The Real GTM Fundamentals: Lessons From Failure, Focus and Leadership

Louis Fernandes does not talk about go-to-market like a department plan. As a SaaS revenue adviser at Winning by Design, with more than 30 years across marketing, sales and revenue leadership, he sees it as a commercial system that either produces profitable, sustainable revenue or quietly teaches teams to chase the wrong number.

That view was shaped before SaaS, in banking, ski seasons and a failed business he started in his twenties. Losing that company within 12 months gave him a sharper operating principle than any framework: treat go-to-market decisions as if the money is your own.

This conversation is a direct challenge to the bad habits many software companies built during the free-money era: weak ICP discipline, compensation plans that reward poor-fit deals, attribution used for credit rather than improvement, and brand dismissed as a vague marketing exercise instead of long-term sales activation.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Tom: You started in banking, then ended up running SaaS revenue teams. Which career step shaped the way you think about commercial fundamentals?

Louis: I have been in SaaS for over 20 years and in industry for over 36, which is either really good or a little bit depressing. I started as a client-side marketer in B2C, then moved through agency into sales in technology. For the last decade, I have been in revenue leadership roles, effectively running SaaS scale-ups and their revenue functions.

Banking was where I cut my teeth in marketing. This was when banks still ran apprenticeships, so I went around learning finance, law, sales and marketing. It gave me an appreciation for how a business functions, not just how one department functions.

The most formative moment came towards the end of my time at NatWest, around 1993 or 1994. We were in the middle of the last big recession, when people were literally posting house keys back through letterboxes because they were in negative equity. The bank offered voluntary redundancies, and I took one.

At about 25, I was suddenly out of work, so I headed to the Alps and became a ski bum. That changed my life. I found myself in an unfamiliar country, working in an industry I knew nothing about, and then suddenly running a P&L, the sales, the marketing and the whole lot.

A few years later, I set up my own company in the ski industry because, at 28 or 29, I clearly thought I knew everything. I went bust within 12 months. In terms of lessons learned, that was better than any education I ever had. It taught me to approach go-to-market like it is your own money: how do you de-risk what you are doing while still getting to the result you need?

Tom: If a company has just raised a Series A and wants to build go-to-market properly, where should it start?

Louis: The fundamentals do not change. Anyone who has studied Kotler will know the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. The first question is: what is my product, and what problem is it actually solving?

It can have all the bells and whistles in the world, but if it is not solving a real-world problem and does not have a real-world use case, what are you doing? If you do not have a proper vision of your MVP, or if you think you can be all things to all people, you are in trouble before you start.

You need to understand the proposition, the markets it serves and the intricacies of your ideal customer profile. That is where I would always start.

The next part is being precise about the revenue you want. It is not just revenue. It is profitable, sustainable, predictable revenue. You can get short-term revenue growth and sacrifice next year to hit this year’s target. That is not the goal.

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is still a useful lesson here. Do not pick off too much too early. If you try to run three, four or five sales motions targeting different segments before you have the scale, structure or resources, your economies of scale do not work. Your unit economics collapse, and then your profitability goes down the toilet.

You have to be intentional about which markets you enter, when you enter them, which customers you serve, what problems you solve and whether you can do it sustainably.

Tom: Many teams say they know their ICP, but still sell to the wrong customers. Where does that break down?

Louis: A lot of people think about their ICP. Far fewer actually enforce it.

The problem starts when compensation structures reward people for closing deals regardless of whether the deal is right for the company. If someone is paid on revenue, then as long as they can line their pockets, why would they care whether it fits the ICP?

That is where bad behaviours creep in. You end up selling to people who were never a good fit for the proposition. Then you implement something, it does not go well, they churn, your cost of acquisition goes through the roof and your lifetime value is in the toilet.

It starts with the overarching objective. What is the job to be done? We are looking to achieve this revenue growth in these markets, selling this proposition to this ICP. Everyone needs to align around that.

Then you build compensation plans around the behaviour you want. If I pay someone on number of leads, who cares? Do those leads convert? Do those conversions lead to revenue? Do they lead to revenue in the ICP accounts we defined? If the answer is no, why would I pay for that?

Compensation drives behaviour. If teams are not aligned around the result, it is no surprise when they do not get there.

Tom: Brand is often treated as soft in B2B. Why do you see it as part of the revenue system?

Louis: Tell any marketing executive at Unilever that brand does not drive sales and see what happens. FMCG marketers understand the power of brand. A brand director owns the P&L, the revenue number and market share. If you own Pampers, Kleenex or Gillette, that is about sales.

The issue is that many B2B marketers have not come up through a traditional marketing route, so they misunderstand what brand is. In B2B, look at Salesforce. The value of the Salesforce brand is huge. They reckon that if you wanted to achieve the same output, you would have to spend $3 billion a year, recurring, to get the same effect Salesforce has built through brand.

