Go-to-market strategies rarely fail because teams lack effort, talent, or execution discipline. Most GTM failures begin much earlier and much quieter—when companies move forward with confidence before they’ve earned clarity.

Launches happen on time. Pipelines get built. Campaigns generate activity. From the inside, everything feels like progress. But results tell a different story. Win rates fluctuate. Deal cycles stretch. Messaging struggles to resonate. Teams start debating tactics instead of direction.

This GTM story explores a recurring pattern across growing organizations: GTM doesn’t break in the market first. It breaks upstream—when teams skip the work of becoming truly ready for the market they’re entering.

The Situation: When Confidence Replaces Readiness

Inside most companies, confidence is abundant. Founders believe deeply in the product. Product teams are close to early users. Sales teams hear objections daily. Marketing teams track engagement and pipeline metrics. The issue isn’t a lack of conviction; it’s overconfidence in partial views of reality.

As GTM and market research consultant Ryan Paul Gibson puts it, “By the time companies realize GTM isn’t working, the real mistake happened months earlier.” That mistake is assuming that belief, proximity, or early traction equals market understanding. Teams move forward because they feel ready—not because they’ve validated how buyers actually define the problem, prioritize it, or decide to act. When those questions go unanswered, GTM execution becomes polished, well-funded guesswork.

GTM Problems Are Lagging Indicators

One of the most dangerous aspects of skipping market readiness is how long it takes for failure to show up. Teams can launch without readiness, generate leads, and even close early deals. The damage appears gradually through inconsistent pipelines, wrong-fit customers, stalled deals, and content that never quite lands.

Ryan explains that teams often misdiagnose these signals. When win rates are low or the wrong people enter the pipeline, teams jump straight to fixing execution without asking whether they actually understand the market. By the time leadership senses something is off, conversations have already shifted to optimization instead of fundamentals.

Market Readiness Is About Where Not to Play

Market readiness isn’t about proving that your idea is good. It’s about discovering where it doesn’t matter. Ryan shared a GTM engagement where a company confidently pushed into a new segment they believed was a perfect fit. Sales struggled to create urgency. Marketing couldn’t generate interest. Messaging fell flat.

The issue wasn’t awareness—it was relevance. Most of the buyers being targeted didn’t even see the problem as worth solving. In practice, developers deprioritized the issue entirely, while a different persona—IT leaders—saw it as mission-critical. The company hadn’t done the work to understand who truly owned the problem. This is what skipping market readiness looks like: teams optimizing for a buyer that doesn’t exist.

Buyers Don’t Move in Straight Lines — GTM Shouldn’t Assume They Do

Another common GTM failure comes from assuming buying journeys are linear. They aren’t. As Ryan puts it, “Buying decisions aren’t linear. They zigzag, stall, restart, and change direction.”

Months or even years of internal discussions, workarounds, and failed attempts often happen before buyers engage vendors. GTM teams usually see only the final chapter and then reverse-engineer a story that fits their CRM stages. Market readiness forces teams to understand what happens before high intent, so they don’t optimize for the wrong moment in time.

Why Sales, Product, and Marketing Talk Past Each Other

Misalignment across GTM teams is often blamed on communication or incentives. In reality, it’s usually a data problem. Each function sees a different slice of the buyer journey. Product teams see committed users. Sales teams see active evaluators. Marketing teams influence buyers they can’t directly observe.

As Ryan explains, everyone assumes the slice of reality they see is the full picture, when it’s only one part of the puzzle. When teams align around opinions instead of evidence, decisions become political. Confidence replaces curiosity, and GTM strategy turns into internal consensus rather than external truth.

The GTM Lesson: Readiness Is a Discipline, Not a Phase

Market readiness isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t ship features or launch campaigns. It forces teams to confront uncomfortable truths about who cares, who doesn’t, and why. But it’s the difference between momentum and motion.

As Ryan puts it, “You can’t align teams around opinions. You can only align them around objective market truth.” GTM doesn’t fail because teams lack talent or effort. It fails because confidence is mistaken for understanding, and no amount of execution can compensate for skipping the work of knowing your market first.

Final Thought

Every GTM strategy eventually reaches a point where execution alone stops delivering results. The teams that break through are the ones willing to slow down early, challenge their assumptions, and build strategy around real buyer truth.

Market readiness isn’t a checkbox. It’s the foundation.

More GTM Stories coming soon.