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. 5d ago

    Quick Fire Series: Closed Won Is Where Value Creation Begins

    Episode 64 - Quick Fire Series: Closed Won Is Where Value Creation Begins 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. In this final episode of our five-part Quick Fire series running through Louis's What B2B Forgot newsletter arc, we start at the moment most companies think the job is done, when the deal closes, and ask why closed won is where value creation begins. Along the way we draw the series together through revenue architecture, growth architecture and revenue operating governance. Here's the TL;DL: Closed won records a transaction. It does not prove value. In a recurring revenue business, the commercial job runs from awareness through onboarding, impact, retention, and expansion. Recurring impact creates recurring revenue, so retention is a verdict on the whole system, and that system needs visible architecture, connected economics, and operating governance. Read more on this topic in the corresponding edition of Louis' What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It newsletter: “Closed Won” Is Not the Finish Line. And a quick look ahead at what's coming up on the podcast, as next week we're back with a full-length episode marking 100 editions of Louis's newsletter. Then, returning to our biweekly cadence, we reprise the Christmas Cognoscenti series with an all-female lineup, as we speak to three leading women in the GTM space, taking us to the end of the year! Keep listening… 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. Oct 21

    Quick Fire Series: The Customer Does Not Experience Your Org Chart

    Episode 63 - Quick Fire Series: The Customer Does Not Experience Your Org Chart  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.  In this penultimate episode of our five-part Quick Fire series running through Louis's What B2B Forgot newsletter arc, we turn inward to ask how the organization itself can quietly break the customer experience, from the airline that sends you from desk to desk to the customer who ends up acting as the API between your internal functions. Here's the TL;DL: Companies organize vertically into functions, but customers experience them horizontally as one journey. Every team can hit its local target while context, promises, and accountability disappear at the joins. While specialization is necessary, making the customer integrate the specialists is the design failure.  Read more on this topic in the corresponding edition of Louis' What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It newsletter: The Customer Does Not Experience Your Org Chart.  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. Oct 14

    Quick Fire Series: The Market Does Not Begin with Your Sales Motion

    Episode 62 - Quick Fire Series: The Market Does Not Begin with Your Sales Motion  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 reports back from the Winning by Design London Impact Roadshow, which saw the launch of their new 3X Seller paper on using AI to make sellers three times more effective rather than take people out of the equation. The paper is due out shortly, so get in touch with Louis directly if you'd like a copy.  We're three episodes into our Quick Fire series running through Louis's What B2B Forgot newsletter arc. So far we've argued that revenue is a system and that ICP without segmentation is a trap; today we widen the lens again to route to market and the crucial role brand plays. Here's the TL;DL: A go-to-market strategy describes how a chosen market becomes aware, develops interest and trust, can be reached, buys, adopts and becomes profitable to serve, whereas a route to sales merely describes how work moves through the seller. One is customer-centric, the other isn't.  Read more on this topic in the corresponding editions of Louis' What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It newsletter: B2B Has Built a Route to Sales Not a Route to Market and Brand Is Not a Marketing Veneer.  Other mentions in this episode:  Episode 19 with Joel Harrison on trust from last year’s Summer Cognoscenti Series  Episode 58 with Gerry Hill on Stop Suppressing Your TAM from this year’s Summer Cognoscenti Series  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. Oct 7

    Quick Fire Series: ICP Is Not Segmentation

    Episode 61 - Quick Fire Series: ICP Is Not Segmentation  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're two episodes into our Quick Fire series running through Louis's What B2B Forgot newsletter arc — and keen to hear what listeners think of the shorter, weekly format, so do let us know. Last time we set up the thesis that revenue is a system, not a sales number; today we get concrete, starting with one of the most misused terms in GTM: ICP. Here's the TL;DL: An ICP helps a seller find accounts that look plausible. Segmentation explains why groups of customers buy, what they value, how they need to be served, and whether the economics work. If that distinction is missed, the damage appears later as generic messaging, variable sales cycles, massive discounting, expensive onboarding and churn.  Read more on this topic in the corresponding edition of Louis' What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It newsletter: ICP Is Not Segmentation.  Other mentions in this episode:  Louis' cryptic trademark LinkedIn post  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. Sep 30

    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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

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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
    64
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels
  • Show Website
    What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It