode, co-authors Sangram and Bryan are breaking down the “V” in the “MOVE” framework–velocity–and how organization can use the enablement ramping to scale their business effectively, no matter what stage they’re in.

This is a #MOVE podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here. Check out themovebook.com and you will find all the tem...

Every company wants to scale well. How can they guarantee that they’ll do it right?

The answer: revenue operations.

In this episode, Sangram and Bryan dive into the “O” of the MOVE framework–operations. They talk about exactly what your operations team, tactics, and strategy should look like at every stage of your business. Consider this episode your RevOps 101 course.

This is a #MOVE podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here. Check out themovebook.com and you will find all the templates and scorecards to download for free and even an...

TAM is out - TRM is in.

In this episode of Author’s Cut, co-authors of the MOVE book Bryan Brown and Sangram Vajre talk about the “M” in the MOVE framework - Market. Bryan and Sangram explain why they think “Total Addressable Market” may not be the best baseline for your marketing strategy...it’s actually “Total Relevant Market”. Here’s how you find your TRM, segments, and cohorts–and use them to determine who you should market to. Next week, they talk about the "O" -

This is a #MOVE podcast...

When you’re building a company around your product, there are a few crucial mistakes you need to avoid. The perfect person to walk us through the playbook for product-led growth is my friend Scott Voigt, Founder & CEO at FullStory.

In this episode, he shares the story behind FullStory, why he chose to grow his company alongside his product, and how to apply his learnings to your own go-to-market strategy–no matter what stage you’re at.

This is a #MOVE podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or her...

Sales and marketing: it’s time to make some room.

Say hello to customer success–the new roommate in the go-to-market space. Every GTM strategy must include not only sales and marketing, but customer success, too! And I’ve brought in two great friends and brilliant GTM leaders to talk about this new roommate.

Kelly Ford Buckley, General Partner & Fintech Investor at Edison Partners, and Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert, join me on this episode–you’re not going to want to miss it. Let’s go!

With what is happening all over the world, we have a throwback today with Alicia Esposito, Director, Content + New Media @ G3 Communications, talking with Cole Baker-Bagwell, Founder & Chief Kindness Advisor at Cool Audrey, Inc, about her experience working in an environment that prioritizes kindness and mindfulness and all the benefits that come from it. 

Cole covers:

Check out this additional resource mentioned in the episode:

An...