GTM is getting redefined every 6 months in this rapid era of LLM in services and delivery, informational overload, signal noise, the “dead Internet theory”, different ways to consume, buy, sell, operate, and act.
Especially valid for revenue-generating roles: SDRs, BDRs, VPs of sales, any form of outbound experts – even performance marketing value creation partners on commissions.
In M&A, this can backfire at a larger scale.
The thesis says the acquired company’s install base gets upsold into the platform’s premium tier.
Six months in, the original sales team still closes at the old price because nobody changed their comp plan, and the new product team never trained them on positioning.
Why put the effort if the old pipeline generates predictable returns at low effort?
A $50M health-tech platform bought a smaller competitor to upsell its 1,200 provider customers.
Eighteen months later, upsell attach sat at 11% because the onboarding workflow still pointed to the legacy product and the CRM didn’t flag eligible accounts.
Incentives should be aligned on all levels.
Paycheck on autopilot means that effort will decrease over time, reaching a desaturation point of no work done for recurring revenue.
Commission-based deals with the wrong incentive will equally point SDRs toward opportunities to maximize income with the least effort.
Even in a turbulent market with layoffs, restructuring, augmenting agents, retraining team behavior may lag with years. Proactive enforcement goes a long way when operators take this problem seriously.
