MOVE: Complete Summary of Sangram Vajre’s 4-Question Go-to-Market Framework for High-Performing Revenue Teams

Introduction: What This Book Is About

In “MOVE: The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework,” authors Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown provide a transformative blueprint for business leaders to build and scale high-performing revenue teams. This book challenges traditional go-to-market (GTM) approaches, asserting that many companies fail not due to a lack of good products or strategies, but due to a broken GTM process. It introduces the proprietary MOVE framework, a simple yet powerful system built around four fundamental questions—Market, Operations, Velocity, and Expansion—designed to align marketing, sales, and customer success for sustainable, predictable growth.

Vajre and Brown, drawing on their extensive experience and interviews with hundreds of business leaders, reveal that successful companies treat GTM as an iterative process rather than a one-time project. The book is essential for CEOs, CMOs, CROs, CXOs, and VCs who seek to move their organizations “further faster” by establishing a clear, actionable path from company strategy to customer outcomes. It promises to equip leaders with the tools to diagnose their current GTM maturity stage, identify critical areas for improvement, and orchestrate their next strategic moves with confidence.

The core message is that GTM is not merely about marketing or product launches; it’s about holistic revenue generation driven by a unified team. By understanding the six truths about GTM and applying the MOVE framework, readers will learn to dismantle departmental silos, leverage data for accurate decision-making, and ensure every customer touchpoint reinforces the brand’s vision. This summary offers a comprehensive overview of these insights, ensuring readers grasp the complete wisdom offered by Vajre and Brown for achieving true business transformation.

Section One: Six Truths about Go-to-Market That Will Make Your Head Spin

This section sets the foundation for understanding the MOVE framework by challenging common misconceptions about Go-to-Market (GTM). It presents six fundamental truths that leaders must grasp to achieve effective GTM transformation, rather than perpetuating outdated or inefficient practices. These truths serve as a “safety spiel” to clear the table of problematic ideas before diving into the core framework.

Truth #1: Go-to-Market Is Like Building a New Product

Many leaders mistakenly treat GTM as a one-time project or a static company strategy. However, GTM is an iterative process that must be constantly refined and improved, much like a product that undergoes continuous development based on feedback. The authors emphasize that GTM is not a mission statement to be posted on a wall; it’s a living, breathing process that ensures what is sold is consistently delivered. This continuous iteration demands ongoing investment and enhancement.

The critical question of who owns GTM is often met with widespread disagreement among business leaders. The book unequivocally states that GTM belongs to the CEO. While CEOs are typically responsible for company strategy, culture, and financial health, they must also directly own the GTM process itself. Delegating this responsibility leads to ambiguity and breakdowns. Treating GTM like a product—constantly seeking feedback, tracking “bugs,” and implementing updates—ensures it remains effective and drives the company forward to the next best opportunity.

Truth #2: Revenue Team Has a New Roommate

A common mistake is to view GTM as solely a marketing process. While marketing is integral, GTM encompasses a much broader scope focused on the entire revenue stream. The book highlights that the core of GTM is about creating high-performing revenue teams that unify marketing, sales, and customer success. Traditionally, marketing and sales have struggled with alignment, but effective GTM demands the seamless integration of all three functions.

Customer success is the “new roommate” in the revenue team, playing a crucial role in retention, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities. The GTM process covers the entire customer journey, from new acquisition to pipeline velocity, expansion, and retention. If marketing and sales already struggle to collaborate, adding customer success without a unifying GTM framework will only exacerbate the problem. The goal is for the entire company to “go to market” as a cohesive unit.

Truth #3: Small Is the New Big

Companies often make the mistake of aiming for the largest possible Total Addressable Market (TAM), believing sheer size will guarantee success. This broad approach is inefficient and leads to underserving customers. Instead, the book advocates for focusing on a Total Relevant Market (TRM). This means concentrating efforts on the customers who are the most relevant for the product available today, within the most relevant market for the current stage of the business.

