Your GTM strategy isn’t broken. Your relevance to your market is.

Most GTM strategies fail for a reason nobody wants to put in the post-mortem. The channels were right. The messaging was on brand. The process was followed, the campaigns went out, the CRM was full of activity. And it still didn’t land.

The instinct is to blame execution. Wrong channel mix. Wrong cadence. Not enough content. Sales weren’t fast enough on the follow-up. All fixable, all tactical, all missing the actual problem.

The actual problem sits underneath all of it. If your positioning isn’t relevant, at brand level, business level or product level, no amount of channel optimisation will save the strategy. You’ll just get better at executing something the market doesn’t care about.

Activity was never the problem

Most B2B businesses I meet already have plenty of activity.

Campaigns running. Content going out on schedule. Events in the diary. A CRM full of data nobody quite trusts. Sales chasing, marketing generating demand in a market that’s harder to reach than it’s ever been.

Activity isn’t the issue. Coordination isn’t even the issue, most of the time. The issue is that all of that activity is pointing at a position that isn’t relevant to the person on the other end of it.

You can run a flawless campaign against the wrong problem. You can write brilliant content that nobody recognises themselves in. You can build a slick nurture sequence that nurtures prospects gently toward a decision they were never going to make, because what you’re offering doesn’t map to what they’re actually feeling.

Execution can only ever be as good as the position it’s executing.

Relevance is doing more work than differentiation

I was on a call recently with a CMO I’ve known for years, who’s just stepped into a big brand-side marketing role after a career built across some of the UK’s best-known consumer brands.

I asked what he was hearing most from other senior marketers.

Not trust, which is what you’d expect him to say. Relevance.

His point was simple, and it’s stuck with me. Buyers are one click away from something else. In a market that’s more price-conscious and more saturated than it’s been in years, differentiation on its own doesn’t hold attention long enough to matter.

What holds attention is a business that clearly understands the specific pressure you’re under, right now, and shows up like it.

That’s relevance. Not a strapline. Not a value proposition slide with three adjectives on it. A demonstrated understanding of the buyer’s exact problem, delivered at the exact moment they’re feeling it.

Miss that, and you can have the best messaging in your category and still be background noise.

Positioning operates at three levels

This is where most GTM strategies quietly come apart, because positioning isn’t one thing. It sits at three levels, and every one of them has to be relevant, not just accurate.

Brand relevance is the territory you own

Brand level positioning is why your business exists at all, and what territory you’re credibly allowed to own in the market. This is the level that was wrong in the packaging pitch above. A brand can be famous and still be irrelevant to the specific buyer standing in front of it.

Business relevance is why you, right now

Business level positioning is why you, specifically, in this market, right now, for this buyer, as opposed to the ten other credible options they could pick instead. Relevance at this level is as much about timing as it is about capability.

Product relevance is why this solves it

Product level positioning is why this particular solution solves this particular problem for this particular person, in language that matches how they actually describe the problem to themselves. This is the level most content and campaigns operate at, and the one most likely to drift out of relevance first.

Why all three need to hold together

A GTM strategy can be executed perfectly and still fail if any one of those three is out of step with the others, or out of step with what the buyer is currently feeling.

Channels, messaging and process are the delivery mechanism. Positioning is the thing being delivered. Get the delivery mechanism world-class and point it at a stale or irrelevant position, and you’ve just built a very efficient way of being ignored.

Take a business selling cyber security services into mid-market financial services. Brand relevance might be built around trust and pedigree, which is fine as far as it goes.

Business relevance has to answer why this firm, not the three other credible security consultancies that the CFO has already spoken to this quarter. Product relevance has to speak to the specific compliance deadline or specific breach risk keeping that buyer up at night, not a general description of the service catalogue.

Three levels, three different relevance tests. Most businesses have only done the work on one of them, usually brand, and assumed the rest would follow. It doesn’t follow. Each level has to be built deliberately, and each one has to still feel relevant when the buyer checks it against their own experience of actually working with you.

Sales gets predictable when everything stays relevant

There’s a reason we built our own business around the idea of buyability rather than sales technique. Sales gets predictable when every campaign, every conversation and every follow-up makes you easier to buy from, not harder to ignore.

That only happens when the problem you claim to solve, the demand your marketing creates, the content that nurtures interest and the conversations your sales team is having all point at the same relevant position.

The moment any one of those drifts, the buyer feels the inconsistency even if they can’t name it. Marketing is talking about one problem. Sales is pitching a slightly different one. The website describes a third. None of it is dishonest. It’s just misaligned, and misalignment is exhausting to buy from.

Fix the position first, and that alignment becomes the easy part. The content has one job. The campaigns have one angle. The sales team has one story to tell, because it’s the true one.

Where positioning connects, everything downstream gets easier

When positioning is genuinely relevant, at all three levels, the rest of the GTM engine stops fighting itself.

Content has a sharper job because it’s not guessing what to say. Campaigns have a clearer angle because the problem being solved is named, not implied. Sales conversations start faster because the buyer already recognises the problem before the call starts.

Nobody’s persuading anybody of anything. The recognition’s already happened.

That’s the test worth running before you touch a single channel. Read your own positioning back and ask whether a buyer would see their specific problem reflected in it within five seconds. Not your category. Not a version of the problem broad enough to fit anyone. Their problem, as they’d describe it to a colleague under pressure.

If you can’t say specifically who that buyer is and what pressure they’re under this quarter, you don’t have a targeting problem. You have a relevance problem, and no amount of campaign volume closes that gap.

Let's wrap this up

This isn’t an argument for stopping execution and disappearing into another six months of positioning workshops. Plenty of businesses use “getting the positioning right” as a way of avoiding the harder work of going to market at all.

It’s an argument for sequencing the work correctly. Before you brief the next campaign, pressure test the position it’s built on. Before you rewrite the website copy, check whether the problem on the homepage is the one your best clients actually had, or a flattering description of what you do. Before you scale outreach, make sure the message being scaled is relevant enough to survive contact with a busy, sceptical, one-click-away buyer.

Get that sequencing right, and GTM stops being a bet on volume. It becomes a bet on relevance, executed consistently. That’s a bet worth scaling.

The engine doesn’t fix the position. The position decides whether the engine was worth building in the first place.

If your GTM results have gone flat, don’t start with the channel mix. Start with the question underneath it.

Is what we’re saying still relevant to what our buyer needs to hear right now, or is it just the thing we’re comfortable saying.