Go-to-market strategy · who should build it, and how to hire them

Go to market strategy: what it covers

A go to market strategy answers six questions, and each one needs a decision, not a slide. Get them written down and agreed by the founders before anyone spends money on channels.

The six components

Ideal customer profile (ICP). The companies and buyers you win most easily and keep longest, defined tightly enough that a seller can say no to the rest. Positioning. What you are, who it is for and why it beats the alternatives the buyer already has. Pricing. How you charge and what you charge, which also decides how you can afford to sell. Channels. Where the ICP finds you: outbound, paid, content, events, partners or the product itself. Sales motion. Self-serve, inside sales, field sales or a mix, and the stages a deal moves through. Metrics. The few numbers that tell you the plan is working, set before launch.

The same building blocks appear in small-business guidance. Start Up Loans, part of the British Business Bank, tells founders that a marketing plan should cover target audience, pricing and positioning, channels and goals, and should be treated as a live document. A GTM strategy goes further: it adds the sales motion and ties every choice to one pipeline number. For the full framework, playbooks and templates, use our go-to-market strategy guide at gtm.quest.

Strategy is not the hard part

Most founders can draft a GTM strategy in a week. The hard part is running it: testing the ICP against real calls, dropping a channel that is not working, and rewriting the positioning when buyers keep asking the same question. That takes an owner with time in the week. Browse the roles that do this work on our GTM jobs hub.

GTM strategy: who owns it as the company grows

GTM strategy changes hands as a company grows, and most problems start when nobody is sure whose it is. The pattern above runs from founder to founding GTM lead, then to a head of GTM, then to a CRO.

At the start the founder owns it, because the founder is still closing every deal. Stage 2 Capital, a venture firm that specialises in go-to-market, names stepping away from founder-led selling too soon as a top mistake, and says the first GTM hire should complement the founders’ skills rather than default to sales. Sometimes the right first hire is a marketer.

The founding GTM lead then takes the strategy from the founder’s head and turns it into a playbook other people can run. Once the playbook works, a head of GTM owns the strategy and the team that scales it; that is the seat on our GTM lead jobs page. When sales, marketing and customer success each have their own leader, a CRO owns the whole revenue plan. For that seat, see CRO recruitment.

IR35 and GTM leads employed, or through their own company

Fractional, interim and consulting GTM leads often work through their own limited company, where the off-payroll working rules (IR35) may apply. Status is decided by how the engagement runs in practice, not by the contract’s label.

A medium or large client makes the status determination. For a small client outside the public sector, the worker’s own company decides; HMRC sets out the size tests in its guidance for clients. We set out each candidate’s IR35 position on the shortlist, and our IR35 guide covers the tests.