Sep 23, 2026 · 6 min read
9 GTM mistakes founders keep repeating
Different markets. Different products. Same GTM mistakes. Here are the 9 I've watched founders repeat for 9 years, and how to fix them.
I started in 2017.
Since then I've sat across the table from founders in the US, Pakistan, the UK, Australia and Egypt.
Different markets. Different products. Different budgets.
Same mistakes.
Not because founders are careless. Most are sharp, hardworking and obsessed with their product. That's actually part of the problem. Go to market is a different muscle, and nobody teaches it before you need it.
Here are the 9 mistakes I see most. If you spot two or three of your own, you're normal. If you spot six, we should talk.
1. Selling to everyone who will take a call
Early on, every lead feels like oxygen. So you say yes to everyone.
A logistics company. A dental clinic. A Series B fintech. A friend's agency.
You close a few. Revenue goes up. It feels like traction.
It isn't.
Every one of those deals needed a different pitch, different case studies and different onboarding. You didn't build a GTM motion. You built ten tiny ones.
What to do instead: look at your last 10 closed deals. Find the 3 that closed fastest, paid the most and churned the least. That's your ICP. Write it down in one paragraph. Then say no to everything outside it for 90 days.
Saying no is uncomfortable. Staying unfocused is expensive.
2. Hiring a salesperson to fix a system problem
This is the most expensive mistake on the list.
The founder is tired of selling. So they hire an experienced salesperson and hand over the pipeline.
Six months later the hire is gone. The founder decides they hired wrong.
Usually they didn't. They hired a closer into a company with no ICP, no messaging, no playbook and no pipeline worth closing.
A good salesperson runs a system. They rarely build one.
What to do instead: before your first sales hire, document how you sell. Who you target, what you say on the first call, which objections come up, why deals close. If you can't write it down, a new hire can't copy it.
3. Confusing activity with pipeline
"We sent 4,000 emails last month."
Great. How many turned into qualified conversations?
Silence.
Founders love activity metrics because they're easy to count and they feel like progress. Emails sent. Connection requests. Posts published.
None of those pay salaries.
What to do instead: track conversion between each step. Reply to meeting. Meeting to qualified opportunity. Opportunity to close. The weakest step is where next month's effort should go. Not more volume on top of a leaky funnel.
4. Leaving founder led sales at the wrong time
Some founders exit sales too early. They hate it, so they hand it off before they understand why anyone buys.
Others never leave. Every deal still needs them on the call. Growth stops at the founder's calendar.
Both are timing problems.
What to do instead: stay in sales until you can explain your buyer's problem better than they can. Then remove yourself one stage at a time. Discovery calls first. Then demos. Keep closing the big deals until the playbook works in someone else's hands.
5. Buying tools before building process
I've seen seed stage startups paying for a CRM, a sales engagement platform, two data tools, a call recorder and an AI SDR.
Nobody could tell me what a qualified lead meant.
Tools amplify process. If the process is messy, tools just make the mess faster and more expensive.
What to do instead: map your sales process on one page first. Stages, definitions, owners, next steps. Then buy the smallest stack that supports it. A clean spreadsheet with clear stages beats a messy CRM every time.
6. Talking about features instead of the buyer's problem
Open most B2B websites and you'll read what the product does. AI powered. Seamless integrations. All in one platform.
Buyers don't care.
They care about the problem keeping them up at night, and whether you actually understand it.
When a prospect reads your cold email and thinks "how did they know that," you've got positioning.
What to do instead: record 10 customer calls. Pull the exact phrases buyers use to describe their pain. Use their words, not yours, on your site, in your outreach and in your deck.
7. Depending on one channel
Referrals are the best leads you'll ever get. They're also the most dangerous.
You can't turn them up.
I work with a lot of software houses and IT services companies. Many grew on referrals for years. Then one quarter the referrals dried up, and they found out they had no other way to create demand.
That's the feast or famine cycle. It isn't bad luck. It's channel concentration.
What to do instead: keep your best channel, and build a second one before you need it. Outbound is usually the fastest to control. Content and SEO compound slower but last longer. Start while things are good, not when they're bad.
8. Forecasting by feel
"This deal is looking really good."
Every founder has said it. Most of those deals slipped.
When pipeline stages have no clear exit criteria, deals sit in "proposal sent" for months and everyone keeps counting them. Your forecast becomes a mood, not a number.
Investors notice. So does your bank balance.
What to do instead: define what must be true for a deal to enter each stage. Budget confirmed. Decision maker identified. Timeline agreed. If it isn't true, the deal doesn't move. Run a short weekly pipeline review and remove anything that's gone quiet for 30 days.
Your pipeline will shrink. Your forecast will get honest.
9. Nobody owns GTM end to end
This is the mistake underneath all the others.
Marketing owns leads. Sales owns deals. Product owns features. The founder owns everything, so nothing gets attention for long.
Nobody sits across all of it and asks the uncomfortable questions. Are we targeting the right buyer? Is our message landing? Why did we lose those three deals? Which channel actually pays for itself?
So each team optimizes its own piece, and the whole still doesn't add up to predictable revenue.
What to do instead: give one person ownership of the full revenue motion, from who you target to how you close to why customers stay.
That can be a cofounder with the right experience, or a senior hire if you can justify the salary. For a lot of startups between early traction and real scale, it's a fractional GTM lead who brings the experience without the full time cost.
What matters is that someone owns it.
The pattern behind all 9
Look back through the list.
None of these are about effort. Founders work incredibly hard.
They're about sequence. Hiring before the playbook exists. Buying tools before the process exists. Scaling volume before the message works.
GTM rewards order.
ICP first. Then message. Then process. Then channels. Then people. Then tools.
Get the order right and growth starts to feel repeatable. Get it wrong and every quarter feels like starting over.
Where to start this week
Don't try to fix all 9 at once. Pick the one that made you wince.
If it's your ICP, pull your last 10 deals tomorrow.
If it's forecasting, write stage definitions this week.
If it's ownership, have that conversation with your cofounder.
And if you want a second pair of eyes, I run a free 30 minute GTM audit. We look at where your revenue motion is leaking and what to fix first. No pitch deck. Just a working session.
