When I sit down with company leaders, those growth conversations typically start in the wrong place. Here’s what I mean.

Usually, a founder or a VP of Sales looks at a stagnating pipeline, and reaches for the nearest lever.

“We need more leads.”

This is followed by the tactical scramble. More SDRs. More ad spend. A more aggressive outbound sequence. A sudden pivot into ABM because they heard it on a podcast.

But if we’re being honest, most teams don’t actually have a lead problem. They have a mismatch problem.

They say they want to move upmarket or reach a more sophisticated buyer, but they are still running the exact same sales motion they used for their last ICP. They are using the same channels, the same messaging style, the same follow-up cadence, and the same expectations around speed.

Then they wonder why everything feels like it's dragging through mud.

The reality is that your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) cannot be a line item in a spreadsheet that lives independently of your execution.

Your ICP is the gravity that dictates how everything else in your orbit must move. If your ICP changes and your sales motion doesn't, you aren't scaling…

A lot of teams treat Go-To-Market (GTM) like a fixed system. They find a motion that works once. Usually, in the early days of founder-led sales or when selling to a very specific, high-intent early-adopter group.

And they get attached to it.

They build a machine around it. They hire for it. They measure success based on it.

Then, they try to force every subsequent buyer through that same machine.

This works for a while. It usually works right up until the buyer gets more sophisticated, the ACV (Annual Contract Value) goes up, or the founder is no longer the only one carrying the sale.

That is the moment where the friction starts.

Nothing looks completely broken. The lights are still on. But nothing feels clean either.

I call this the Product-Market Fit trap. You have the product, and you have the market, but the bridge between them (the motion) has decayed.

To understand why this happens, we have to look at the psychological requirements of different buyers. This isn't just about company size. It's about the burden of the decision.

If you’re selling to a founder at a $5M–$20M company, or a department lead with a specific, bleeding-neck problem, the motion should be direct.

This buyer doesn’t need a six-part nurture sequence. They don’t want to read a 40-page research report before they’ll hop on a call. In fact, over-producing the process actually hurts you here. To this buyer, the process feels like a drag.

They need 3 things.

They need to feel like you understand the problem fast and can solve it without creating more work for them. This buyer responds to sharp outbound, clear positioning, and content that reflects real operator insight.

If you can show them you’ve solved their exact problem for someone they respect, the deal is halfway done.

But once you move upmarket, the game changes entirely.

Now, you aren’t just selling to a person. You’re selling to a nervous system of interconnected stakeholders.

You might have a VP who holds the budget, a Director who feels the operational pain, and a Procurement or IT head who needs to bless the decision.

This buyer doesn't value speed in the same way. They value Alignment and Risk Mitigation.

They need proof. They need evidence that your solution won’t just work in a vacuum, but will hold up across multiple functions. They need to see how you think before they ever trust you with their data or their reputation.

If you try to use the direct SMB motion on this buyer, you come across as amateur or, worse, risky. You’re trying to force an enterprise trust-building exercise through a transactional outreach system.

Same offer. Same product. But if you use the same motion, you will fail.

This is why I’m always cautious when companies say they want to do more content or add outbound.

Cool. But those are just tactics. Tactics are the how, but the motion is the why.

If your ICP is wrong for the motion, every tactic downstream gets weaker.

The disconnect shows up in very predictable, very frustrating ways:

Predictable pipeline is not created by stacking tactics until the wall is high enough. It comes from Alignment.

When you get back to the foundations, you start to ask the right questions:

When those are answered, your GTM strategy reveals itself.

You know where attention should come from. You know what kind of proof actually matters. You know whether content is supposed to generate demand, support demand, or simply make the sale easier once the conversation has already started.

You stop expecting every buyer to respond to the same playbook.

If pipeline feels harder than it should right now, stop looking at your "leads" and start looking at the relationship between your ICP and your motion.

Are you trying to sell bigger deals with an SMB motion? Are you trying to sell consultative work with transactional outreach? Are you trying to force enterprise trust-building through a "hustle" system that no longer scales?

"Shhhessh" is the sound of a team realizing they’ve been running the wrong race for 6 months.

If we’re being honest, a lot of “we need more leads” conversations are really “we haven’t updated our motion to match the buyer we say we want.”

Updating your motion isn't a small detail or a tweak for Q2 or Q3.

The relationship between your buyer and how you sell to them is the strategy.

Everything else is just typing.

If you can align those 2 things… the buyer and the motion… sales start to feel cleaner. Not easy. Never easy. But cleaner.

You’ll find that when you stop fighting the way your buyer wants to buy, they start finding it a lot easier to say yes.

I recently joined Lee Levitt on Thoughts on Selling to talk about a problem that hides inside a lot of pipeline conversations. Your best leads may not be bad leads at all. They may be getting wasted by a broken sales and marketing system.

We got into what happens when marketing is measured on volume instead of revenue, why customer success should be feeding your best messaging and sales enablement, and how AI can help teams pull real buying language out of sales calls instead of guessing.

If pipeline feels noisy, conversion feels inconsistent, or sales and marketing still operate like separate departments, this conversation is for you.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here

To scale from $1M to $15M+, you have to stop relying on Founder Heroics and start installing a repeatable GTM Operating System. Most companies stall at the 7-figure mark because the hustle and random acts of marketing that got them there aren't built for volume or delegation.

The transition requires shifting from a person-dependent business to a system-dependent one. This happens across three pillars:

The Bottom Line: You don't need more tactics. You need a growth engine where the right buyer, motion, and message are perfectly aligned.

👉 [Read the GTM Playbook]