Learnings from 35 of the Worlds Best GTM Leaders

What GTM Leaders Taught Me About Building Businesses That Scale Successfully

Over the past two years on the Growth Unlocked Podcast, I've sat down with 35 of the brightest founders, CROs, RevOps leaders, and GTM strategists who've collectively built billions in enterprise value.

These weren't polite LinkedIn conversations. They were raw, unfiltered dissections of what works when you're trying to scale a B2B company.

I went into this thinking I'd collect tactics. What I found instead were patterns, recurring mistakes, shared inflection points, and a handful of non-negotiable truths that separate companies that scale profitably from those that burn through runway chasing vanity metrics.

This is the playbook every founder should have. Every insight here cost someone money, time, or sanity to learn. I'm just writing it down.

The Death of "Growth at All Costs"

The 2010s playbook is dead.

You know the one: raise capital, hire reps, throw money at ads, scale before you're ready, figure it out later. That worked when capital was free and investors cared more about growth rate than unit economics.

Not anymore.

Every guest who scaled successfully in the past said some version of the same thing: you cannot scale what doesn't work at a small scale. Pouring fuel on a fire that isn't burning just creates expensive smoke.

The shift isn't subtle. It's an inversion of priorities:

Before: Grow revenue at any cost → hire sales reps → build marketing machine → hope for efficiency later

Now: Prove unit economics → achieve product-market fit → validate go-to-market fit → scale what works

The maths is brutally simple. If your CAC is $15,000 and your average customer lifetime value is $18,000, hiring ten more sales reps won't save you. It'll just burn cash faster. You need to fix the foundation first, improve conversion rates, reduce churn, increase expansion revenue, before you pour more into the top of the funnel.

One CRO put it this way:

"I've watched three companies hire 20 sales reps before they had a repeatable sales process. All three ran out of money within 18 months. The ones that survived? They hired rep number two only after rep number one was hitting quota consistently for six months."

What to Do Instead

Run the readiness audit. Before you hire another rep or increase ad spend, answer these questions honestly:

1. Do we have product-market fit? Can we prove customers see value quickly and stay?
2. Do we have go-to-market fit? Can we acquire customers profitably with a repeatable process?
3. What's our actual revenue retention rate? Not the number we tell investors—the real one.
4. If we stopped all new sales tomorrow, would we lose 10% of revenue or 40%?

If you can't answer these with confidence and data, you're not ready to scale. You're ready to fix what's broken.

Kill the vanity metrics. Pipeline size means nothing if conversion rates are 2%. MQLs mean nothing if they don't turn into revenue. Likes and shares mean nothing if they don't drive business outcomes.

Start reporting what actually matters:

• Revenue retention (net and gross)
• Customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value
• Time to value (how long before customers see ROI)
• Win rate by deal size and ICP segment
• Average deal size and sales cycle length

These numbers tell you if your business model works. Everything else is noise.

Prioritise retention over acquisition. This one came up in nearly every conversation. If you're losing 15% of your revenue base annually, you need to replace that 15% just to stay flat. Every dollar you spend on acquisition is fighting against a leaking bucket.

The Bow Tie model makes this obvious: start your revenue planning by calculating churn, then figure out how much you need to sell just to break even, then layer growth on top. Most companies do this backwards—they set a growth target and ignore the fact that their existing customer base is eroding.

One RevOps leader told me:

"We cut our sales team by 30% and shifted resources to customer success. Revenue grew 40% that year because we stopped churning high-value customers. Turns out keeping a customer is easier than finding a new one."

GTM Alignment Is Essential

Here's what I learned: you don't have a sales problem or a marketing problem. You have a go-to-market problem.

The traditional model of Marketing generates leads, Sales closes deals, Customer Success retains them, creates three teams optimising for their own metrics while the customer experience falls through the cracks. Marketing celebrates MQLs that Sales ignores. Sales celebrates bookings that churn in 90 days. Customer Success inherits mess after mess and gets blamed for retention issues they didn't create.

