Go-To-Market When You’re a B2B Founder
Founders juggle a ridiculous amount mental tasks just to keep the business moving. Go-to-market decisions become a confusing bucket because it looks accessible to anyone with a laptop and ChatGPT. Just because you can do some marketing tactics doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing. The question you’re likely dealing with is: “What do I actually need?”, whether you’re a founder or leading sales. What I’m giving you here is a simple way to think about your go-to-market when you don’t have someone running it full-time. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all tactic list (you can find those anywhere). It’s for founders and sales teams to use as a framework to pressure-test your decisions. You can circle back to this whenever you need.
For this, I like using tiers:
Tier 1: Your High-Impact, Low-Budget Essentials
Tier 1 includes the core go-to-market basics: sales and marketing collateral, and outbound.. Founders already know they need these, but in practice? They underestimate. I’m trying to stress that Tier 1 exists to force your intentionality: Does your business have the essential basics in place that serves your growth stage?
Marketing collateral & sales enablement essentials
Collateral hasn’t changed much in the history of business. Tech moved forward, AI moved forward, but customers still want the same basics: a deck, a one-pager, and a website that clearly explains what you do and what you’ll do for your ideal customer.
Founders tend to have the same pitfalls: creating assets that are feature-heavy, or full with cliche branding and slogans that only you understand. That’s why I’m flagging this to your attention.
When it comes to collateral, less is more. Focus on sales material with clean messaging, as mentioned earlier: what your company does and what the customer gets in return. Keep it simple so it translates easily into a solution-first deck, a one-pager, and a website that clearly communicates value. This is your baseline. Once it’s solid, everything downstream gets easier, especially outbound.
This baseline isn’t meant to be rewritten every time you learn a new insight, add a feature, or hear feedback from one prospect. Treat it as infrastructure, not a campaign. You only change it when your target customer or core problem changes, not when your opinions do.
Your Approach to Outbound
In sales-led B2B startups, outbound is a top priority to get your name out there e.g.,: calls, warm intros, LinkedIn messages, small webinars. It gives you the earliest feedback about your messaging and the language your market uses, and it’s where you start hearing what people pay attention to. The more you spend time on the ground with your potential ICP (which happen offline), you’re likely to attract warmer leads later. Offline relationships have to come before fancy online visibility. Early outbound isn’t about scale. It’s about learning where you get traction before you pay for awareness.
But at some point, expect your sales to hit a wall because they might attribute their closing challenges to brand awareness. That said, founders will jump into thinking that paid campaigns on LinkedIn is the first tactic to start with. I say: not yet.
The word “visibility” can mean different things to different people. If you’re going to spend tens of thousands on anything, LinkedIn isn’t the first place to spend. Trade shows are the higher-impact place to start with better ROI. PR comes later, once sales show signs of life. Regarding LinkedIn campaigns, I would use it much later downstream, usually when I have some budget change, and after exhausting trade shows and PR budgets.
This is where tier 2 comes in.
Tier 2: High-impact, high-budget investments
Tier 2 is when you can actually allocate budget and sustain impact. This is where your go-to-market execution starts to matter as a strategic move that builds on everything you did in Tier 1. Here I listed two main activities: industry trade shows and PR.
Trade Shows Simplified
Trade shows sit in Tier 2 because they are expensive, require real preparation, and only make sense once you already know what you are trying to move forward in your GTM process. You have two paths: attending or exhibiting, and they are not the same thing.
Attending is for intelligence, early relationships, and understanding where you actually sit in the ecosystem. It is lower budget, lower risk, and useful when you are still validating your position and market assumptions.
Exhibiting demonstrates maturity, budget, and intention. It only works when you already have real business development relationships and want to accelerate your pipeline. Exhibiting too early burns money because you won’t have enough demand or clarity to justify the spend. Being a delegate is not “nice exposure.” You go because it supports the pipeline and your position in your category. That is the point.
Trade shows exist for two clear purposes:
1. Intelligence and relationships.
You meet potential partners, customers, and competitors in one place. You’ll get a feel of the ecosystem, hear how people describe your category, and how they talk about competitors.
2. Building a sales pipeline and scaling reach with buyers
You get access to delegate lists, decision makers, and buyers you normally wait months to reach. Everyone relevant to your category is in the same building, which makes it easier to move deals forward or open new ones.
Tier 2 requires coordination across sales, product, and marketing as part of a single GTM effort. The prep and budget are heavy, but when you are intentional about why you are there, they become one of the highest leverage activities of the year.
PR: Do’s and Don’ts
PR is not marketing, and it’s not a sales tool either. It is a credibility operation, because you are building relationships in the public channels of your industry. These include reporters, analysts, industry outlets, and platforms that can put you on the map. But PR is short-lived and expensive, and it only works when it reinforces momentum you already created.
When PR makes sense (not all at the same time):
- After securing funding
- Signing a meaningful partnership
- Reaching a product or commercial milestone
- Announcing a new direction for investors or the market
Decision makers often confuse public visibility with demand. You do need visibility, but in the early stage you’ll first need reach with buyers and partners via outbound, not with the broader public.
PR creates attention, but it does not bring qualified leads or improve marketing metrics long term. It is there to help you leverage the reputation you’ve already built offline.
What founders should know about PR:
- It creates broad exposure, not qualified interest
- Earned coverage (organic) is far more valuable than sponsored articles
- Traffic spikes for a week and then drops
- Reporters and analysts only care about stories that create value
PR only works when your sales motion is already working, because people pay attention when you already have signs of life. Without that, PR turns into a vanity move.
That is why PR sits in Tier 2. You layer it in only after Tier 1 is solid: clear messaging and collateral, early customers, and outbound that actually converts. It has an impact when tied to funding, partnerships, or a major GTM moment. That is the foundation for every type of visibility you will want later.
Tier 3: Low-Impact, High-Budget Activities
Early-stage companies don’t know themselves well enough yet. You brand after you’ve seen who buys, why they buy, and what they consistently choose you for.
Tier 3 only makes sense once you actually have the cash and the maturity to justify it. Branding upgrades and high-production campaigns start to matter when you’re scaling and need to look the part because partners, enterprise buyers and talent are paying attention. This is long-term identity, category presence and continuity. It is what companies like Monday.com and HubSpot invested in once they have already proven they’ve been on a profitable trajectory in their go-to-market.
This tier doesn’t typically match early-stage sales or early GTM execution. It becomes relevant around Series B, when you have paying customers, traction and clearer PMF.
Tier 3 is low-impact and high-budget because none of it drives revenue. It makes you look better but it doesn’t fix unclear messaging or create demand. A six-figure rebrand won’t solve an unclear value prop. This tier only works after Tier 1 and Tier 2 have been used intentionally. That is why it sits at the end.
Final Thought: Flexibility Is Key
This tier framework is a just way to think about go-to-market decisions during PMF. It’s not meant to be a checklist. Different needs pop up at different times depending on your industry, sales cycle and funding. The real filter is whether your GTM activities reflect what the business actually needs right now. Some things that look low-impact can matter early if timing or external pressure pushes it. Branding does matter eventually, but getting it wrong too early is costly. Trade shows and PR only work once sales and outbound are moving. If your board expects you to show up, you show up but keep the spend controlled.
The point of the model is prioritization. It helps you avoid wasting budget on activities that don’t serve your stage. If you don’t have someone who thinks this way inside the company, bring in someone who can carry the early tiers with you and keep the work focused. That is what actually moves you forward.