"Go to market" is the most used phrase in B2B SaaS, and I've never worked anywhere that agreed what it meant.

In marketing it tends to mean a launch. In sales it means pipeline. In product it means a release date. At board level it means the revenue plan. Each is reasonable on its own. Put them in one room and you have four people nodding at the same phrase while picturing four different things.

There's a second problem with it. Unless you've built something genuinely new, you aren't going to a market at all. You're already in one. Your customers have an opinion of you, your prospects have heard something about you, and the market has formed a view from every rep, project manager and support call you've ever had. The real question is whether you're ready to go back to it, which usually has a less comfortable answer.

The meetings I sat through

At one company I worked with, I was responsible for a set of products that hadn't had a meaningful sales motion in a couple of years. Engineering capacity was thin, the roadmaps were mostly cosmetic, and there hadn't been much strategic investment before I arrived. Customers knew it and were getting restless. My plan was simple enough: fix what we knew was driving churn, then go back to market with something we could stand behind.

Around the same time, a central sales function was stood up with one standard outbound programme across the whole portfolio. SDR to BDR to AE, same playbook, same targets, whatever the product.

The machine didn't need to know the state of the product, so it didn't ask. SDRs did what they were targeted to do and booked meetings. Pipeline filled up, some of it with buyers the product was never built for. It was designed for organisations that already had an audience to reach, and meetings were being booked with organisations hoping to build one. A perfectly good conversation to have, just not one our product could win.

The deals didn't come, so the meetings did. I sat through a lot of them being asked, not gently, whether we had the GTM wrong. Was it the ICP? The target market? The messaging?

The honest answer was that the product wasn't ready to go back to market and wouldn't survive contact with the prospect. I spent most of those meetings trying very hard not to say it. In hindsight, that's the part I'd do differently.

What was actually going on

Everyone in those meetings meant something different by go to market. Leadership meant strategy. Sales meant volume. I meant whether the product had earned the right to be sold again. Three definitions, one phrase, and nobody noticed because we were all using the same words.

That's the soil problem in miniature. Nobody had agreed what the product was for now, who it was for, which problem it solved for them, or who would vouch for it. Without that, an outbound engine has nothing to aim at, so it aims at everything.

Where AI comes in

This is what worries me about the current moment. A GTM engineer with an AI sequencing stack can now do in a week what that SDR team did in a quarter. On ready soil, brilliant. On soil like ours, it gets you to the wrong answer faster and in bigger numbers.

The drift is easy to spot if you look: wrong deals, no deals, long sales cycles. Usually all three. They tend to get diagnosed as a pipeline problem, and the fix for a pipeline problem is more pipeline.

This week

Ask your heads of marketing, sales and product, separately, what go to market means in your business and what you're going to market with. If the three answers don't match, hold off on the next sequence until they do.

Rew