# Optimizing GTM Strategy: Alignment, Maturity, and AI

**Podcast:** Product Momentum Podcast
**Published:** 2026-03-31

## Transcript

Margie, I wanted to talk about our first question about connectedness.
Uh I I'm curious, uh, why do product teams often feel so disconnected to go-to-market outcomes?
Well, I think part of the answer to that kind of rests in how people think about what go-to-market even is.
Some people think of go to market as a one-time project.
Maybe you're just gonna launch one product out into the market, right?
And then you've gone to market and that's it.
Some people think of go-to-market just as sales, right?
As the people that are, you know, carrying the bag and carrying the quota.
And when I think of go-to-market, uh, I think one of the most important aspects is that it is connected across different teams.
It's a joint cross-functional engine, not a one-time project, but an ongoing system that involves marketing, sales, product, customer success, um, and also finance.
So everybody has a role to play, um, and and product is an important team member as part of that cross-functional group.
For those of us that are listening that have kind of like limited experience in in the go-to-market operating model, before you start investing in kind of marketing and sales execution, what are the core things that you need in order to have success?
Yeah, well, we kind of hit on started talking about that when we were just talking about personas.
Um, and and understanding your audience.
I always start there, right?
And it even before you get to the people within the organization, really thinking about the type of organization that's gonna be the best fit that and then what the problems that though that those organizations have.
How can product leaders help shape messaging that's direct, unique, and not generic?
Yeah, well, I mean, I'll go back to really understanding um what your customers are trying to accomplish.
Not just their jobs to be done, but their business goals, the context that they live in, recognizing how hard it is for them to change, and like your your solution and your messaging around the solution has to be really compelling to get people to stick their neck out and take a risk.
We had two guests today.
We had Andrew, but we also had Margie Agin with us.
Margie talked to us a ton about go to market strategy and the connection to product and business goals.
It was an amazing episode.
Andrew, what are your takeaways?
I love the conversation, so much fun.
The two things that I stuck out with with me were uh the connectedness, how do you take a product person and connect them to the go to market outcomes?
And then later on in the episode, we talked about the importance of having a really strong distinct point.
I loved it.
Yeah, gotta have a point, right?
This is a great episode.
Let's get it.
Hi everybody, we are here today with Margie Agin.
She is a go-to-market advisor and practitioner for B2B tech scale-ups, particularly cybersecurity, IT and OT.
She translates complex technical topics into sales enablement tools and targeted campaigns so her clients can get more meetings, demos, and sales.
Before founding Center Board Marketing, Margie led a dynamic generation efforts for the education technology company Blackboard and digital marketing for video conferencing leaders Tanberg and Cisco.
She also taught marketing at Johns Hopkins University and wrote the book Brand Breakthrough How to Go Beyond a Catchy Tagline to Build Authentic, Influential and Sustainable Brand Personality.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
We also have a special co-host today, Andrew Knoblock, ITX's director of sales, is with us today.
We're really excited to have you, Andrew, and you're gonna kick us off today.
Sean, yeah, good to be here.
And Margie, I wanted to talk about our first question about connectedness.
I'm curious, uh why do product teams often feel so disconnected to go to market outcomes?
Well I think part of the answer to that kind of rests in how people think about what go to market even is.
I think if if we asked the people on this screen, or we went out to 10 different people, we would get 10 different answers of what people think the term go-to-market refers to.
So maybe just for one second, I'll tell you how I think of go to market.
And as part of that, I think it'll kind of it'll it'll answer your question about why different teams product and others maybe feel disconnected from it.
And I think that's because most people think or some people think of go-to-market as a one-time project.
Maybe you're just gonna launch one product out into the market, right?
And then you've gone to market and that's it.
So some people think of it that way.
Some people think of go-to-market just as sales, right?
As the people that are carrying the bag and carrying the quota.
And so they don't see themselves in that definition.
And when I think of go-to-market, uh, I think one of the most important aspects is that it is connected across different teams.
It's a joint cross-functional engine, not a one-time project, but an ongoing system that involves marketing, sales, product, customer success, and also finance.
So everybody has a role to play, and product is an important team member as part of that cross-functional group.
You make those, you know, you mentioned marketing, finance, sales.
Seemingly those could be viewed as stakeholders, but how do you make them partners to the go-to-market team and the go-to-market outcomes?
Yeah, I mean, that's the million dollar question, right?
Is is when you got a cross-functional team, who's the owner?
Because if everybody everybody has a stake in it, but there is no actual owner, then sometimes it's really difficult to get if you have a difference of opinion or you just need to, you know, have uh an outside point of view that is not biased or weighted towards one of those cross-functional areas.