This isn't a people problem. It's a structural problem.

The companies that scale efficiently have torn down these silos entirely. They've created a unified GTM function where everyone—Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, reports to the same goals, uses the same data, and is compensated on the same outcomes.

CEO's Must Own GTM

This came through loud and clear: GTM strategy cannot be delegated.

A CRO can execute the sales plan. A CMO can execute the marketing plan. But decisions about market positioning, ideal customer profile, budget allocation, product-market fit, pricing strategy, and competitive differentiation? Those are CEO decisions.

One founder who scaled from $5M to $50M told me:

"The moment I stopped treating GTM as someone else's problem and started owning it at the executive level, everything changed. We cut three markets we were losing money in, doubled down on one ICP, and revenue grew 3x in 18 months."

If you're a CEO and you can't articulate your GTM strategy in two minutes, you don't have one. And if you don't have one, your team is guessing.

Create a Single Source of Truth

Every company I spoke to that scaled past $20M had implemented some version of a Go-To-Market Office or RevOps function that sits above Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success.

This isn't just operations. It's strategic infrastructure.

The GTM Office owns:

• Unified data and reporting (no more "my numbers vs your numbers" debates)
• Cross-functional process design (how does a lead move from awareness to retention?)
• Strategic planning and forecasting (what markets should we enter? What deals should we chase?)
• Technology architecture (what tools do we need and how do they connect?)

When done right, RevOps becomes the truth-teller in the room. Marketing can't inflate MQL numbers. Sales can't sandbag pipeline. Customer Success can't hide churn. Everyone operates from the same data, which means everyone can finally align on what actually needs to be fixed.

One CRO said it perfectly: "Before we built RevOps, every leadership meeting was a blame game. Marketing said Sales wasn't following up. Sales said Marketing was sending garbage leads. Customer Success said both of them were overpromising. Now we look at the data together and solve the problem."

Align Compensation to Customer Outcomes

If your sales reps get paid when the deal closes and have no accountability for whether the customer stays, you've built a churn machine.

The most mature GTM organisations are shifting compensation models so that:

• Sales reps have quota tied to retention milestones (e.g., customer must stay 12 months)
• Marketing is measured on pipeline that converts to closed-won revenue, not just lead volume
• Customer Success has variable comp tied to expansion and upsell, not just renewals

This forces everyone to care about the same thing: customer success. Because if the customer doesn't succeed, no one gets paid.

One VP of Sales told me they restructured comp so reps got 70% commission at close and 30% at the 12-month renewal mark. Churn dropped by 40% in six months because reps started qualifying deals properly and setting realistic expectations during the sales process.

AI Won't Replace Humans, It'll Make Them More Human

Every conversation about AI eventually landed in the same place: AI is not here to replace salespeople, marketers, or customer success teams. It's here to remove the bullshit so they can focus on what humans do best—build trust, solve problems, and create relationships.

The phrase that stuck with me: "Humanise the exceptional, automate the repeatable."

AI should handle research, data entry, call summaries, account planning, lead scoring, the "work before the work" that eats up 60% of a rep's day. What AI can't do (at least not yet) is read the room, navigate complex political dynamics, or build genuine trust with a buyer who's making a bet-the-company decision.

In a world where every company has access to the same AI tools, the differentiator isn't who has better automation. It's who builds deeper human connection.

Automate the Repeatable

One sales leader shared this framework: map out every activity your team does in a week. Categorise each task as either:

• Repeatable (same process every time, rules-based, data-driven)
• Exceptional (requires judgment, creativity, relationship-building)

Automate everything in the first column. Protect time for everything in the second column.

For most teams, that means:

• AI handles account research, pulling firmographics, technographics, and recent news
• AI drafts personalised outreach based on research (but humans edit and approve)
• AI logs call notes and updates CRM fields automatically
• AI scores leads based on engagement and fit
• AI generates weekly pipeline reports and flags at-risk deals

This frees up reps to spend 100% of their energy on conversations, relationship-building, and strategic thinking. The result? Higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and reps who don't burn out doing admin work.

