GTM struggles of 2025: What’s holding everyone back?

Why are so many folks struggling to reach go-to-market fit in 2025?

And why is “what’s the sales channel that’s working for everyone right now” the most asked question?

‍_{(Anecdotal, but this was overwhelmingly my experience at Notion panels last year.)}

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TLDR: There is no single channel, and in most cases, this isn’t the right question to be asking.

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Folks are spending so long focusing on the execution of their GTM, experimenting with channels, with messaging, with cold calling, with ads, waiting to “hit” that magic recipe they think is out there… 

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But they’re not starting with a clear enough idea on who they want to win and why. 

And this has to be the starting point for everything. 

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Here’s why I believe folks are having such a hard time, and what questions I think you should be asking in your GTM efforts/struggles.

1. The customer is always right first 

Iterating your GTM strategy before you’ve nailed the right customer = running before you can walk.

Your first GTM experiments should always be with the customer themselves - not how you approach them. Because: 

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1. When you cast your net too wide, your message starts to get lost. It has to be diluted to work for everyone, making it by default work for no one in particular.

2. When it’s time to raise funding, any investor worth their salt is going to check if you’ve got “lookalikes”. If you don’t have customers with common characteristics and needs, using your products in the same way, recognizing the same value - how can they confidently invest? 

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To illustrate this with an example: I've worked with a bunch of employers of record.  

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For those that aren't familiar, they basically help you hire staff outside of your entity locations. So if I'm a UK Limited Company, and I want to hire a sales rep in South Africa, they’re going to help me hire that sales rep without me having to jump through all of the legal hoops.

It's a fascinating space, because there are tons of them (Deal, Remote.com, Playroll, Safeguard…), and they're all well-funded as they had a boom during COVID. 

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With this in mind: how on earth would one of them go out there and deliver a message to this really crowded market? How would they even begin to differentiate themselves?

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It starts with being clear on who you're selling to in the first place. A challenger employer of record startup might hypothesize:

• We work with companies hiring remote workers 
• And we specialize in role types A, B and C in regions X, Y, and Z
• And we really benefit when they're hiring for 10+ roles because they've got ongoing needs. 

The litmus test for this would be: if you identify a customer who meets those attributes and 9 times out of 10 they have a clear reason to pick you, you've probably cracked it. 

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Bad messaging would be ‘we work as an employer of record with anyone remotely in any region’. If a customer meets those vague characteristics, there's no clear reason to pick you over anyone else. All of those things might be true, but there's nothing differentiating you - except maybe something like price point or quality of support which are hard to defend. 

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Now using my company GoodFit as an example. GoodFit is a data product for sales teams. Folks GoodFit may be uniquely positioned to serve would be: 

• B2B sales organizations running outbound
• And they have between 3-50 sales reps
• And they have 1+ people in RevOps.

This is because after 3 reps, things start to get more complex. Reps aren't self prospecting. They tend to have territories with accounts distributed. 

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I also want them to be working in a very big market, but with lots of different customer types,sizes and regions that they're struggling to find and prioritize. 

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I might also layer in: “Territory planning” keywords. If someone's running territories, they tend to mention it in sales manager, reps, and RevOps job descriptions. 

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But it's the complexity where we win at GoodFit, in finding those qualified accounts of different shapes, sizes, regions, and then prioritizing them and getting them in the hands of the reps accordingly. This is where I hypothesize that our product is strong.

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So we can work with any B2B company, and sales team of any size - but it's not specific enough to give me the direction that I need to go out and run really effective GTM experiments.

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Remember: you’ll also find useful data in the companies you’re winning and losing - i.e. what’s the commonality between your successes? And prioritize/deprioritize accordingly. 

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But the real hard question you need to ask yourself - and better yet, your customers - is “Why should they pick us over someone else? Why not a competitor, or stick to the status quo?”. 

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You need extreme clarity on this. Some folks really get stuck doing this part. Because they struggle to see past the fact that they can, technically, serve anyone. 

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2. Your own fears and biases 

Is your GTM problem technical… or is it emotional? 

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I’ve seen a kind of scarcity mindset going on, where founders think niching down will cut too many customers out of the equation, and where they’re getting lost in the weeds of their GTM setups.

Fear of niching down

Folks are really, really worried about picking their winners.

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To the extent they get scared into spaces. They don't want to tie themselves to any one group, in case they pick the wrong one. Super normal. But it's through experimentation that we're going to mitigate that risk.

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It's in the experimentation where some of the most exciting developments in reaching GTM fit have emerged over the past year or so. We’re not going to be sure we’ve got it right when we're sat around our zoom whiteboards, right? 