It can be tricky.
So the most successful cross-functional go-to-market teams that I have seen are typically run by, let's say, not run, but owned by the CEO or the president of a company.
Doesn't mean that they're in the weeds in every decision, but they have kind of oversight and ownership because they're really, if you think about it, the only one, uh, maybe there's an off cheap operating officer, but generally that's the only one who sort of can balance across all of those different teams.
That's really interesting to me.
I I was surprised when you said that the CEO is like the is like is the best quarterback there.
What are the behaviors that they exhibit in that role that makes them the best to carry that out?
So I think and I kind of I kind of hesitated when I said run versus own, right?
Because because you don't want your CEO waking up in the middle of the night saying, you know, why aren't we ranking for this key org?
Right?
We don't we don't want them saying add this feature to the roadmap.
We don't want them totally in the weeds.
But ideally they can set a strategy for the entire company when you're looking at go-to-market, really it all stems from what what are your business goals, right?
You how much do you want to grow in the next year?
Where do you think you're gonna grow the most?
Right?
What are you gonna how you're gonna make decisions that to prioritize what you're gonna do and not do?
And probably everybody at that table has a slightly different perception of the answer to those questions, right?
And they all come with their own data in their own, you know, their own dashboard and they're if WARDE's is you know the loudest in the room then and the others aren't listened to, then the decision that you make might be skewed in in one direction or another without considering all the downstream impact.
So ideally the the person who's the owner of that team is the one who's able to you know listen to all of the inputs but then connect the strategy to execution and make sure everyone understands and is on point with the strategy.
Is that the is that we talked in our in our pre-call for this we talked about kind of the business context.
So what is that business context everybody should understand every product manager should really understand when approaching you know when when approaching this go-to-market subject so if you're sitting within within the product team um then your product manager that could mean in some companies it might mean that there's only one product, right?
And so you essentially are the voice of the entire product organization, right?
In other companies, you may be one product manager among six or twenty or thirty, and in which case to you your product is the whole world.
So especially in that case, it's to think about the business context is to think about your product and how it fits into the whole portfolio.
I don't know, uh, what are the do you have specific goals?
Does the organization have specific growth goals, sales goals, usage goals, positioning goals for your product?
Maybe maybe it's a beachhead product, right?
It's like the one that people buy first to help the company get the foot in the door.
Or maybe it's an add-on to another product or it's always sold with something else, or maybe it's, you know, the one that's the one that comes in late in the game.
So understanding the context of where you fit in the overall portfolio is important because ultimately you're giving guidance to the sales, assuming it's a sales-led organization, okay, or even to the to the marketing team of how much effort they're gonna put into your product versus the other products and how they're gonna explain how this product fits into the overall portfolio, the overall company story, the overall narrat narrative.
So that I think is like the most important thing from a from a product manager perspective is like figuring out if the company has specific goals for your product, and if they don't, why not?
And and who is responsible for setting those?
How do those get set?
So even asking the question, right?
If you're not told that, even asking the question and bringing that information and a perspective to the table, that may be something that a a product manager can do as they sort of manage up to those around them.
Again, that's the connectedness theme.
There's a lot, you mentioned before, there's so many people involved, stakeholders and team members as you go to market, but also how you go to market depends a lot on your company size, where you are in maturity level.
And I I guess I'd love to hear more about, you know, we talked a bit about the the maturity stages that you use and how they differ, and through the lens of what is a product manager need to know about those three stages.
I'd love to hear more about that.
Yeah, so you could think of companies in their go-to-market kind of maturity as maybe three main, they might fall into one of three main buckets, and there's you know, there's nuances among all of these buckets, but the three main buckets we'll call the first one problem market fit, right?
Then we have product market fit, which which is you know a term a lot of people use to be like, yeah, we've finally we've hit it, so that's our goal, right?
We and then ultimately there's platform market fit.
So there's some nuances among these different three areas.
So let's take problem market fit.
In this kind of example, you're still you're maybe a startup, right?
Or you're a small business, you're kind of still in search of your big idea.
You're testing out a lot of things, you're still in early days, and so you might not know exactly who your ideal customer is at this point, right?
Because you're still pressure testing different groups within the organization.
Your product, you may be more open to customization, right?
With your first sort of set of design partners.
You actually need a lot of agility and flexibility at this stage to be able to change and adapt on a dime.
And it might be okay if your founder, you know, has one story that he tells to one, you know, what one prospect, and then different story that he's telling you a different prospect, and he comes back to the to the shop and says, Okay, guys, this is now we have to make this because we just got this big bank as a as a company, and these are the things that they want.
