Then she did five unscalable, high-touch deals—and figured out the whole thing.

The mistake was not outbound. The mistake was trying to scale a motion before she had a strategy: clarity on the buyer, their problem, and how they buy.

This is not just an early-stage problem. At every stage, companies are tempted to add a new motion when growth slows. But whether you are at $2M or $50M, scaling a motion without that underlying clarity only helps you do the wrong things faster.

Here’s why skipping the messy phase is the most expensive shortcut in go-to-market.

Let’s dig in.

I ask this question in almost every CEO roundtable I run, and I love it because the answer never changes.

Twelve founders in the room last month, all between $1M and $15M in ARR. I asked how they got their first 20 customers. Almost every hand described the same thing: high-touch, manual, founder-led, custom work that would make an investor cringe if they actually saw it happen. Spreadsheets. Favors. Friends of friends.

Then I asked, "Is this how you're still doing it now?"

Half the room laughed nervously, because the answer was obviously no. They'd built SDR teams, launched sequences, hired people to run the transactional sales they used to run themselves. They'd moved to bigger deals and partnerships.

Here's the thing I want every CEO to hear:

starting with unscalable, high-touch work is not a compromise. It's a strategy.

Not because it generates revenue fast, though it does. Because it teaches you something no spreadsheet or investor call ever will: how your best customers actually buy, what they value, and what they tell their friends.

Most CEOs skip the high-touch phase because they think it won't scale.

That's not really the reason.

The real reason is they're confusing a go-to-market motion with a go-to-market strategy.

A motion is the channel: outbound, events, community, whatever.

A strategy is knowing why that motion works for your specific buyer. Skip the strategy part and you scale the wrong thing. You write sequences around a message that hasn't been tested, so you end up mass spamming. You hire an SDR before you know your price point or your buyer's real objections. You launch a partner motion with no proof point and create a pile of failures instead of a pipeline.

The hustle in the early days isn't inefficiency. It's research. Mistakes only you can afford to make, because you're the one who learns from them.

You still have to pick a motion early on. Things don't happen by accident. But a real go-to-market strategy answers three questions, in this order:

1. Who exactly are you targeting?
Not "mid-market B2B SaaS." A specific profile where you win every time, at a price point with real margin, delivered by a team that can actually close and deliver it.

2. What problem do you solve that they can't ignore?
Not a feature list. Customers don't buy your product because of what it does. They buy the outcome they're chasing. Let them tell you what that outcome is, and build your message around it.

3. How do those buyers actually buy?
Do they respond to outbound? Do they need to try it first? Do they need a person on the phone, or will a video get them there? Do they trust a partner or a community more than a cold email?

You can only answer these by getting close enough to your first 20 customers to learn directly from how they buy.

And if you’re a $100M+ company, “your first 20 customers” does not mean the first 20 customers your company ever signed. It means the first 20 for a new product, market, segment, or motion. Every new bet starts with a learning phase—and the faster you get close to those customers, the faster you learn what is actually repeatable.

The best companies in the world are usually great at one or two of these—not all six. Nail one and you can become the category leader, no matter who the incumbent is.

You cannot build a scaled motion around any of these without first doing the unscalable version by hand.

Want to go deeper on the six GTM motions? Read the framework here.

When Terminus grew through events, I invited our competitors to the very first one, because that's partly how it got funded. Then I found the top 10 influencers in our market and recorded a personal video for each one. This was 2014.

"Hey Megan, I love what you're doing. I want you to come speak at this event I'm putting together called Flip My Funnel. Share what's changing in B2B, whatever you think is challenging the status quo."

I sent that to ten people. Every single one flew in on their own dime to speak at an unknown conference thrown by an unknown guy in Atlanta. Why? Because I made them feel like they mattered. That doesn't scale. It was never supposed to. That's exactly the point.

$0 to $5M: Do not skip the unscalable phase. Run 10 to 20 high-touch deals and treat every one like research. Ask each customer how they found you, why they bought, who else has the same problem, and whether they'll make an introduction. That's how you get your first 20 customers.

$5M to $15M: Look at your best 20 customers and work backward. What motion actually brought them in? What do they have in common? I call this "show me the money." Start with the close date and trace it back, weeks or months or years, until you find how they actually found you. Do that for all 20 and the through-line will show up.

$15M to $20M+ and stalled: The answer is almost never a new motion, even though a new motion always feels tempting. It's almost always a missing strategy underneath the motion you already have. If events built your business and growth stalled, the fix usually isn't switching to outbound. It's figuring out what broke in the events: wrong cities, wrong invite list, weak call to action. Most companies are only ever great at one or two motions. Fix the one you have before you go chasing a sixth.

Wherever you are, $5M or $30M or $50M, the next step is the same: get clear on where your business is today before you add, scale, or abandon a GTM motion.

Take the free assessment at runongtmos.com/move. More than 3,000 companies have used it to identify whether they are in problem-market fit, product-market fit, or platform-market fit—and what to do next.

CEOs: if your growth is stalling and you'd rather build a profitable business than chase the next shiny motion, work with one of our GTM OS certified partners.

Fractionals / Forward Deployment Operators (FDO): 10+ years in GTM and want to join the GTM OS Certified Partner program? Get listed on the GTMarketplace

Now, let's get moving.

love,
sangram