Because if go-to-market is still treated as a department initiative, you don’t really have a go-to-market strategy. You have a collection of activities and a recurring hope for growth.
Because if Go-To-Market is still treated as a department initiative, you don’t really have a go-to-market strategy. You have a collection of activities, a set of dashboards, and a recurring hope that “more leads” or “more reps” will somehow fix a system-level problem.
That is exactly why I felt genuinely honored to host Sangram Vajre in Episode 6 of Curious by Nature. Sangram is the Co-founder & CEO of GTM Partners, Co-founder of Terminus, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book MOVE: The 4-Question Go-To-Market Framework, and a LinkedIn Top Voice who has been invited to speak at HubSpot INBOUND conference. More importantly, he has spent years translating messy GTM reality into frameworks executives can actually use to create clarity, alignment, and results.
I’m grateful he accepted my invitation, and even more grateful for how openly he shared the hard parts: the near-misses, the reinventions, and the lessons that don’t fit neatly into a keynote.
Episode 6 with Sangram Vajre is live now: Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
About the guest
Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners, co-founder of Terminus, and a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of MOVE: The 4-Question Go-To-Market Framework. In the episode, he shares how his career evolved from marketing execution to building frameworks and operating systems that help executive teams align, simplify, and scale.
Why this episode matters for executives and boards right now
Going into 2026, most B2B SaaS leadership teams are navigating three pressures at the same time:
- The end of “growth at all costs.” Efficient growth is no longer optional.
- AI pressure. Everyone feels they must “do AI,” even when nobody can explain what measurable impact it has.
- A GTM system that was built for a different era. The playbooks of 2015–2020 still show up in org charts, incentives, and dashboards, even if buyer behavior has changed.
Sangram’s point is direct: AI is not the main problem. A lack of strategic clarity and an incoherent operating system is.
Watch it on Spotify by opening the episode on the Spotify App
From $350 to GTM OS: His journey behind the frameworks
We start the conversation where most podcasts do not.
Sangram grew up in India, came to the US after advice from his brother around the post-9/11 shift, did his master’s, and discovered marketing as a craft. One of his early defining roles was at Pardot, which later became part of ExactTarget and then acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 Billion. That gave him his first exit and the confidence to build something bigger.
From there, he co-founded Terminus, raised serious capital, and helped shape how the market thinks about ABM. Along the way he became an accidental “chief evangelist,” not because he chased a title, but because someone had to “carry the gospel” of a new category into the market.
He also shares the less glamorous parts: moments where the company had a week of cash left, and the gut-punch realization that every growth stage requires reinvention, not just scaling what used to work.
One of the most powerful questions in the early part of the episode is this:
“Are you growing as fast as your company is growing?”
It’s not a motivational quote. It’s a board-level risk question.
The core reframe: GTM is the business, and the CEO must own it
One of the most useful segments for founders, CEOs, and boards is when Sangram breaks the myth that go-to-market equals marketing.
His logic is disarmingly simple:
- Who decides whether you invest more in marketing or sales? The CEO.
- Who decides whether you open a new region? The CEO.
- Who decides pricing changes, packaging, or acquisition strategy? The CEO.
Those are go-to-market decisions. So the CEO owns go-to-market, whether they admit it or not.
This is not semantics. It changes how you structure accountability, decision-making cadence, and what “alignment” actually means.
What’s broken in GTM, and how GTM Partners diagnoses it
Sangram explains that GTM problems are rarely solved by adding activity. They are solved by forcing clarity and focus at the executive level.
He shares a practical, repeatable diagnostic approach, built to reduce noise and remove “department theatre”:
- Start with 15 common GTM problems. Pick the top 3 as an executive team. If everyone picks different problems, you cannot fix anything.
- Identify which of the “five valleys of death” you’re in. You might “market but can’t sell,” “sell but can’t renew,” “renew but can’t expand,” and so on.
- Answer the GTM OS questions with extreme clarity. One to two bullets each, no essays. Debate is a feature, not a bug.
- Then design one to two 90-day priorities and stop everything else from hijacking focus.
This is where many companies fail. They run ten projects with incremental movement and conclude that “nothing works.” In reality, the system is never allowed to concentrate energy long enough to create a visible shift.
For a board, this is a useful lens: if the company has “many initiatives” but no meaningful change, you’re often looking at a focus problem disguised as a strategy problem.
AI and GTM: why most initiatives fail, and what to redesign first
This episode does not treat AI like magic dust.
Sangram shares a moment from a keynote that says a lot about the current state of AI adoption: everyone claims they’re implementing AI, everyone claims it’s boosting productivity, but nobody feels more productive. People feel more exhausted.
His explanation is blunt: execution is running ahead of strategy. AI is being applied to broken processes and misaligned goals, so it accelerates noise.
Then he goes concrete. Before AI is “added,” several legacy structures should be redesigned or decommissioned:
- The SDR function, as commonly designed, because it often produces more spam than signal.
- The obsession with MQL/SQL, static lead scoring, and outdated nurturing logic.
- The executive-level obsession with ARR as the North Star, which can produce inefficiency and fragility.
His alternative North Star is clear: NRR (Net Revenue Retention) and, in many cases, usage as a health signal.
For boards, that has immediate implications: if you keep rewarding ARR growth while ignoring retention quality and expansion mechanics, you are incentivizing a revenue engine that looks good short-term and collapses quietly later.
Designing GTM for 2026: partner-led, PLG, workflows, and “services as software”
When we move into GTM motions, Sangram outlines six common motions they see in research: PLG, inbound, outbound, community-led, partner-led, and more.
His strong view: partner-led is increasingly powerful in the post “best-of-breed” era, because buyers are exhausted. They want integrated workflows, fewer logins, and fewer tools to stitch together.
He also introduces a concept that many leadership teams underestimate: the rise of services as software. Instead of buying a stack of tools and hiring a small army to run them, more companies will pay for outcomes delivered by specialized operators who bring the tools, the process, and the iteration loop.
This is not a small trend. It affects how you plan headcount, where expertise lives, and how you test go-to-market bets without committing to two-year tool contracts.
A board-level checklist you can steal right now
If you’re a CEO, executive team member, or board member, here are a few questions from this episode you can use immediately:
- Who owns GTM decisions, really, and do we operate like it?
- What are our top 3 GTM problems, and does the full exec team agree?
- Which valley of death are we in, specifically?
- Do we have a single executive GTM dashboard, or fragmented department dashboards?
- Is NRR and usage treated as a true North Star, or a footnote?
- What are we willing to stop for 90 days to create real focus?
If those questions trigger discomfort, good. Growth tends to start there.
Listen to Episode 6
If you lead a B2B SaaS company, sit on a board, or are responsible for revenue outcomes in 2025, I believe this episode will give you both strategic reframes and concrete moves.
🎧 Episode 6 with Sangram Vajre is live now:
👉 Listen on Spotify
👉 Listen on Apple Podcasts
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