Stop Running 2022 GTM in 2025: Make These 9 Shifts Now
GTM Shifts You’ll Need to Make.
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This week’s research note includes:
GTM Research: 9 GTM Shifts You’ll Need to Make by 2026
GTM OS Certified Partner Spotlight: Don Drury at Drury Advisors
Upcoming Events and Access
Research: 9 GTM Shifts You’ll Need to Make by 2026
We’re heading into the second half of 2025.
If you’re still running your GTM the same way you did in 2022, you’re already behind.
The pressure for efficient, profitable growth is higher than ever. Budgets are tighter. Buyers are more discerning. Board expectations haven’t let up. And across every industry, the same question is surfacing:
Why isn’t our go-to-market working like it used to?
Here’s the truth: the way people buy, sell, and build has changed—but most GTM strategies haven’t caught up.
The good news? There’s still time to fix it.
At GTM Partners, we’ve worked with hundreds of companies to decode what’s actually driving durable growth. The pattern is clear. The companies poised to win in 2026 are the ones making these 9 critical shifts—right now.
FROM Unpredictable Growth TO Profitable Growth at Scale
The old GTM model was built for speed, not sustainability.
But in today’s environment, speed alone won’t cut it. You need clarity. You need alignment. You need a strategy that scales without burning out your team or your budget.
These 9 shifts will get you there.
1. Overwhelming TAM → Clear TRM
Total Addressable Market (TAM) sounds great in a board presentation, but it rarely guides actual revenue decisions.
You can’t sell to everyone, and you shouldn’t try.
Winning companies are shifting to a Total Relevant Market (TRM) mindset—focusing on the real buyers that matter right now.
That means accounts with budget, urgency, alignment to your ICP, and actual buying intent. It’s the difference between casting a wide net and fishing where the fish are.
Learn more about the shift from TAM to TRM.
2. Everyone Owns GTM → CEO Owns GTM
Go-to-market used to be treated like a functional initiative—owned by marketing, driven by sales, ignored by leadership.
That model leads to confusion, misalignment, and missed goals. Today’s top-performing companies are making GTM a C-level priority, with the CEO at the center of the strategy.
This doesn’t mean micromanaging campaign details—it means owning the outcomes, holding leaders accountable, and making GTM execution a strategic, cross-functional priority.
(We said the CEO needed to own GTM for 2025 too, but it’s still rare enough, we need to repeat it!
3. Spammy Inbound/Outbound → Strategic 6 GTM Motions
The days of “more emails, more ads, more cold calls” are over. Buyers are smarter, channels are noisier, and generic outreach is ignored.
The modern GTM strategy is multi-modal and highly intentional. Companies are choosing from six proven GTM motions—inbound, outbound, product-led, event-led, partner-led, and community-led—and building a coordinated mix based on their market, their buyers, and their maturity.
No more random acts of marketing. Every motion must serve a purpose.
Learn more about the 6 GTM motions and how to use them.
4. Heroics Every Month → Repeatable GTM Plays
If your revenue results depend on end-of-quarter fire drills, you don’t have a strategy—you have adrenaline.
This "heroics" model burns out your people and breaks your forecasting. Modern GTM organizations are building libraries of tested, proven GTM plays that work across functions and across quarters.
They’re standardizing what works and creating repeatable systems for pipeline generation, deal acceleration, and customer expansion. Success isn’t a surprise anymore—it’s planned.
Read more: One-third of GTM leaders say they rely on sales heroics instead of repeatable plays.
5. Churn Is Killing Your Business → Clear ROI for Customer Stickiness
The cost of acquiring a customer is only going up. If you’re not keeping the ones you have, growth will always feel like a struggle.
Retention is now a GTM priority, not just a CS problem. Leading teams are designing onboarding, implementation, and engagement strategies to drive ROI fast—and prove it clearly.
When customers see value, they stay longer, expand faster, and refer more. Stickiness isn’t just a product thing. It’s a GTM outcome.
Get your 2025 ROI Playbook here.
6. Acquisition Hamster Wheel → NRR-Driven Growth
Too many companies are stuck in a loop of constant lead generation, chasing new logos to make up for poor retention. This model is expensive, exhausting, and inefficient.
By contrast, companies focused on Net Revenue Retention (NRR) are growing smarter.
They’re tracking expansion, upsell, and cross-sell as core revenue motions. They know that a 10% increase in NRR has more impact than 100 new leads. Growth through your existing base is more than possible—it’s essential.