So that's fine in when you're in problem market fit.
As you grow at the point at which you then, for example, have multiple salespeople.
The founder is not in every conversation, right?
And you need to start scaling because maybe you just got a bunch of funding and now we're, you know, we want to grow faster, that agility is gonna kill you.
You can't be like changing the story all the time, changing the the pricing, changing the product specs, changing the you know, the all packaging, all these things.
So we need to have in product market fit, this you're ideally selling the same thing to the same people in the same way, right?
And that that like struggle point where companies have one foot in the old world and but yet they're trying to to move on to the next world that's where there's that's where there's a lot of conflict and friction because there may be some behaviors still that are appropriate for that first stage of maturity but just you know are getting in the way of growth when you need to uh you need to become more scalable in my head I'm stuck I'm I'm a huge West Wing television show nerd and there's this whole thing at the end of season seven now this is post Sorkin era so don't judge it but there's this whole thing where there's this romance to campaigning right there's this beautiful romance on the ground campaigning but then you go to govern and it's meat and potatoes time you know it's like grinded out time and I'm feeling a little bit of that as you talk about yeah problem product and we haven't even gotten to platform yet yeah I mean some people love that first stage and and and some companies stay there for a long time and actually that's I mean God love them right because it's chaos, but they love it and would rather stay in that period of time for a long time.
Many of the companies that I work with who have gotten like a series B funding and you know, they've got growth expectations need to change because because of that, so they have to start building systems.
Right?
Now we have to start actually making something that we is repeatable and more predictable and that other people can execute other than the founding team, right?
So you have to give up some some agility and power to be able to to grow.
So that's some people like that middle space.
And then the third space, the platform market pit uh fit, at that point, not pit at that point you're a lot of your growth is gonna you're already mature, you've already been in the market a while.
So a lot of your growth is really about expanding and it's less about net new logos and more about expanding your base and cross-selling and making sure you have retention, net net revenue retention becomes a much more important metric to you at that point.
So just the the metrics that you use, you know, the motions that you use, the way that you think about, you know, where you put the prioritization uh tends to shift at that point, and that's when companies start adding on, you know, they they start thinking about long-term margin and long-term relationship and renewal.
I've worked so for me, my background is really large enterprise companies, right?
I've only worked in one smaller, more nimble company in in my time.
I love the connections that you that what you're talking about has to something that we preach, which is the product lifecycle.
And that's kind of easier if you're in kind of that's easier to understand if you're kind of in that one one product.
I'm selling this one product and I'm trying to grow this this product's market share, right?
When you're in the enterprise game, it's just different, right?
So how how does somebody change their mindset going from all right, I know how to do this with one product, but now I'm working with an enterprise level platform with multiple offerings housed inside of it.
How do I make the jump?
Yeah that not gonna lie that's really really difficult.
I mean yeah because at that point you've got different products in different stages.
So you're asking questions like do they all have the same customer profile?
Like could be different buyers different personas, different users, different use cases.
If that's the case, then ultimately you have different market go to market motions right they basically have to run this sort of almost separate separate plays.
The way that you market to people is is going to be specific based on those decisions and the way that the sales team is going to be talking about the product is going to be different based on those decisions.
So I think taking a really really hard look at whether the buyer and the user are the same if they are, then you know it's much easier to package those things together and talk about them in one conversation.
But if they're very different, then you sort of end up with like too many SWAT teams.
Yeah.
I've been in that experience before where the buyer is oftentimes a single people or a small group of people.
Right.
But the majority of your users are people whose sentiment is really going to drive your retention, right?
Uh so I I like how kind of describing there like ultimately like you really need to know your segments when you get into when you get into that larger platform game.
It can't just be like security decision maker.
Yeah.
I do a lot of security, cyber security work, right?
And if you have a persona that's like security decision maker, there that's maybe that's the ultimate check signer, but really underneath that you got you've got the architect, you've got, you know, you've got the sock guy, you've got the person in charge of, you know, what's more IT operations.
So really thinking about the nuances of this and then sort of mapping that across the portfolio is an important step.
Okay.
All right.
So for those of us that are for those of us that are listening that have kind of like limited experience in in the gold market operating model, before you start investing in kind of marketing and sales execution, what are the core things that you need in order to have success?
Yeah, well, we kind of hit on started talking about that when we were just talking about personas.
Um, and and understanding your audience.
I always start there, right?
And it even before you get to the people within the organization, really thinking about the type of organization that's gonna be the best fit that and then what the problems that those organizations have.