Whether you think Salesforce is a great product or whether you think it has had its day does not matter. It still has share of mind.

Les Binet and Peter Field’s work, The Long and the Short of It, is useful here. It talks about long-term and short-term marketing strategies. Many B2B marketers focus on campaigns to create demand for this quarter or next quarter. Very few think enough about brand.

Brand activation is long-term sales activation. You are front of mind. People know who you are and what you stand for. When someone enters a buying cycle, they think about your brand ahead of someone else’s.

People talk about the dark funnel and say 70% or 80% of the buyer journey happens before sales is involved. If that is true, you need to be present there so you are part of the consideration set.

Tom: Attribution is meant to help teams make better decisions, but often becomes a way to claim credit. How should revenue leaders treat it?

Louis: The problem with attribution is that many organisations use it to get credit. Why am I measuring attribution? So I can say I achieved X, Y or Z because that is how I get paid.

The better reason to track attribution is to understand what to change to get a better result and improve the revenue engine. Very few organisations use it that way.

I also have a bugbear with attribution because most people use first touch, last touch or a W-shaped model. If you want to do proper attribution, you need econometric modelling. That is expensive and complicated, so most people do not really do it.

If I came into an organisation as a CRO, attribution would not be my highest priority. My priority would be making sure we are selling into the ICP and doing it consistently.

That means understanding the revenue model. What are we doing in net new names? What is happening with retention? What are we doing in expansion into existing accounts?

Many CROs come from a net-new background, so they do not pay enough attention to retention and expansion. But an ARR business is about maintaining recurring revenue and then building on it. At a certain scale, the mega vendors are not really selling many net new names. They are expanding the footprint in existing accounts with new propositions and capabilities.

It is different at every stage: nought to one, one to five, five to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 50. At 20 to 50, you are starting to scale and retention becomes critical. From 50 to 100, expansion becomes a bigger focus, and it quickly outstrips net new names.

I think about ARI, not just ARR. ARI is annually recurring impact. If I continue to have impact with a customer, they will spend more money with me. If I ignore the customer and focus only on winning new business, I end up with Kotler’s leaky bucket.

Tom: What role should marketing play after the deal is signed?

Louis: Marketing has a big role in articulating the impact you are having for existing customers and turning that into reasons why other people buy. It is not just case studies.

Take SPIN selling. Situation, problem, implication and needs payoff. Marketers can talk about the situation, the pain and the implication.

You can say: this is a customer that looks like you. This is the context they were operating in. These are the challenges everyone in that model faces. These were the specific problems they had. This is how they approached the problem. This is where we helped. The technology might be part of that story, but it should not be the whole story.

Then you talk about the outcomes. What was the before and after? That is classic storytelling.

There is also a sales methodology called Command of the Message, which is about consistency of message through every interaction from marketing to sales to customer success. You take people on the journey with you.

It also reminds me of Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. People do not buy what you do, they buy why you do it. That is classic storytelling too.

Winning by Design is strong on this as well. Jaco van der Kooij talks about the bow tie model, where the journey does not stop at close. In fact, he does not really recognise close in the traditional way. He talks about mutual commitment, first impact and recurring impact over time.

Traditional sales models stop at “we closed a deal, hurrah”. But that is the start of the engagement. I have made a commitment to you and promised an outcome. Now I have to deliver it. That is where recurring impact happens and where trust is built.

Tom: A marketer may agree with all of this but still sit under a CEO or CRO who thinks in narrow departmental goals. How should they start changing the conversation?

Louis: Follow the money. Understand the economic model as well as your peers in revenue. Be part of that conversation. Be commercial. Do not just be marketing.

You need to be able to talk finance and speak other commercial languages. A lot of organisations fail because people at C-suite level do not speak each other’s languages.

Challenger gave us teach, tailor and take control. Educate people on how things could be done differently. Tailor your message depending on the audience. Then take control.

When I moved from marketing into sales, that is what I did. I started storytelling internally to win support for the initiatives I wanted to run. At SAS and HPE, I had licence to do innovative work inside monolithic organisations because I was talking about commercial outcomes that had impact.

For AI, I mostly use ChatGPT as a sparring partner. A lot of people use it as a substitute for critical thinking. I use it to augment my own critical thinking.

My superpower has been spanning sales and marketing. If a marketer wants to understand sales properly, my advice is simple: become a salesperson for 12 months. Carry a bag. Do the job.

My biggest mistake was losing the company I started when I was 28 because I thought I knew it all. My own arrogance got in the way. But if I could go back, I would not change it. I learned too much from it.

IBM used to talk about the DIKW pyramid: data, insight, knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom comes with lines on your face and grey hair. You do the hard yards, you take the hard knocks, and that is how you learn resilience.

For recommendations, I would point people to The Long and the Short of It by Binet and Field, and Revenue Architecture by Jaco van der Kooij. I also co-host What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Simon Daniels. Outside that, I enjoy Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, and both The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is Politics US.