Starting small allows companies to get it right with a focused group of customers. This approach enables businesses to refine their product-market fit, build loyalty, and ensure customers are willing to pay for and consume more products. Once successful within a smaller, relevant segment, the company can then strategically expand into bigger boxes. In the B2B world, unlike consumer markets, simply adding more salespeople to reach everyone in a vast market is not sustainable. Agility and focused efforts on TRM are key to efficient growth.

Truth #4: RevOps Is the New Growth Lever

A pervasive problem in many organizations is the lack of a single source of truth regarding business performance. Departments often rely on their own isolated data and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), leading to conflicting numbers, endless debates, and misaligned incentives. The solution presented is the implementation of a Revenue Operations (RevOps) team. RevOps functions as the “truth teller” for the organization, providing objective, standardized, and holistic data across marketing, sales, and customer success.

The RevOps team should report to a neutral executive, such as the CFO, COO, or even the CEO, to ensure autonomy and unbiased reporting. This structure allows teams to shift their focus from arguing over data to collaborating on solutions. RevOps is identified as the new growth lever because it enables accurate decision-making, faster growth, and better resource allocation. Without a centralized RevOps function, companies risk becoming stuck in cycles of misalignment and underperformance.

Truth #5: Retention Is the New Acquisition

Traditional B2B marketing often places a disproportionate focus on top-of-the-funnel lead generation. This truth asserts that the primary KPI for marketers is shifting to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). It is significantly more cost-effective to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one; Invesp states it is five times more expensive to acquire a new customer. This paradigm shift means marketing teams must prioritize maintaining and growing their existing customer base.

A low churn rate directly correlates to higher Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). The ultimate goal is to achieve a negative churn rate, where revenue growth from existing customers (through upsells, cross-sells, and expansion) outpaces any customer churn. Focusing on retention and maximizing CLV provides a crucial buffer during economic downturns, allowing companies to weather storms better than those fixated solely on new acquisitions.

Truth #6: Flywheels Are the New Funnels

The traditional lead funnel is criticized as a wasteful “churn machine,” with Forrester reporting that less than 1% of leads typically convert into loyal customers. The book advocates for replacing this with a revenue flywheel. The flywheel model shifts focus from mere lead volume to efficient and effective revenue growth, prioritizing the progression of opportunities with accounts that are a good fit. Quality over quantity becomes the guiding principle.

A flywheel suggests a constantly repeating cycle that builds momentum over time. It emphasizes that customers, once acquired, should be set up for long-term success and happiness, encouraging them to return for more products, services, and value. This full-revenue-cycle thinking involves continually identifying new use cases, personas, and expansion opportunities within the existing customer base. The flywheel concept underscores the importance of customer retention and expansion as continuous drivers of growth, unlike the linear and often inefficient lead funnel.

Section Two: Navigating the Go-to-Market Maturity Curve

This section provides a crucial framework for understanding how to implement the iterative GTM process based on a company’s current stage of business. It introduces the GTM maturity curve, explaining that companies must assess where they are to determine the best way to move forward and avoid paralysis or stalling. This curve outlines three distinct stages of business transformation, each with corresponding strategic priorities and GTM focuses, referred to as “the three Ps.”

Understanding the GTM Maturity Curve

Many companies struggle with GTM implementation because they fail to assess their current maturity level. Trying to apply advanced GTM strategies when a business is still in its early stages can lead to frustration and failure. The authors stress that revenue is not the sole indicator of a company’s stage; a company with $20 million in revenue might still be in the ideation stage, while another with $8 million could be transitioning faster. Large, complex companies, like Amazon, can even operate in multiple business stages simultaneously for different product lines or services.

The GTM maturity curve is non-linear, featuring “dips” as companies move from one stage to the next. These dips represent moments of necessary transformation, where old approaches no longer suffice for continued growth. The book warns that failure to transform in time can lead to a “slippery slope,” potentially causing a company to stall or even crash. The CEO bears the primary responsibility for anticipating these transitions and driving the necessary changes.

