What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It

Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels
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Exploring the key go-to-market challenges that SaaS organisations face and how to overcome them to ensure success.

  1. 3d ago

    Quick Fire Series: Revenue Is a System Not a Sales Number

    Episode 60 - Quick Fire Series: Revenue Is a System Not a Sales Number  Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.  Louis previews a busy week ahead: he's speaking at the NEXO Conference on Friday, giving a fireside chat on scaling businesses across Europe, before co-hosting the Winning by Design London Impact Roadshowthe following week alongside Jacco van der Kooij and Mike Boogaard.  We launch a brand new run on the podcast this time — a five-part Quick Fire series adapting Louis's What B2B Forgot newsletter arc, starting with the case that revenue is the output of a commercial system, not simply a sales number. Here's the TL;DL: B2B often treats revenue as the output of Sales, when it's actually the result of connected choices about market, proposition, price, channel, customer experience and value delivery. A modern CRO's job should therefore be to make the whole system coherent and to optimise the quality of revenue, not simply its volume.  Read more on this topic in the corresponding editions of Louis' What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It newsletter: What B2B Forgot and Your CRO Should Think More Like an FMCG Brand Director.  Other mentions in this episode:  NEXO Conference  Winning by Design London Impact Roadshow  The Revenue Operating Governance paper, co-authored by Louis with Kevin Brown and Travis Brown  Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

  2. Sep 24

    Summer Cognoscenti Wrap-up with Ian Truscott

    Episode 59 - Summer Cognoscenti Wrap-up with Ian Truscott  Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.  Louis marks a milestone before getting into the main topic — next week’s newsletter edition will be his 100th, two years since he started writing it. He also shares news that he’ll be co-hosting the Winning by Design London Impact Roadshow with Jacco van der Kooij and Mike Bugard on 7th October, an invite-only session for senior SaaS revenue, GTM ops and executive leaders.  In a special wrap-up episode, Louis and Simon revisit this year’s Summer Cognoscenti Series to draw out the common threads running through it, joined by returning guest Ian Truscott, managing partner at B2B tech fractional leadership and advisory consultancy VelocityB. Here’s the TL;DL: SaaS doesn’t primarily have an execution problem — it has a governance and operating model problem that manifests itself through execution. The connective tissue running through this summer’s Cognoscenti series has been governance: organisations can optimise individual functions, metrics and tactics while still degrading the performance of the whole system. Under pressure, local optimisation becomes easier to justify, competitive imitation erodes tactical advantage, and faster execution can compound poor choices just as effectively as good ones.  Huge thanks to our fabulous guests: Mark Walker, JD Miller, Kevin Brown, David Keene, Travis Brown and Gerry Hill.  Listen back to all the episodes in the Summer Cognoscenti Series -  Mark Walker on the RevvedUp shutdown  JD Miller on the new CRO playbook  Kevin Brown on governance before scale  David Keene on technology architecture  Travis Brown on governance at scale  Gerry Hill on suppressing your own TAM  Other mentions in this episode:   Ian’s Rockstar CMO podcast and his 5 F’in’ Marketing Fundamentals  The Revenue Operating Governance paper, co-authored by Louis with Kevin Brown and Travis Brown  Simon’s LinkedIn article: How a Throwaway Line About Money Supply Explains the GTM Measurement Trap  Excerpts from the Accenture Song Client Buying Index 2026  Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

  3. Sep 10

    Summer Cognoscenti Series - Gerry Hill: Stop Suppressing Your TAM

    Episode 58 - Summer Cognoscenti Series - Gerry Hill: Stop Suppressing Your TAM  Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.  We close out our Summer Cognoscenti Series with Gerry Hill, VP Customer Strategy at TitanX, who returns to the show to make the case that most GTM teams are suppressing their own TAM. Here's the TL;DL: While AI has made outbound activity almost free, buyer attention has never been more expensive. The response has been to shrink the market to the accounts displaying visible intent, then hammer the same small pool of buyers everyone else is chasing too. Gerry's challenge is that we are suppressing our own TAM. We need an architecture in which brand creates memory, intent informs sequence, conversations create evidence, and expensive sellers are deployed where they can generate the greatest economic return.  Other mentions in this episode:  Gerry previously joined us on Episode 23 to discuss cold calling.  Louis and Simon first unpacked TAM, SAM and SOM back on Episode 2.  Louis references Simon’s Goodhart's Law article discussed in the previous episode.  Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

  4. Aug 27

    Goodhart, Governance and the GTM Machine

    Episode 57 - Goodhart, Governance and the GTM Machine  Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.  Louis kicks things off with news of his move from London to Porto. With the move itself out of the way, Louis is turning his attention to what's next — he's looking for a new senior GTM leadership role helping scale a SaaS business through that $20 to $60 million revenue range, ideally in a European remit spanning sales, revenue, or go-to-market management. Read more, and get in touch!  This week Louis and Simon dig into why go-to-market teams keep making the same mistake: noticing a measure that correlates with success, turning it into a target, attaching incentives, then acting surprised when people optimise the measure instead of the outcome. Here's the TL;DL: Targets change behaviour. Revenue Operating Governance asks the harder question: if that's inevitable, how do we design the system so the behaviour we induce is driving the outcomes we actually need?  Other mentions in this episode:  Simon's LinkedIn article: How a Throwaway Line About Money Supply Explains the GTM Measurement Trap Mark Walker's LinkedIn post on aligning everyone around the real goal of revenue The conversation with Mark Stouse on correlation, causality and data attribution The conversation with Travis Brown on Revenue Operating Governance and the Revenue Operating North Star The conversation with Kevin Brown on the discipline of walking away from bad-fit deals Simon Sinek's TED Talk, "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

