In my experience there are few topics as misunderstood as "go-to-market." Ironically it's one of the more on the nose descriptions of an activity, but in practice, it's never very straightforward. For me, there are two major reasons for this confusion: one situational and one philosophical. Firstly, "go-to-market" contains multitudes. It's a very large bucket of activities rolled-up into a categorical treatment. But it also exists in multiple states: you can go-to-market (read: the self-contained activity), and you can be a go-to-market professional (read: the domain of work). There are go-to-market strategies, go-to-market plans, and go-to-market activities and they're all a bit different. Secondly, integrated and systematic activities confound the current organizational design paradigms. In pursuit of accountability all domains *demand* an owner (If you don't believe me, explain why the RACI matrix exists). This is especially present in software and SaaS organizations where specialization has lead to product and revenue teams that progressively bifurcate. Who owns GTM? Product? Marketing? Product Marketing? Product Management? What about Strategy or Finance? How can any one team own a domain of work? And what do you actually mean when you say "go-to-market?" Are you really talking about launching (and iterating on the launch of) a product? Or are you talking about the domain of work broadly concerned with successfully commercializing a *thing.* In many ways this challenge is indicative of a particular brand of narcissism rampant in the SaaS space right now—all things must be reinvented in the image of recurring revenue. One of the greatest decisions I've made in my (long-ish?) career was to spend some time away from software. In doing so, I made myself somewhat more impervious to this behavior. At the time of writing, SaaS is entirely consumed by the [[95/5 rule]], LinkedIn is a veritable pulpit with many a talking head pontificating about "#brand" vs. "#demand-generation." Software marketers are rediscovering decades-old research that has long been accepted as cannon in other industries: commercial success = mental availability + physical availability. The fact that we operate on the Internet™ has never precluded us from this truism, it just took broad market compression, and a changing capital investment paradigm to uncover our collective silliness. In the same way, "go-to-market" is a self-serving rebrand for which we can thank SaaS marketers. For many years, the pressure of [[predictable revenue]] (itself an oxymoron) pushed software marketers toward quantitative methods. I suspect this has a lot to do with the proliferation of "go-to-market." Marketers of the early 2010's were obsessed with earning a seat at the table, and in this pursuit, abandoned many of the fundamental practices of marketing for the less effective but infinitely more quantifiable practices of digital marketing. Existentially, it became much more in vogue to devote oneself to "go-to-market" rather than "marketing," the latter filled with so much fluffery. Marketing for me has always been an enterprise activity. Anyone who has worked with me will recognize my (maybe pedantic) reference of "Capital M" Marketing and "Lowercase m" marketing. Put another way, there's Marketing as an organizational pursuit and marketing as an execution of marketing work. If you're starting to notice some symmetry between "go-to-market" and "marketing" in this states of being line of inquiry, you're tracking the broad strokes. Pick up a marketing text book from the last 50 years and you'll learn about the P's. Any number of P's, actually, but the fundamental ones remain: products, place, price, promotion. That's quite a remit, and it begs the question, if this is marketing, what's go-to-market? At the risk of becoming the very thing I lampoon, I'll try to untangle this bag of snakes. First a few beliefs: - [i] Marketing is an enterprise activity fundamentally concerned with the commercial success of the business/product/service. - [i] Marketing as a discipline, is multi-faceted: it's a discipline made up of many disciplines and pursuits. - [i] "Go-to-Market" is a categorical treatment of those activities primarily concerned with high-level, organizational Marketing AND high quality marketing execution. It follows then that my personal philosophy is that as leaders, our role is to facilitate the businesses (M)arketing (commercial success), while directly ensuring high-quality (m)arketing (marketing execution). I'd argue that this is the spirit of what everyone refers to when they talk about "go-to-market." ## The future of GTM as an engineering challenge Where we sit in Q1 of 2025, many talking heads and organizations have adopted a new posture towards go-to-market work. We continue to adapt to a new paradigm in knowledge work—one largely assisted and facilitated by generative AI tools. On the heels of Clay's ~$1bn+ raise and valuation, the industry has well and truly minted the concept of "GTM Engineering." A quick search for GTM Engineering turns up a lot of top of funnel content, but the majority of the "what is GTM Engineering" content loosely conforms to how Clay defines GTM engineering. In so many words, GTM Engineering is a new discipline that collapses traditionally specialized sales functions (AE's, SE's, SDR's) into a single, high level function: >[!Quote]+ [At Clay, we’re pioneering this future with the industry’s first GTM Engineering team—a reimagining of traditional sales roles that collapses SDRs, AEs, and sales engineers into a single, high-leverage function.](https://www.clay.com/blog/gtm-engineering) Clay's focus on "revolutionizing selling" is an interesting positioning choice, and in it's narrowness you can see the roots of anger and discomfort a few GTM disciplines feel in this definition. So here's where we come back to the brand vs. demand argument in the context of go-to-market. A narrow definiti