Leverage Unstructured Data

Here's where AI gets really powerful: analysing unstructured data at scale.

Most companies sit on thousands of hours of sales calls, customer interviews, support tickets, and chat transcripts. That data is gold—it tells you exactly what customers care about, what objections come up most often, what language resonates, and why deals are won or lost.

But nobody has time to manually review 500 call recordings to identify patterns.

AI does.

One RevOps leader told me they used AI to analyse 12 months of sales calls and discovered that deals where the rep mentioned a specific competitor in the first call were 3x more likely to close. They updated the sales script, trained the team, and win rates jumped 15%.

Another company used AI to analyse support tickets and found that 40% of churn was driven by a single onboarding issue that wasn't even on the product roadmap. They fixed it in two weeks and retention improved immediately.

The companies winning with AI aren't using it to write LinkedIn posts. They're using it to extract insight from data they already have but never had time to analyse.

Don't Fake Authenticity

The biggest AI mistake I see: using AI to generate content that pretends to be you without editing it.

People can smell inauthenticity instantly. If you use ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn post and it reads like every other AI-generated post (overuse of colons, numbered lists, generic observations), you've just eroded trust.

Use AI for structure, research, and ideation. But the final output needs to sound like you—your voice, your perspective, your examples.

One founder said: "I use AI to brainstorm angles and organise my thoughts. But I rewrite every sentence in my own words. If I wouldn't say it in a conversation, I don't post it."

In a world flooded with AI-generated noise, authentic human voice is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Customer Intimacy Beats Broad Market Coverage

The companies that scale fastest aren't trying to be everything to everyone. They're obsessed with solving a specific problem for a specific customer better than anyone else.

This came through in every conversation: niche down to blow up.

The failure mode looks like this: "We sell to mid-market and enterprise companies in technology, healthcare, and financial services." That's not a strategy. That's a list of industries you're willing to take money from.

The success mode looks like this: "We sell to Series B SaaS companies with $10M-$30M ARR who are expanding from one product to multi-product and need to unify their GTM motion."

Spot the difference? The second one tells you exactly who the customer is, what problem they have, and why they need you now.

Define Your ICP with Precision

Most companies define their Ideal Customer Profile by demographics: company size, industry, revenue, location. That's a start, but it's not enough.

The companies that dominate their niche go deeper. They define ICP by:

• Psychographics: What does the buyer believe? What keeps them up at night?
• Behavioural signals: What actions indicate they're in-market right now?
• Situational triggers: What events (funding round, leadership change, tech stack shift) create urgency?

One GTM leader told me:

"We used to target 'mid-market companies with 100-500 employees'. Our win rate was 12%. We redefined our ICP as 'companies who just raised Series B and are hiring their first VP of Sales'. Win rate jumped to 35% because we were showing up at exactly the moment they needed us."

The tighter your ICP, the easier it is to:

• Build the things that matter
• Create messaging that resonates
• Identify where your buyers hang out
• Hire reps who understand the customer

If your ICP is too broad, you're building for no one.

Sell Outcomes, Not Features

Customers don't buy software. They buy outcomes.

They don't care that your platform has 47 integrations and a mobile app. They care that you'll help them grow revenue by 30%, reduce churn by 20%, or take market share from their biggest competitor.

The shift in messaging is simple but powerful:

Before: "Our platform automates lead scoring and enrichment with AI-powered insights and real-time sync across your tech stack."

After: "We help B2B companies close 40% more deals by ensuring reps spend their time on leads that are actually ready to buy."

Same product. Different framing. One talks about what you built. The other talks about what the customer gets.

One sales leader said: "We rewrote every sales deck to start with the business outcome first, then worked backwards to the product. Close rates went up 25% because prospects finally understood why they should care."