The Three Stages of GTM Business Transformation

The book defines three critical stages, each associated with a “P” representing its core market fit focus:

• Ideation (Problem-Market Fit): This is the earliest stage, characterized by a lead-focused, sales-led approach and inefficient growth. The primary goal is to validate whether the problem the product aims to solve is significant enough and whether the market for that solution is large enough to build a successful business. Companies are actively testing hypotheses and seeking initial traction.
• Transition (Product-Market Fit): At this stage, the focus shifts to an account-focused approach with sales and marketing alignment for efficient growth. The company has identified a product that resonates with a specific customer segment and is working to create repeatable and scalable sales processes to capture market share. Retention issues from the ideation stage may still be present, making segment-based performance measurement crucial.
• Execution (Platform-Market Fit): This is the most mature stage, marked by a customer-focused, integrated revenue team (marketing, sales, customer success) driving efficient growth at scale. Companies have moved beyond a single product to a multi-product platform, expanding into new categories, regions, and solutions. The focus is on maximizing customer lifetime value and predictable, long-term growth.

Ideation Stage: Problem-Market Fit Deep Dive

In the ideation stage, companies are essentially validating a hypothesis. The two core questions are: “Are you creating a solution that fits the market right now?” and “Is the market big enough for your solution?” This stage is characterized by being lead-focused and primarily sales-led, often relying on high volumes of outbound calls to gather market intelligence. This results in inefficient growth, which is acceptable for this phase but unsustainable long-term.

The objective is to learn as much as possible about the problem and market. Companies cannot yet pick “target accounts” because the ideal customer profile is still being defined. Sales efforts generate volume, and each interaction provides valuable feedback, helping clarify what the ideal customer looks like. However, as the business grows, the increasing volume of leads becomes untenable due to rising costs and difficulty retaining non-ideal customers. This signals the impending need for transition.

Key characteristics and metrics for the Ideation Stage include:

• Sales activities: calls, demos, opportunities.
• Marketing activities: traffic, leads.
• Funnel conversion rates and cost-per-lead.
• Bookings and win rate.
• Tech stack: CRM, marketing automation platform (MAP), conversation tracking, CMS, sales automation, contact data.

From Ideation to Transition: The Critical Shift

Recognizing when to transition is vital, as lingering too long in the ideation stage will cause a company to stall or crash. This shift is driven by the realization that heroics and inefficient volume cannot sustain growth indefinitely. When a company is confident it has the right product in the right market for the right customer (i.e., customers who see ROI and renew), it’s time to move.

The transition involves building a different GTM team with leaders focused on new metrics. KPIs shift from funnel conversions to pipeline coverage, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and gross revenue retention (GRR), broken out by segment performance. Marketing and sales must align, focusing on segmentation and coordinated efforts around specific target accounts.

Warning signs that prevent transition include:

• Attempting to scale without a clear ideal customer profile.
• Heavy discounting and “renewing down,” indicating commoditization.
• Weak brand and positioning leading to poor demand.
• Lack of a primary reason for churn.
• No common enemy or clear direction.
• Customers unsure of ROI at renewal.
• What is sold is not what is delivered.
• Sales reliance on heroics rather than repeatable processes.

Transition Stage: Product-Market Fit Deep Dive

Once a company has a product that customers believe in and renew, it enters the transition stage. Here, marketing and sales teams align on repeatable processes, proactively pursuing target accounts. This phase is characterized as the accounts stage, moving beyond chasing individual leads. Growth becomes more efficient.

Despite progress, companies in this stage may still experience poor retention due to non-ideal customers acquired during the ideation phase. Measuring performance by segment is crucial to identify which customers to pursue and which to abandon. Expansion efforts at this stage remain decentralized as the company continues to refine its product-market fit. Staying too long in this stage risks disruption or commoditization, leading to a decrease in average deal size.

