What most startups miss before activating a new GTM Channel

It’s a one word answer: Foundations.

They never fix the marketing foundations and jump straight to activating one channel after the other. While this gives a feeling that a lot of marketing efforts are being put in, the ROI from those channels looks bleak.

Here’s what happens: A campaign underperforms. The team debates the creative, rewrites the ad copy, or revises the hero section of your website homepage.

The question that rarely gets asked: have we ever agreed, in writing, on what we sell, who we sell it to, and why a buyer would choose us over the alternative they already have?

Most B2B SaaS GTM struggles for exactly that reason. The foundations underneath were thin, undocumented, or simply postponed. Thin foundations are expensive in a way that is hard to see on a dashboard, because they make every channel slightly less effective at the same time. The damage shows up as broad, sluggish performance that looks like an execution problem and gets treated like one.

The question becomes: what to fix then?

Here are the six foundations worth documenting, and in the order they should be fixed.

1. Ideal customer profile

Firmographics tell you who to target. Psychographics tell you why they are in-market. Document both, along with the watering holes where they already spend time.

Interview at least 10 people who fit your ICP and have not bought from you. Existing customers validate the story you already tell. People who have not bought will describe the problem in their own words, name the alternatives they weighed, and show you which parts of your pitch went past them. That vocabulary becomes the raw material for everything in the next section.

This matters more today as B2B buyers research a lot on their own. Gartner's survey of 646 B2B buyers found 67% prefer a rep-free experience and 45% used AI during a recent purchase. If your best explanation of the problem only exists inside a sales conversation, most of the buying group will finish evaluating you without ever hearing it.

2. Positioning and messaging

Write down what your product does, who it is for, and the outcome it delivers.

Pick the category you want to compete in. Buyers put you into a category within seconds of landing on your site, and if you have not explicitly made it clear, they put you in the nearest familiar label. 

For example, you are a logistics planning and optimization tool, but never communicated this upfront. Your customers might confuse you for a TMS or a route optimisation tool. This is an example we saw with one of our clients, and was a major problem with a relatively easy fix.

Build a point of view that goes beyond a feature list. Your PoV is what you believe about the problem that your competitors do not. It is the one part of your messaging that stays with you after the next feature-parity release.

Then use that same language everywhere: website, sales deck, ads, onboarding emails, the first 30 seconds of a demo. Buyers move across those surfaces in a single session, and every version of your story they meet should reinforce the same language and messaging.

3. Buyer personas

An ICP describes a company, but it’s the individual people who sign the contract.

Gartner research based on 632 B2B buyers found buying groups ranging from 5 to 16 people, across as many as four functions, with 74% of those groups showing unhealthy conflict during the decision process. Groups that reached consensus were 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal.

Map two to three core personas inside your ICP: role, goals, pains, and what success looks like for each. Then map which of your messages matters to which persona. A CTO and a VP of Marketing will resonate with very different messaging. Personalise the argument for each stakeholder, and give the group one shared business case they can rally around together.

4. Competitive intelligence

List your top three direct competitors. Then list your top three indirect ones: a spreadsheet, a manual process, an intern, or doing nothing.

April Dunford frames the exercise as a single question: what would a customer do if your offering did not exist? She points out that companies commonly lose between 20% and 30% of deals to "no decision", which makes the status quo worth a battlecard of its own.

Document how each alternative positions itself, using their words rather than your summary of their words. Then define one difference that is defensible, provable, and worth paying for. 

5. Customer validation and proof

Humans are wired to be influenced by what others think. Remember the queue in front of the coffee shop made you think their coffee must be worth waiting for. That’s customer validation and social proof.

Your next buyer needs someone else's buying decision to justify their own.

Interview 5 to 10 existing customers (happy ones, of course) and capture the before and after story with numbers attached. Then get your review presence live. G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report found review sites (38%) and AI chatbots (37%) are the top two sources influencing which vendors make a buyer's shortlist, and that eight in ten buyers used AI chatbots to source software recommendations in the past 24 months. Those chatbots are reading your reviews, your website, and third-party coverage, so review profiles now feed both human research and machine research.

6. Channel Identification

Channels come last for a reason. Each one you add needs an owner, a budget, and two or three quarters of patience before the results mean anything. Because like all good things in life, marketing also takes time.

Identify the two or three places your buyer already goes to look for answers, and build a real content plan and strategy for each. Three channels run properly will outperform eight running at 20% effort, because most channels have a minimum viable effort below which output stays close to zero.

The order matters

Each foundation feeds the next.

ICP interviews produce the language for your positioning. Positioning  and messaging exercises determine what matters to your target persona. Personas and competitive alternatives together define which proof points you need to collect. Proof and personas tell you which channels deserve real investment.

Make it a living document

Fix the above six foundations, document it, and revisit them every quarter.

That document becomes the operating system your GTM runs on. Every campaign brief, sales call, landing page, and new hire pulls from the same source, which is what makes execution look easy later.

It is unglamorous work that will never appear in a weekly metrics review. It is also what separates a GTM motion that compounds from one that restarts every two quarters.

If you need help with your foundations, flick me a message on LinkedIn or an email. Happy to chat.

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