The CEO Must Talk to Customers

If you're a CEO and you're not spending at least 20% of your time talking directly to customers, you're flying blind.

Filtered feedback through sales, customer success, or product teams isn't enough. You need to hear it yourself—the frustration, the confusion, the moments where customers almost churned but didn't, the features they're begging for, the competitors they're comparing you to.

One founder told me: "I set a rule: I have to do five customer calls every week, no exceptions. That discipline saved us. We were about to build an entire product line that customers didn't want. Talking to them directly made it obvious."

Customer intimacy isn't a nice-to-have. It's the source of every strategic decision that matters.

Leadership Is a Skill You Must Learn 

Here's the uncomfortable truth: being great at your job doesn't make you a great leader.

The best individual contributor on your sales team might be a terrible sales manager. Your top engineer might hate managing people. Your most reliable operator might crumble under strategic ambiguity.

Yet most companies promote people into leadership roles based solely on performance, then wonder why culture breaks down and teams underperform.

Every leader I spoke to who scaled successfully said the same thing: leadership is a skill that must be learned, practised, and developed intentionally.

Hire for Values, Train for Skills

You can teach someone how to use HubSpot. You can teach them your sales methodology. You can teach them how to run a project.

You cannot teach someone to be honest, loyal, transparent, or resilient. Those are values. And if someone doesn't share your core values, no amount of training will make them the right fit.

One founder told me:

"We made the mistake of hiring a VP of Sales who was a rockstar in his previous role but didn't align with our culture. He hit his numbers but left a trail of destruction, blamed his team publicly, cut corners on deals, lied to customers. We had to let him go and rebuild trust with the entire company. Never again."

The lesson: hire for values first, skills second. A-players who don't fit your culture are still toxic.

Invest in Middle Management

The biggest leadership gap in most companies? Middle management.

Companies promote their best individual contributors into management roles without any training on how to actually manage people. The result: you lose a great IC and gain a mediocre manager who burns out their team.

One CRO shared this:

"We started running a six-week management bootcamp for anyone promoted into a leadership role. We taught them how to run one-on-ones, give feedback, coach underperformers, and manage up. Our employee engagement scores went up 40% in one year."

If you're not investing in training your managers, you're setting them up to fail.

Ruthlessly Prioritise Your Time

Every leader I spoke to had some version of this realisation: 80% of what you do doesn't matter.

The calendar audit is brutal but necessary. Look at your last two weeks. How much time did you spend:

• In meetings that could have been an email?
• Reviewing work that should have been delegated?
• Firefighting problems that your team should have solved?
• Reacting to urgent-but-not-important requests?

Then ask: how much time did you spend:

• Thinking strategically about where the business is going?
• Talking to customers to understand their world?
• Coaching your leadership team to level up?
• Building systems that eliminate recurring problems?

One CEO told me: "I blocked out every Friday for strategic thinking. No meetings, no Slack, no email. Just me, a whiteboard, and coffee. That one day a week changed everything. I finally had space to think long-term instead of just reacting."

Leadership isn't about working harder. It's about working on the right things.

What This All Means

If I had to distil everything I learned from 50+ conversations into one sentence, it would be this:

The companies that win are the ones that stop chasing growth and start building systems that make growth inevitable.

That means:

• Fixing unit economics before scaling
• Aligning GTM around customer outcomes, not departmental goals
• Using AI to remove friction, not replace humans
• Obsessing over customer intimacy, not market coverage
• Investing in leadership, not just hiring bodies

None of this is sexy.

None of it makes for a good LinkedIn post about hockey-stick growth. But it's what works.

The era of "growth at all costs" is over. The era of "efficient, sustainable, profitable growth" is here.

The question isn't whether you'll adapt. It's whether you'll adapt fast enough.

If you want to talk through how any of this applies to your business eg. GTM strategy, RevOps alignment, AI implementation, whatever it is, reach out.

I'm always up for a conversation with someone who's serious about building something that lasts.