Key characteristics and metrics for the Transition Stage include:

• Metrics by account segments: ideation metrics plus engagement, pipeline coverage, deal velocity, average deal size, GRR, efficiency metrics (magic number, CAC) calculated per segment.
• Tech stack: ideation tech plus ABM platform, intent data, intelligence data, multichannel delivery, business analytics, sales enablement and automated training (LMS, coaching), configure price quote (CPQ), order management, billing automation, customer service automation.
• GTM processes focus on quality acquisition by design using segmentation, prescriptive plays, and higher Annual Contract Value (ACV).

From Transition to Execution: The Final Leap

The final leap to the execution stage requires a shift from relying solely on new bookings for growth to leveraging the existing customer base. Customer segments (not just new account segments) become paramount. Metrics evolve to focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Net Revenue Retention (NRR), and Multi-Product Adoption (MPA). This transition involves expanding into new categories, creating new solutions, and potentially acquiring new companies, all aimed at building a much bigger business.

The “flying machine” transforms into a fleet, reliably transporting passengers and offering diverse experiences. To prevent stalling, companies must avoid common pitfalls at this stage, such as a weak vision focusing on a single product, underinvestment in future distribution, or an inability to hit numbers predictably. Executive alignment becomes critical to avoid competing on multiple fronts without dominating any, and ensuring teams understand their roles.

Execution Stage: Platform-Market Fit Deep Dive

In the execution stage, companies operate with multiple products or services in the market, supported by integrated RevOps. The focus is on platform-market fit and expanding growth potential through strategic, long-range moves. Processes are centralized, with marketing, sales, and customer success acting as a highly trained, revenue-focused GTM team achieving efficient growth at scale.

The emphasis shifts to long-term customers, viewing them as lifetime partners with expansive value. Relevant accounts evolve into customer cohorts that can be segmented for targeted growth. Companies in this stage operate predictably and reliably, enabling accurate forecasting and strategic investments. They continually seek opportunities to grow their single airplane into a global fleet, serving more destinations and offering enhanced experiences.

Key characteristics and metrics for the Execution Stage include:

• Metrics by customer cohorts: transition metrics plus CLV, time to value, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer ROI, product line revenue and pipeline, NRR/net expansion, gross margins, growth by category.
• Tech stack: execution tech plus customer data platform (CDP), integrated stack, data stack with AI/ML modeling, customer experience management, full journey orchestration, sales forecasting.
• A GTM process that delivers repeatably and predictably.

The overall message is clear: to sustain growth, companies must continuously navigate the GTM maturity curve, assessing their current position and proactively transforming their GTM approach to align with the demands of the next stage. This iterative process, guided by the CEO, is what separates enduring, world-changing companies from those that falter.

Section Three: The MOVE Framework

This section introduces the core of the book, the MOVE framework, designed to simplify the complex challenge of Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy. It revolves around four essential questions that, when answered effectively, unlock significant growth opportunities for any company, regardless of its size, industry, or complexity. The framework acts as an operator’s manual for the GTM process, orchestrating teams, investments, activities, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) seamlessly.

The Four Questions of the MOVE Framework

The MOVE framework is an acronym representing:

• Market: Whom should we market to?
• Operations: What do we need to operate effectively?
• Velocity: When can we scale our business?
• Expansion: Where can we grow the most?

These questions are interconnected, forming a continuous, circular movement for the company. Once a company identifies its next best area for growth through Expansion, it essentially restarts the MOVE framework by reconsidering its Market. This iterative cycle ensures ongoing transformation and sustained progress.

Market: Whom Should We Market To?

This question challenges the common mistake of focusing on a broad Total Addressable Market (TAM). Instead, the emphasis is on relevancy, akin to aiming a single arrow at a bull’s-eye rather than firing a hundred arrows aimlessly. Relevancy begins with gathering better data about existing best customers to form a full picture, which then helps identify ideal timing for outreach.