So getting really immersed in understanding who you think it might be a hypothesis at this point, right?
Which you're gonna test as you go along.
But based on the initial conversations that you've had when you know you're starting your research and you're building your idea, who do you really think is gonna be your best fit customer?
And not trying to boil the ocean and sell to everybody, right?
It can't just be like everybody that has money.
It has to be somebody that has a defined some a defined problem and some defined attributes, even beyond just you know, industry or size of company, the more specific you can be, the more you're gonna really deeply connect with their problems and their messaging is gonna resonate and your products are gonna be truly relevant to solving those problems.
So at least starting with the hypothesis and then gathering that that data and that feedback to see how close you are and and adjusting.
That's that's where I would always start.
Andrew, how as the director of sales, how did you feel about don't s just sell to everybody that has money?
That's a temptation, it's a tough one.
But no, you're you're exactly right.
Like you even even to the level of what are the things they might care about, that sort of discussion, you probably can't plug that into your normal targeting tools and use it.
But as you get into conversations with people on the other end, the users of your product or the buyers from your business, you're listening for those signals.
So I I I really love that point, having those having those deeper discussions.
Yeah.
And I mean, to make your job easier, right?
To make the sales team's job easier, we've got to give you some direction, some prioritization.
We can't just say, you know, you're responsible for the the Midwest.
We can, but you're responsible for the Midwest.
Go.
You need you need some signals or some attributes.
So looking uh often find that companies will stop at location and industry, maybe company size, right?
And that that is a good place to start.
That's fine.
But if if I also said, Oh, the companies that also have this technology, right?
Well that that might mean that they're they're mature or that they we integrate well with it, or you know, so something about the fact that they have this tech stack.
Or it could be they just hired a person with a certain title, or someone with a certain title, they just put out a job posting because they have a gap there.
Cheap data officer is a really interesting one.
Company suddenly is looking for a cheap data officer, that means they're now taking data seriously, right?
So if you have a data-oriented product, now you're, you know, now you're maybe have an in that you didn't have before.
So we're looking for those those attributes and also signals of of readiness that something has changed in their environment.
A lot of times this is publicly available information, right?
We just have to know where to go and capture those signals and then say, yeah, these these if I have a list instead of 10,000 companies, now I have a list of like my top 100, and maybe I even have my list of my top 20.
So it's really trying to make Andrew's job more efficient.
I certainly appreciate that.
Uh the other thing, um, well, it the the time says 3 26 p.m.
Eastern.
That means we've been on this call since three o'clock Eastern, and we haven't brought up AI yet.
So I'm so proud of it.
Yeah.
So far with AI, but now we have to.
So we are contractually obligated to talk about AI.
So havi and post edit.
I hope you can make that a real check mark.
Uh we did it.
So uh like we talked about this in our prep call.
There's obviously it makes content creation faster.
It raises the bar, it makes it harder to be original.
And you said something that I wrote down at the prep call, which was you have to have a point.
You have to have a point of view, no matter what.
AI can't take away the importance of having a point of view.
Can you expand on that?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think AI is making the execution part of all of our jobs easier, faster, and exposing things to us that we don't that we didn't know before, think about before, but but it has its definitely has its benefits.
I mean, even where you were talking about before, like we were talking about the signals, those might have been things that you were manually looking for before, or like you intuitively knew that oh, so and so-and-so just moved to another company, I should probably reach out to them.
AI can now automate a lot of that stuff for you, but you still have to kind of do the thinking to know what those signals are.
And similarly, in the in the content world or or in the the messaging world, when it comes to a point of view, AI can make expressing that point of view faster and sharper.
Uh, I mean, I'm a writer at heart, and I'm using AI to you know to make my writing sharper and tighter and you know, sound like me or sound like a client of mine, right?
In ways that the execution is is much faster.
But the difficult part is always what the difficult part was, which is figuring out what you have to contribute to the conversation that is unique, that people haven't heard a million times before, you know, that makes people think, maybe exposes a gap that they didn't know was there, maybe explains why you started the company in the first place, or why this approach that you're taking with this product is actually different, better, faster than some something that they've been doing traditionally, and why it matters.
So that type of deep thinking is is I don't think at this point is something that is solved by AI, but it it comes from a lot listening to to customers and talking with the team and really thinking about like what are we contributing to this world where we're not just rehashing what's already out there?
And can we be a little provocative, right?
If we want to be a little bit disruptive or a little provocative, then let's be loud and proud about it.
Let's figure out what we really stand for.
And that still takes some work that I don't this human work that AI is not replacing us with yet.
