What Smart CEOs Know: Scaling GTM Can Kill You If You're Not Ready

Scaling go-to-market (GTM) is like a deadlift: one flaw in your form, and everything collapses. The era of “growth at all costs” is long gone, shattered by a market that now punishes inefficiency with ruthless precision. Today, the edge isn’t just in scaling. It’s in scaling with control. For CEOs, this means transforming GTM from a sprawling machine into a lean, powerful athlete.

But how do you test its true fitness before betting the company’s future on it?

Every CEO wants to scale GTM. Few are ready. Before you invest another dollar, run this 30-second assessment I call the Golden Ticket, a diagnostic I picked up decades ago at i2 Technologies, one of the fastest-scaling B2B companies of its time. It hasn’t failed me since. I’ve run it in boardrooms, pipeline reviews, and war rooms. If you can't pass it cold, you’re not ready to scale.

• Why would a buyer do anything at all? (Compelling event or intolerable pain?)
• Why now? (What’s the cost of inaction?)
• Why with you? (Undeniable value against all other options, including doing nothing?)

Pause here for 30 seconds. No, really. Can you, as CEO, answer these three questions with absolute clarity, backed by hard, recent evidence from your team and your customers? If there’s even a flicker of hesitation, if the answers feel more like internal narratives than market-validated truths, you’re already feeling the first tremor of inefficiency.

Smart CEOs understand that building a GTM physique that’s lean, powerful, and injury-proof is the new imperative. In today’s capital-efficient market, most GTM programs don’t need more reps or heavier weights. They need a rebuilt core and flawless form. Scaling before your GTM is ready is like attempting a new personal record on your deadlift with garbage form: expensive, demoralizing, and often fatal to your progress.

“Speed without efficiency is just a faster path to injury — or failure.”

Real-World Flashback: The Golden Ticket in Action

We were days from launch. Budget approved. Headcount committed. Sales team hyped. But when we ran the Golden Ticket, we uncovered a fatal gap: no urgency. No "why now." We paused the rollout, rebuilt urgency into the messaging, and re-segmented. Outcome? We avoided five bad hires, cut marketing waste, and created momentum with half the spend.

Smart GTM isn’t louder. It’s leaner, faster, sharper.It’s like the gym: bad form + more reps = injury. Bad GTM + more spend = failure.

In part two of this series, we championed GTM speed: how designing for agility compounds growth. But what happens when you try to stack on more weight before mastering the fundamental movement, revealing every inefficiency in your technique? You get devastating waste. Wasted capital. Wasted talent. Wasted market windows. That’s why scaling your GTM before rigorously pressure-testing its core components is like attempting a new personal record on your deadlift with poor technique. Looks intense. Ends in injury.

The 4 Silent Killers of GTM Efficiency

These are the most common, and most expensive, forms of waste I see inside scaling B2B tech companies:

1. Wrong Customers: You’re not building strength; you’re just inviting imbalances and eventual strains (churn). Your team burns out performing exercises that won't lead to competitive gains, chasing ill-fitting customers who never stick around. Looks like a lot of activity. Feels like progress. It’s not.
2. Siloed Teams: Sales blames marketing. Marketing blames sales. CS is stuck in the middle. It's like your upper body and lower body are trying to lift the same weight but are completely out of sync – nothing moves efficiently, and something is bound to strain. Pipeline slows, morale drops, millions leak. Alignment isn’t a tech fix; it’s a CEO mandate.
3. Tech Bloat: AI. ABM. CRM. CDP. Love the fancy gear? Check your burn. Up to 60% of enterprise software features go unused. It’s like having a state-of-the-art gym filled with expensive machines, but 60% of them are just gathering dust or used as coat racks. If your tools aren’t making you stronger or more efficient, they’re just an expensive display. Is your tech stack a high-performance training center, or a museum of good intentions slowly gathering dust?
4. Fighting Last Year's War: If your pitch still speaks to 2024 pain, but your buyer’s world has shifted, you’re not scaling, you’re stalling. Your GTM strategy needs to adapt to current conditions like a dynamic training plan, targeting today's specific weaknesses and opportunities for strength gains.

What Smart CEOs Do Before Scaling

Scaling smart means perfecting your form and removing sticking points in your lift before you even think about adding more plates to the bar. Smart CEOs don’t scale on “top-of-funnel” metrics. They scale on retention-adjusted revenue velocity, because volume without stickiness is just noise. The best operators I’ve worked with do four things exceptionally well:

1. Obsess over Value, Not Volume: Don’t just hunt big logos. Look for fit. Who gets real value, renews fast, and refers others? Focus marketing, sales, and success here. Watch NRR (Net Revenue Retention) by segment: If it’s flat, you’re chasing the wrong crowd.
2. Fix Friction First: Like lifting with bad form, a sloppy GTM burns effort, not results. Map the friction. Call out inefficiencies. Get an outside perspective. Fractional GTM pros can accelerate this refinement at half the cost of full-time hires, and at twice the speed.
3. Delay Headcount Until Ready: Don’t scale noise. Nail ICP, messaging, onboarding, and qualification first. Then accelerate.
4. Sharpshooters, Not Sledgehammers: Once your technique is flawless and your core strength is solid, then you can strategically increase the intensity or load. Use AI to pinpoint areas of maximum leverage, like a skilled coach identifying the exact adjustment needed for a breakthrough gain. No wasted motion. No ego lifting. Just results. For example: one client clarified their ICP, redesigned GTM flow, and consolidated their stack — cutting GTM spend by 30% and doubling pipeline velocity in 60 days.

Ask yourself - and your team - today. You may be surprised with what you hear.

The New Mandate: Lean, Not Just Loud

Precision scales. Waste compounds. Knowing the difference is crucial and paying for both is catastrophic.

Remember, scaling doesn’t fix a broken GTM. It just amplifies its cost. And in today’s market, loud doesn’t win, lean does. The companies that figure this out now? They won’t just survive; they’ll lap the field.

If you're a CEO betting your next quarter on GTM performance and haven’t pressure-tested your motion in the last 90 days, now’s the time. That’s where the next conversation starts. In this market, building a GTM with a strong core and flawless form isn't just about winning; it's about survival and enduring market leadership.

P.S. Want the ultimate litmus test for your GTM’s underlying fitness and your team's alignment? Ask them this one question in your next leadership meeting: “If market conditions (or our board) demanded we cut all discretionary GTM spend by 30% tomorrow, yet still hit our core growth targets, what ONE current activity, system, or headcount area would we immediately sacrifice to protect and amplify our absolute core strengths?” The quality, speed, and (most importantly) the alignment of their answers will tell you more about your GTM's true readiness and efficiency than a thousand dashboards.

About the Series

In this series, Modernizing Your Go-to-Market: A CEO's Guide to Sustainable Growth, we are exploring a blueprint for modernizing GTM with agility, precision, and scalable expertise. CEO are seeking smarter, more sustainable growth in an environment where buyer behavior and technologies have dramatically changed, but most GTM strategies haven’t. Each article dives into one of the five market trends reshaping GTM in 2025.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the leaders whose real-world trenches sharpen this thinking. This series evolves with our conversations – the landscape shifts too fast for static thought.

Originally published on the LinkedIn platform by Charlie Latch.