  5. Aug 14

    Cognoscenti Archive: Andy Champion & Wayne Starritt

    Episode 56 - Cognoscenti Archive: Andy Champion & Wayne Starritt  Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.  This episode heads back into the Cognoscenti Archive to revisit the original conversation with Wayne Starritt, Founder & Managing Director of Bullingstone Associates, and Andy Champion, Global Head of Enterprise Sales Atlassian and a returning friend of the show, recorded following Bullingstone's CROs Who Succeed research into why so many Chief Revenue Officers fail within 18 months. Louis explains why the conversation is worth hearing again rather than leaving it in the archive: when it was first recorded, the discussion was framed principally as a people question — hiring for adaptability over pedigree, diagnosing before prescribing, holding strong ideas lightly. Having since spent much more time on revenue architecture, growth architecture, and revenue operating governance, Louis now hears the same conversation differently — not just as a question about the individual CRO, but about the system they're placed into. Fragmented objectives, incentives that reward local optimisation, and a reliance on one heroic leader holding everything together can undermine even a very capable CRO.  Here's the TL;DL: Great revenue leadership matters, but sustainable performance comes when great leadership is supported by great architecture and great governance.  Other mentions in this episode:  CROs Who Succeed The Bullingstone Associates white paper behind the original conversation.  Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

  6. Jul 23

    Summer Cognoscenti Series - Travis Brown: From Leadership Intent to Organisational Behaviour

    Episode 55 - Summer Cognoscenti Series - Travis Brown: From Leadership Intent to Organisational Behaviour  Welcome to What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.  Louis confesses to a new addiction: The Rest Is Football, with Gary Lineker, Micah Richards and Alan Shearer, which has had him up at both ends of the day throughout the World Cup. Simon, no football fan himself but equally swept up in the tournament, flags a tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn post he put together imagining fake commentary lines for every World Cup host city.  Continuing the governance thread picked up with Kevin Brown earlier in the Summer Cognoscenti Series, this episode turns to Travis Brown, CXO at Opiniion and co-author of the Revenue Operating Governance Working Paper, who explores how governance moves from principles a founder believes to routines and behaviours an entire organisation consistently follows. Here’s the TL;DL: This episode isn’t primarily about the seven revenue operating governance principles — it’s about the gap between knowing the right thing and getting an organisation to repeatedly do it. Where Kevin’s episode explored governance as internalised founder judgment, Travis explores how it becomes distributed organisational judgment.  Other mentions in this episode:  Revenue Operating Governance Working Paper  Winning By Design's Bow Tie model  The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni  Kevin Brown's episode  Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

  7. Jul 9

    Summer Cognoscenti Series - David Keene: AI, Trust and GTM Architecture

    Episode 54 – Summer Cognoscenti Series - David Keene: AI, Trust and GTM Architecture  Welcome to What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. Simon recently hosted the Rethink B2B Customer Growth event in London, run under the Accenture Song umbrella, which brought together research, client perspectives and practitioner insights on B2B growth strategy. Simon shared findings from the Customer Buying Index study, led a session on revenue planning, and made the case for planning at the buying group level in enterprise settings — arguing that account-level planning lacks the fidelity needed to align renewal, expansion and multi-motion strategies. He also published a roundup post drawing together attendee reflections and key data points from the day. Louis noted that several of the themes — revenue architecture, growth architecture and revenue governance — dovetail closely with recent content arcs on the podcast. In this episode, continuing the Summer Cognoscenti Series, David Keene, Co-Founder and CRO at Agentive — who brings three decades of experience across Google Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and Wipro — joins Louis and Simon to explore what’s really broken in B2B go-to-market and where agentic AI fits in. Here’s the TL;DL: AI won’t fix broken GTM — it’ll expose it. The opportunity isn’t to automate more activity; it’s to move from systems that record what happened to systems that help revenue teams decide what should happen next. But that only works if the business has clear architecture, good governance, trusted data, and a genuine focus on customer impact rather than internal activity. Other mentions in this episode: Simon’s Rethink B2B Customer Growth 2026 roundup post Episode 52 with JD Miller on The New CRO Playbook Episode 53 with Kevin Brown on Governance Before Scale Episode 51 with Mark Walker on AI-Native SaaS Pavilion — peer community for GTM leaders CMO Circle — peer community for senior marketing leaders Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

  8. Jun 25

    Summer Cognoscenti Series - Kevin Brown: Governance and Building Operating Discipline

    Episode 53 - Kevin Brown - Governance and Building the Operating Discipline Before Scale Welcome to What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. This episode continues our Summer Cognoscenti Series, with Kevin Brown, CEO and co-founder at SMVue, joining the conversation. Here’s the TL;DL: Governance isn’t bureaucracy, and it isn’t something you bolt on after scale — it’s the discipline of making trade-offs conscious before they become accidental strategy. For founders, that means how you avoid turning short-term survival decisions into long-term operating drift. Other mentions in this episode: Revenue Operating Governance working paper, co-authored by Louis Fernandes, Kevin Brown and Travis Brown. Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

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About

Exploring the key go-to-market challenges that SaaS organisations face and how to overcome them to ensure success.

Information

  • Creator
    Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    60
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels
  • Show Website
    What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It

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