You Don't Have a GTM Strategy. You Have a Marketing Plan.
How GTM strategy got collapsed into “the marketing plan” and what it’s costing manufacturers
I've walked into companies that have been through 3 marketing leaders in 5 years and still can't figure out why revenue isn't moving. The function keeps getting blamed. The architecture never gets fixed.
Walk into 10 manufacturers and ask for their GTM strategy. 8 will hand you a marketing plan. 1 will hand you a sales forecast. The 10th will tell you it’s still a work in progress.
None of those are GTM strategies.
The gap between what GTM actually is and what most manufacturers have built is where revenue growth stalls.
GTM strategy is not a marketing strategy. It’s not a sales strategy either. It’s a business operating model for revenue creation, one that sits above any single function and governs how all of them work together to win.
In building products and construction, where the path from manufacturer to end customer runs through dealers, distributors, contractors, builders, architects, and specifiers (sometimes all of them on the same project) that operating model isn’t optional. It’s the only thing that connects a complex channel to a coherent revenue motion.
When it doesn’t exist, every function builds its own version and runs in its own direction.
What Breaks When GTM Gets Collapsed Into One Function
In this industry, the owning function is almost always sales or operations. The CCO, CGO and CRO titles often don't exist. Marketing departments are small and tactical. Someone has to own GTM, and those are the functions with a seat at the table.
The plan that gets built reflects what those functions can see. Brand positioning, demand creation, and channel pull-through stay underdeveloped because they're outside the owning function's expertise.
A few things break on a predictable schedule.
Sales builds its own strategy in parallel. Without a shared GTM model, the sales team develops its own ICP definition, its own channel priorities, its own messaging. Dealers get inconsistent stories. Reps go off-script because the script doesn't match the deals they're actually closing.
Operations optimizes for capacity, not customer. When ops owns GTM, production efficiency wins over market opportunity. Pricing follows cost-plus logic instead of channel value. Channel decisions favor distribution ease over commercial positioning. Capacity utilization becomes the proxy for success, even when share of wallet is shrinking.
Product doesn't know what to build. Roadmap decisions happen disconnected from the commercial strategy. Features get built for segments the company isn't really prioritizing. Pricing doesn't match how the channel actually transacts.
The CEO blames marketing. Even when marketing barely exists. Marketing is the cheapest place to assign blame when revenue stalls. Small footprint, hard to attribute, easy to "fix" by replacing the person. It gets handed a GTM-sized problem with a marketing-sized budget. Results look underwhelming. Not because marketing failed. Because the scope was wrong from day one.
Marketing leadership cycles out. Whoever holds the title gets replaced. A new lead comes in. The same structural problem stays in place. The cycle repeats on about an 18-month clock.
The Strategic GTM Seat Keeps Going Unfilled
The truth about the CMO role in B2B and manufacturing is that the strategic version, the one that actually owns the cross-functional GTM model, has always been rare.
Sales has historically owned the customer relationship and the revenue number. Marketing has been treated as a sales support function. Even when CMOs sit at the executive table, most of them spend their days on brand, demand gen, content, and MarTech rather than the operating model that should sit above all of that.
What’s changed in the last 5 years or so is that the gap finally got named, and the title structure shifted to match. The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), chief Growth Officer (CGO), and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) titles emerged to consolidate sales, marketing, customer success, and sometimes product under one revenue leader.
Sometimes that works. Sometimes it produces a sales-led GTM in different clothing, one that misses what the marketing lens actually brings to the table. Buyer psychology. Segmentation. Positioning. The difference between a campaign and a category position.
That gap is the work I do. I sit in it as a Commercial Growth Advisor focused on GTM, the strategic partner that defines how a company creates revenue cross-functionally, then translates that operating model back into the companies positioning, channel strategy, product roadmap, messaging, campaigns that make it land across every audience.
GTM Strategy Lives Across 8 Domains, not 1
A GTM strategy in building and industrial products has to answer a specific set of questions. Not generic B2B questions. Channel-shaped, manufacturer-shaped, project-shaped questions.
Every company is operating across all 8 of these whether the strategy is named or not:
1. Who the company is built for.
Not just the end customer. The dealer, the contractor, the spec writer, the project owner. ICP at every layer of the channel.
2. Where the company places its bets.
Channel allocation, segment priority, geographic focus, investment by motion. Where the dollars and the headcount go.
3. The story and the pull.
Brand positioning that holds across the channel and demand creation that pulls through it, not around it.
4. From sample to specification to PO.
How a project, quote, or sample request actually moves through the system to a closed order. Stage by stage.
5. From PO to install.
How the end customer and the channel partner realize the value they bought. Installation support, contractor enablement, dealer onboarding.
6. Repeat business and wallet share.
How existing dealers grow. How existing customers come back. The motion that turns one project into the next.
7. The operational spine.
CRM, channel data, attribution, measurement. The infrastructure that makes the whole model visible.
8. How the org actually runs.
The governance and cadence that keeps marketing, sales, ops, product, and customer support coordinated. The handoffs. The decision rights.
Marketing has a role in all 8. Sales has a role in all 8. Product, ops, and customer support each have roles in most of them.
If any one function is “owning” the GTM strategy for all 8, you don’t have a GTM strategy. You have that function’s interpretation of one.
Building the System in the Right Order
The work is straightforward, but the sequence matters.
Start with the business strategy. Where is the company going? What does winning look like in measurable terms? Which markets, which channels, which segments?
Then build the GTM strategy as a cross-functional operating model. Marketing, sales, ops, product, and customer support in the same room, defining who you sell to, how you reach them, and how the org works together to win. This is the layer that gets skipped most often, and it’s the layer that makes everything else work.
Then let each function build its strategy inside that model. Marketing knows its lane. Sales knows its lane. Ops, product, and customer support know their roles. The system is legible to everyone operating inside it.
Then build the operational infrastructure underneath. Process, data, tech, measurement.
Each layer informs the next. Each layer has a different owner. And no single function gets asked to carry the weight of the whole system on its own but it needs coordination and facilitation.
Ask Yourself This Question
If you lead a building products manufacturer and the marketing investment hasn’t been producing the revenue growth you expected, ask this before you change the strategy, the agency, or the leader:
Do we actually have a GTM strategy? Or do we have a marketing plan and a sales forecast running on separate tracks?
Because if a single function could own it, it wasn’t one.
Tell me in the comments: who owns the GTM strategy inside your company today? And does everyone else in the room agree?
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You can find me here: www.dhxconsulting.com