Go To Market Consulting

You have a product people want. You have a few customers who are genuinely happy. But you can’t reliably find more of them, reach them, and close them. That’s not a product problem - it’s a go-to-market problem.

Go-to-market consulting is the work of solving that. Not writing a strategy deck that lives in Google Drive. Building the systems, playbooks, and processes that turn “we grow when we get lucky” into “we grow because we have a repeatable engine.”

What is go-to-market consulting?

Go-to-market consulting is the practice of defining who you sell to, what you say to them, which channels you reach them through, and how deals close, then building the working systems that execute it repeatably. It sits between your product and your revenue, and it is equal parts decision-making and construction.

GTM consulting covers the full stack of those decisions:

• ICP definition: who exactly you’re selling to, what their pain looks like, and how to identify them at scale
• Positioning and messaging: what you say about your product, why it’s different, and why it matters to the specific buyer you’re targeting
• Channel selection: which 2-3 channels are right for your stage, budget, and ICP - and in what order
• Outreach playbooks: email sequences, LinkedIn scripts, objection handling - the actual words your team uses
• Sales process design: how deals move from first touch to closed, what happens at each stage, and who’s responsible
• Marketing-to-sales handoff: how leads get qualified, handed off, and tracked so nothing falls through the cracks

Good go-to-market strategy consulting produces things your team can pick up and run with - not slides. Working sequences. A real ICP with enough specificity to build a list from. A sales process that maps to how your buyers actually buy.

Who needs go-to-market consulting?

The most common trigger is a transition moment. You’ve been growing on founder relationships and referrals, and that’s starting to plateau. Or you just raised a round and need to show traction beyond the founder’s personal network. Or you’re trying to move from founder-led to team-led sales and nothing is working yet.

Other signals:

• You’re doing outreach but getting no replies - or replies that go nowhere
• You have meetings but deals don’t close at a rate that makes the math work
• Different people on your team have completely different answers when asked “who’s our ideal customer?”
• You’ve hired salespeople and they’re underperforming - not because they’re bad, but because there’s no playbook

B2B GTM consulting is the right intervention for all of these. It’s cheaper and faster than hiring more people into a broken system.

GTM consultant vs agency vs fractional CMO vs first sales hire

These four get compared constantly and they solve different problems. Picking the wrong one is the expensive part.

• A go-to-market consultant is right when you don’t yet know what works. The job is to find the repeatable motion and build it. Wrong choice if you already have a proven motion and just need more volume through it.
• An agency is right once the motion is proven and you need capacity to run it across more channels and more accounts. Wrong choice before that, because agencies are built to execute a brief, and at this stage nobody can write the brief yet. Scaling the wrong message to the wrong list is the most expensive mistake available to a seed-stage company.
• A fractional CMO is right when you need ongoing marketing leadership: someone owning the function, the budget, and the team over quarters. Wrong choice if what you actually need is one motion built and handed over in 90 days.
• A first sales hire is right after the playbook exists. Hiring a rep to invent your go-to-market is asking someone on a commission plan to do six months of unpaid R&D. It usually ends with the rep leaving and the founder concluding “sales hires don’t work here.”

The order that works: figure out the motion, build the playbook, then hire into it. Most founders I meet tried it in reverse.

What does a GTM consulting engagement look like?

A typical engagement for SaaS GTM consulting has two phases:

• Strategy phase (weeks 1-6): ICP workshops, customer interviews, competitive analysis, messaging development and testing, channel prioritization, and playbook build. Output: a GTM strategy document and working outreach assets.
• Implementation phase (months 2-6): launching the channels, iterating on messaging based on real prospect responses, tracking pipeline contribution, and handing off a system your team can run independently.

The strategy phase without the implementation phase is just consulting. The implementation phase without the strategy phase is just execution without direction. The combination is what actually moves the number.

One practical detail that matters more than it sounds: I do the building. You are not buying a strategy from a senior person and then getting the execution handed to whoever is free. That handoff is where most go-to-market projects quietly die, because the intent behind a positioning decision does not survive being written down and passed on.

What deliverables come out of GTM consulting?