You know one of the questions that I was going to ask was what's you know we I'm imagining there's something a lot that's changed with AI but what hasn't changed.
And I think you really touched on that there in terms of you still got to have something that's unique.
You've got to have something that that matters fundamentally that hasn't changed.
So knowing what good looks like having kind of an like an exemplar um that's a word that my my kids school uses a lot and it's like this is the sample is our best case this is so when you write your report or you do your work you write your code or you you know you you craft your messaging this is what this is what a good example looks like and in that sense you need to have sort of that toolkit of examples to feed the AI and to train the AI.
And then the AI can execute a lot of it on your behalf but only you know what ultimately you want you want the result to be and only you know also like the workflow that you want to follow with all the people that you want to be involved the decision making process you want to follow you know the the review process the alignment across all of these cross-functional people that we were talking about before like AI can surface the information easily so that they can all see the same thing and have the one source of truth but the being in the room around the table and debating it and looking at it from different angles and agreeing or agreeing to disagree but move forward anyway right all this stuff is human stuff that is really where the hard work lies.
Okay.
All right this is the this is the the slope this is the million dollar I think it's a good thing for humans right I like our big I set the stage of how hard everything is but like we still have a place right we we're not going away yet so we got this is the part that we have to get better and better at is the alignment and the decision making because because the other parts our job, obvious up slate, right?
Are gonna be easier to outsource.
Yeah, fair enough.
All right.
So for our last like million dollar question, right?
How can product leaders help shape messaging that's direct, unique, and not generic?
What are like just some easy tips somebody could take away today and go, hey, I know the conversation I want to have with marketing and sales next based on the next thing that I'm in helping to market.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'll go back to really understanding what your customers are trying to accomplish.
Okay.
Not just their jobs to be done, but their business goals, the context that they live in, recognizing how hard it is for them to change.
And like yours your solution and your messaging around the solution has to be really compelling to get people to stick their neck out and take a risk.
I I honestly find this more lately.
I'd be curious if you guys feel this too.
But I've had my business 13 years and I've been in marketing, you know, 30 plus, and like you always talk about driving urgency and all that, but I feel like lately it's people really hard to get people to change.
There's a lot of uncertainty.
So think just recognizing that and uh thinking, is this have we done enough and have we told a good story that it worth the pain of having to change?
How do we express why it's really worth it?
I love it.
With our experience with one of our customers right now, it's it's a platform, it's a platform for small businesses, right?
So when you think about like the price of change, right?
We're talking about not only are you changing something for somebody who has to administer this product, but you're also changing this one thing for somebody who wears a lot of different hats, because in the small business world, nobody is one thing, right?
So I think that price of that I really like that'll be my first here.
I'll I'm gonna do go to takeaways next, but like my first thing is really like understand the pain of the change that you might be you might be introducing.
Is it worth it?
I love that.
That's an amazing takeaway.
Here are my other ones from today.
I've got go to market is an extension of business goals.
We all we love starting with business goals, right?
It's vision and then your objectives.
What are your time bound business goals, right?
I learned something brand new today.
I'd had no idea what you were talking about when you said beachhead product, and I learned that I gotta learn some lingo, right?
So learn your go to market lingo.
That's a takeaway for me.
Uh know your targets.
So what is your ideal customer profile?
And if you're in the if you're in the enterprise game, what are what are those segments, right?
You might not be one ICP, it might be multiple depending on the product mix that you think is most commonly that it is most commonly available, right?
Don't just sell to everyone that has money.
Andrew took that one to heart.
I was proud of his response there.
Nice job.
We put you on the spot, right?
You have to have a point.
I think that's I I feel like almost every episode since we interviewed Phil Hornby, we've been referring to his like we're paid to have an opinion.
And I think that that's like a direct corollary is not only do you have to have a p an opinion, but you also have to have a point, right?
Love it.
And then know what you have that's unique, I think is the last thing that I that I the last big takeaway that I have.
I think a lot of people know maybe the problem that you solve, right?
But maybe there's other market entrants that have that solve the same problem, right?
So how are you gonna defend your position?
What do you have that's unique?
Right?
Awesome.
Yeah, absolutely.
Margie, thank you so much for being here today.
Well, this is your second time on product momentum, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Second time, yeah.
I love this topic because we've only had two or three other people that come to us and talk about go to market and how we need to connect at the product and how important it is, right?
And you can't just throw things over the wall at sales, you have to have a plan, and it's really important to know that up front.
So, how do we shift that left in our SDLC?
So, yeah, thank you so much for being here today and talking about this amazing topic with us.
Yeah, it was a pleasure.
A lot of fun.
Thanks so much.