Learn why NRR is the most important metric you need to grow.
7. Teams Running in Different Directions → GTM Dashboards Aligning Teams
Sales is reporting on revenue. Marketing is measuring MQLs. Customer success is tracking NPS. Everyone’s busy, but no one is truly aligned. This disconnect creates friction, missed handoffs, and fuzzy results.
High-performing teams are creating shared GTM dashboards that track leading indicators, lagging outcomes, and mutual goals across the funnel. Everyone can see what’s working, what’s not, and what comes next.
Alignment isn’t a vibe. It’s a visibility issue—and dashboards fix it.
8. Smart Individual Contributors → Team Transformation
Having a few A-players on your team used to be enough. Not anymore. Today’s GTM environment is too complex, too cross-functional, and too collaborative to rely on lone wolves.
Leading companies are investing in full-team enablement, shared frameworks, and cultural norms that support alignment and accountability. They’re creating environments where teams—not just individuals—perform at a high level.
GTM transformation doesn’t start with hiring better people. It starts with building better teams.
Read 15 Beliefs of High-Performing Teams
9. Activity Obsession → Outcome Obsession
The old way of working measured effort—emails sent, calls made, posts published.
But activity doesn’t equal impact.
Modern GTM leaders are shifting to an outcome-first mindset.
Every initiative must be tied to pipeline, conversion, retention, or revenue.
Marketing doesn’t just create content—they generate SQLs. Sales doesn’t just book meetings—they close business. Customer success doesn’t just manage accounts—they increase lifetime value.
If you can’t tie the work to a measurable result, it’s probably not worth doing.
Get KPIs for each of the 6 GTM Motions.
You Still Have Time to Make These Shifts
Most companies feel stuck right now—not because they’re doing the wrong things, but because they’re doing too many things without a clear GTM system.
The nine shifts outlined above aren’t aspirational. They’re practical, achievable, and urgent.
If you want help making them happen inside your business, GTM University is built for exactly that. It’s where ambitious leaders go to level up their GTM strategy, get clarity on what works, and implement change that actually sticks.
Take the Next Step: Join GTM University
If you’re ready to stop guessing and start operating with precision, GTM University is where it begins.
GTM University is built on the GTM Operating System™—a proven, stage-based framework for aligning your teams, defining your strategy, and executing efficiently across the entire revenue engine.
Our on-demand and live courses are designed for operators, executives, and RevOps professionals who are tired of reactivity and ready to lead.
Your playbook for efficient growth is here. Learn how to use it.
GTM Certified Partner Spotlight: Drury Advisors
Fractional Revenue Leadership & Scaling Expertise
Drury Advisors helps B2B startups and scale-ups accelerate growth with battle-tested go-to-market strategies and hands-on revenue leadership. Founded by seasoned sales executive Don Drury, the firm brings decades of experience in building high-performing sales teams, optimizing GTM operations, and unlocking revenue potential.
Whether you need a fractional CRO to guide your team, a fresh GTM playbook to improve execution, or a strategic advisor to help you scale with confidence, Drury Advisors delivers practical, no-fluff support tailored to your growth stage.
Looking to scale smarter, not just faster?
Learn more: Drury Advisors Partner Page →
If you’d like to be a certified GTM Partner like Don Drury and many others, we’d love to talk to you about how to make that happen.
Upcoming Events: Where We’ll Be Speaking in 2025
(DM Sangram for a discount code to attend or to get slides after the talk)
Summer is usually a bit quieter for events, but it’s not too early to grab tickets for the Fall schedule:
Revenue Growth Summit (hosted by HGInsights), July 14-16, Palo Alto
Operationalizing Your GTM with Data (hosted by ScaleMatters), July 30
INBOUND (hosted by Hubspot), September 3-5, San Francisco
DRIVE 2025 (hosted by Exit Five). September 10-11, Burlington, VT
Usage Economy Summit (hosted by LogiSense) Nov 5, San Francisco
Love,
Sangram and Bryan
p.s. Access GTM University | Hire GTM OS Certified Partners | Read Fractional Friday
Just when you think you know something, the customer goes ahead and changes *EVERYTHING* on you! hahah... so true. Worth acknowledging and calling out what needs to happen. Reminds me of how we used to look at data like a pile of gold you can hoard and sit on. But it's not true, because that data is getting old and disappearing quickly!