Concretely:

• A written ICP document with firmographic, demographic, and behavioural criteria
• A positioning and messaging framework - the narrative that makes your product make sense to the right buyer
• A prioritized channel strategy with rationale
• Outreach sequences for email and LinkedIn - tested and iterated based on real response data
• A sales process map showing deal stages, actions, and owner for each stage
• A 90-day execution plan with week-by-week priorities

These are working assets, not templates. They’re built for your specific product, ICP, and competitive context.

What does go-to-market consulting cost?

Anyone quoting you a number before looking at your funnel is quoting a package, not your problem. What I can tell you is how the pricing is structured.

The entry point is a fixed-price Revenue Audit at EUR 500. You get a written diagnostic of where your go-to-market is actually leaking, and you get it whether or not you hire me afterwards. In three years of running it I have issued zero refunds on that audit. If you would rather test the thinking before paying for anything, the free 30-minute audit covers the same ground at less depth.

Full engagements are scoped from the audit against a specific outcome and a specific timeline, not sold as an open-ended hourly retainer. That’s deliberate. Hourly billing pays a consultant to take longer, which is exactly the wrong incentive when the goal is handing you a system and getting out of the way.

Does it actually work?

Two engagements with numbers attached.

Venture Challenge was a founder-led service with no repeatable acquisition motion. We rebuilt the ICP and the outbound system: 170 qualified leads in 90 days, and 25 teams enrolled at EUR 5K each.

IKI Health was running sales manually with no pipeline structure. After building the outreach system and the qualification process: 30+ scheduled calls in month one, and two high-ticket deals closed immediately.

For context on the pattern-matching behind this: I’ve closed over EUR 4M in B2B SaaS revenue myself, in deals ranging from EUR 5K to EUR 120K, and worked with 27 founders in the last 24 months. I’m not applying a framework I read about. I’m applying what I’ve watched work and fail across a lot of similar companies.

Why go-to-market projects fail

The failures are boringly consistent:

• The ICP is a market, not a customer. “B2B SaaS companies in Europe” is not an ICP. You cannot build a list from it, so nobody does, so outreach goes to whoever was easiest to find.
• Messaging is written for the founder, not the buyer. It explains what the product does instead of what breaks without it. Founders are the worst-placed people to spot this in their own copy, which is most of why an outside pass is worth anything.
• Too many channels at once. Three half-run channels produce less than one properly run channel, and they also produce no signal about which one was worth keeping.
• The strategy never becomes a system. Someone leaves with a good document and nobody owns turning it into sequences, lists, and calendar time.
• It gets judged too early. An outbound motion evaluated at week three is being evaluated on setup, not performance. Sales cycles are longer than patience.

Working with European B2B SaaS

Most go-to-market advice online is written for the US market and quietly assumes it. Deal sizes, sales cycle length, how directly you can open a cold conversation, how much a buyer expects to self-serve before talking to anyone: all of it shifts across the Netherlands, DACH, Benelux, and the UK. Multi-language markets change the list-building work too, and GDPR changes what an outbound motion is even allowed to look like.

I’ve built outbound systems across those markets, which mostly means I know which US playbook advice to throw away. If you’re selling into Europe, our European B2B SaaS sales playbook covers the specifics.

What I don’t do

Worth saying plainly so you don’t waste a call. I don’t do brand campaigns, paid media management, or PR. I don’t work with companies that don’t yet have a product in market, because there’s no go-to-market to fix until something exists to sell. And I don’t take engagements where the founder wants to stay out of it, because the ICP and messaging work needs the person who has actually talked to every early customer.

How long until I see results?

With a solid outbound-led GTM, you should see initial responses and booked calls within the first 3-4 weeks of launch. First closed deals typically follow in weeks 6-12, depending on your sales cycle length. Building enough pipeline to make confident revenue projections takes 60-90 days of consistent execution.

Referrals and inbound will continue to come in the background - GTM consulting doesn’t replace what’s already working, it builds the engine that works when referrals are slow.

Related: B2B SaaS sales process design, B2B sales playbook build, and fractional CMO for ongoing marketing leadership. Our go-to-market checklist for SaaS launch is a useful reference before your first call. Or book the free audit and we’ll start with a diagnostic of where your GTM is breaking down.