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We're only going to know if we're right or wrong after we run the tests, and we're going to run that testing through low-cost programmatic outbound. 

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Hint: position this process internally as a period of hypothesizing - not locking in who your SDRs are expected to go after for the next 12 months. 

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Most have tried and failed at outbound - maybe several times - in their quest for GTM fit. There’s tons of content out there about these struggles. 

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The good news is that the ‘death of outbound’ panic has been greatly exaggerated. Not just because people still get results from it, but because the barriers to outbound are lower than ever before. It’s just that the volume of folks trying (and therefore failing) has increased, which is amplifying this message that it's no longer working. 

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But just one year ago, in order to test running outbound, you'd have to hire a couple of SDRs. You'd give them access to a prospecting tool. You'd give them some guidance on who to go and sell to through your ICP docs or whatever it may be. Then you let them run at a set of accounts for a quarter/two quarters for good measure. 

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That is a pretty significant expense. Up to £100,000 on people, then the cost of onboarding, cost of recruitment, cost of tooling. Plus, 6 months is quite a long time to wait for results, right? Especially if you're working off a 12-18 month runway.

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Today, data and AI have reduced these barriers dramatically. Now you can build a list of customers in a single tool and then automate contact via email and LinkedIn, with numbers in the 1000s, from the click of a few buttons.

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The problem is that people are trying this stuff, but can't quite get it to work.

Too much set-up time 

A quick analogy - you could give 100 people a violin and say: “go learn to play the violin. You've got 3 weeks to try and get a tune out of this thing”. 

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A select few talented folks may be able to get a tune out of a violin in 3 weeks, but most people won't be able to. At that point of not being able to play a violin after 3 weeks, it’s not the time to rush to LinkedIn and post that violins no longer work in 2025 and violins are dead. 

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The same is also true for outbound. You can't just dip your toe in. 

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I invested in a company recently - a tool to help engineers and solution architects onboard customers - they spent two weeks setting up their Clay campaigns. They got to 50 qualified companies with lots of sales engineers. Each one had a persona they wanted to get in front of. They even had these slick AI-generated, personalized messages ready to fire out - exciting times, right? 

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From those 50 people they enrolled, they got 0 calls. Brutal…

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At this point in time, it would’ve been natural for them to jump on LinkedIn and say, “this thing doesn't work”. But honestly, people are spending so long setting this stuff up that it inflates their expectations, and then they throw in the towel.

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I said to them: “I could manually email 50 companies in a couple of days versus the two weeks it took you to set this up, right?”.  There’s absolutely no point doing this much work until you’ve nailed the right segment.

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But, if you're fully automating outbound LinkedIn and email with no humans involved, with something like Clay, getting a 2 to 3% response rate is pretty good. 

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This is where experimenting programmatically comes in. We need to quickly and cheaply start proving or disproving our hypotheses, with a view to finding GTM fit, then scaling what’s working.

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Struggles aside, this is truly easier and cheaper than ever in 2025.

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And we're not using programmatic outbound to deliver best in class performance, or the highest number of ops that we possibly can. 

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We're using it as a tool which will drive some demand, but more to help us quickly and statistically significantly validate where we should be investing our GTM dollars. 

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3. GTM yesterday vs GTM today 

To wrap this up with a comparison (and we’ll link to a second part about how you should actually be iterating towards GTM fit):

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Most commonly, I've seen people hire two SDRs, give them a tool to prospect from, give them a customer profile, and they manually/semi manually outreach to these people, maybe doing a few phone calls.

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This was the status quo even 1-2 short years ago.

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Then after 2 quarters you look for results and commonality. Usually, you’d be able to introduce enough tweaks, variables, and personalization along the way to draw confident conclusions from. 

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This was okay. 

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Many of us ran and scaled successful GTM motions working in this way. But we don't need to do that anymore. 

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Today, the way in which we're going to test our GTM hypothesis, or run GTM experiments into different segments, is we're going to start with the hypothesis themselves. 

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Data is better than it’s ever been before, allowing you to draw tight segments around different folks that you think you are uniquely positioned to serve. And we can then use tooling (not human efforts) to reach out to these folks in incredibly large quantities - super quickly and super cheaply.

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It's going to give us a direction of where we should double down, where we find success. And once you've found success, it's all about scaling up your investments, because you've seen the green shoots.

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This should accelerate the speed at which you can find some of that GTM fit, concurrently experimenting with a lot more different segments all at once,. 

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GTM struggles of 2025: Experimenting your way to GTM fit