Construct a GTM strategy that delivers at Disrupt 2025

Disrupt 2025 unites a rare combination of GTM brainpower: Max Altschuler of GTMfund, Alison Wagonfeld of Google Cloud, and Marc Manara from OpenAI are all on one stage. Their common message is that a modern go-to-market engine has to be evidence-led, motion-agnostic, and AI-native. Here is the playbook they will pressure-test for founders who want traction that investors can bet on and customers will continue buying.

Begin with a razor-edged ICP and problem proof

High-output GTM begins at the shrine of product-market truth: the customer’s job to be done. A focused ICP (industry, size, stack, compliance need or trigger) and pain quantified in hard numbers — hours saved, risk reduced, and/or revenue unlocked. 10 design partners and 5 paid pilots with clear before/after benchmarks kicked the crap out of a thousand top-of-funnel leads.

Produce a one-page value hypothesis the CFO can sign. If you can’t demonstrate ROI in two lines and prove the math, the motion is dead. McKinsey research links high growth to disciplined customer-back testing; founders who run more experiments, quicker, win sooner.

Create a story that buyers can rally behind

Features don’t move across buying committees, strategic stories do. Gartner suggests enterprise purchases often include 6–10 stakeholders. Construct a story that makes the status quo bad in a newly relabeled way, names what is at stake, and identifies your product as the source of credibility that can solve for said new operating model. Demonstrate the “new math” by persona — security leaders need risk reduced, operators need cycle time down, finance needs payback clarity.

Package that in a way that sellers and founders can deliver three assets:

• “What the market needs is …”
• ROI-driven demo flow
• Proof of customers who look like our ICP

You simply need your message to be boringly consistent — and you must keep working on it every day.

Choose the right motion: PLG, sales-led, or hybrid

Choose the motion the market desires, not what you want.

If end users can get value within minutes, start product-led: free tier, fast onboarding, usage triggers, and a clear path to team upgrades. Firms such as Figma and Notion showed that bottom-up adoption can tee up large enterprise deals when PMM and sales close ranks.

Complex, multi-stakeholder transactions still require sales-led discipline. Think Datadog and Snowflake land-and-expand: technical validation, success metrics tied between companies, and usage-based pricing that’s aligned against value. OpenView’s benchmarks demonstrate that pay-as-you-go pricing is now the norm since it aligns with how customers consume outcomes.

Don’t ignore partners. According to Canalys, more than half of B2B tech spend goes through the channel. Initial partnerships with cloud marketplaces, system integrators, or an app ecosystem can drive 20–35% of pipeline and higher win rates if you invest in enablement and co-selling ROE.

Recruit for learning velocity, not headcount

Your first GTM hires should tighten insight loops. A founder-led AE who can do discovery, a solutions engineer to de-risk technical proof, and a product marketer that can crystallize ICP/message/pricing will outperform an early SDR army. Comp aligned to value: achievement quotas, 3-month ramps, and upside for multi-threaded deals & expansions.

Document that sales motion as you invent it — stages, exit and talk tracks, how to handle objections, and sort of a MEDDICC-like or liquidation-style qualification. Repeatability is an asset class.

Measure what investors really believe about your GTM

Signal strength beats vanity. KeyBanc’s Private SaaS survey has historically correlated efficient growth to a CAC payback of less than 12–18 months; top performers clobbered a year. Aim for 3x coverage of qualified pipeline in each quarter, a 20–30% SQO-to-win rate in your core ICP, and continually shrinking sales cycles as confirmation your message is “sticking.”

Retention speaks loudest. NRR greater than 110% and GRR greater than 90% are solid B2B benchmarks that we have consistently heard across Bessemer and OpenView reports. Monitor adoption rate, time-to-value, growth per account, and depth of champions. If you have one persona that owns you, +1 reorg away and you are churn.

Make AI native to your GTM across every workflow

AI isn’t a feature, it’s leverage across the funnel. Leverage foundation models from companies such as OpenAI to customize outreach at scale, summarize discovery calls, and draft proposals from your own content with retrieval-augmented generation. Arm reps with AI assistants that automatically present sales battlecards, security answers, and ROI snippets when you need them to.

Instrument every touchpoint. Pipe in data from clean product telemetry, CRM, and marketing signals into a single warehouse. Then roll out lead scoring, churn risk flags, and pricing recommendations which are explainable and compliant. Trust and governance are as important as speed, particularly in regulated industries — expect the security review to inquire.

A 180-day operating plan for Disrupt attendees

Days 0–30: lock your ICP and value hypothesis; recruit 10 design partners; ship a demo that demonstrates time-to-value in under five minutes. Record the story and test two pricing plans.

Days 31–90: 3 channel experiments (PLG free tier, ICP-triggered ones targeted outbound, and one partner motion). Appointment guidelines, forecast hygiene, and weekly pipeline review. Create kill-or-ramp policies: programs that do not deliver sales-qualified opportunities at a target cost by week six are paused.

Days 91–180: add your first AE and solutions engineer; light up a marketplace listing if it makes sense; formalize a customer advisory board. Issue both of those case studies with quantified results. Up and to the right on CAC payback less than 12 months for your core motion; and NRR momentum applies to systematic expansion plays.

The throughline you’ll hear from the stage: focus, proof, and speed. Nail the proof of customers, tell a strong story, pick the motion your buyers prefer, and wire AI into every revenue workflow. Do that, and Disrupt is not just a conference — it’s your GTM inflection point.