The book categorizes accounts to prioritize efforts:

• Total Addressable Market (TAM): All potential customers over the next 5-10 years, often large but lacking prioritization.
• Total Relevant Market (TRM): Best-fit target accounts that are the highest priority today, which grows over time.
• Intent Accounts: Companies showing active intent to purchase a product like yours, or already “in market.”
• In-Pipeline Accounts: Companies already interacting with your sales team, indicating readiness to purchase.

The goal is to progress target accounts towards becoming in-pipeline accounts based on their relevancy and readiness. Intent data is crucial here, revealing behavioral signals such as website visits, brand familiarity, research activities, and interactions with your company. This data makes sales teams more efficient, leading to shorter sales cycles and more personalized solutions.

Specific data types to gather for Market assessment include:

• Firmographic Data: Number of employees, locations, revenue size, funding structure, industry, verticals.
• Technographic Data: Technology investments (software, hardware), current vendors, competitor solutions (for renewal prediction).
• Ideal Customer Profile Attributes (for TRM): Qualities that make a customer the best fit for your solution, allowing for coordinated marketing, selling, and servicing around specific segments.
• Psychographic Data: Observed messaging across web properties, keyword trends, and natural language processing (NLP) to determine similarity with existing customers and uncover relevant accounts that traditional firmographics might miss.
• Engagement (for Intent Accounts): First-party interactions with your brand, interaction rate to prioritize.
• Hiring (for Intent Accounts): Open positions relevant to your solution, indicating focus and investment.
• Research (for Intent Accounts): Content consumption habits and trends, revealing intent even if unaware of your brand.
• Relationship (for Intent Accounts): Two-way interactions with employees, frequency, recency, and velocity to determine strongest potential relationships.

For companies in the ideation stage, the primary focus remains on TAM. However, as they transition, the focus must shift to TRM and specific segments within it.

Operations: What Do We Need to Operate Effectively?

Operations, specifically RevOps, serves as the “brain” of the MOVE framework. Its ultimate goal is to discern the truth of the numbers objectively, over mere opinions, to enable accurate business decisions. This involves establishing repeatable processes, ensuring data quality, optimizing systems and tech stack, and defining a clear set of metrics.

A common pitfall is treating operations as an efficiency metric or compartmentalizing it into separate marketing and sales operations. The book advocates for a unified RevOps approach for effectiveness, unifying marketing, sales, and customer success. This unified structure prevents data silos and conflicting departmental numbers, which can stall a company’s progress, especially by the transition stage.

The RevOps team should be led by a revenue leader reporting to a neutral executive (CFO, COO, or CEO), ensuring independence and bias-free reporting. This structure allows RevOps to focus on overall business outcomes and answer critical questions:

• How to create repeatable processes?
• How to ensure clean customer data?
• How to ensure systems work as intended for predictable data?
• What metrics to use for market success?

While individual departmental efficiency remains important, it must serve the broader goal of business effectiveness. RevOps provides a single source of truth, enabling the aligned revenue team to gain a holistic perspective on performance and make informed investment decisions.

Key operational elements vary by GTM maturity stage:

• Ideation (Problem-Market Fit):
  • Metrics by functions: Sales activities (calls, demos, opportunities), marketing activities (traffic, leads), funnel conversion rates, cost-per-lead, bookings, win rate.
  • Tech: CRM, marketing automation (MAP), conversation tracking, CMS, sales automation, contact data.
• Transition (Product-Market Fit):
  • Metrics by account segments: Ideation metrics plus engagement, pipeline coverage, deal velocity, average deal size, gross retention rate (GRR), efficiency metrics (magic number, customer acquisition cost, calculated per segment).
  • Tech: Ideation tech plus ABM platform, intent data, intelligence data, multichannel delivery, business analytics, sales enablement and automated training (LMS, coaching), configure price quote (CPQ), order management, billing automation, customer service automation.
• Execution (Platform-Market Fit):
  • Metrics by customer cohorts: Transition metrics plus customer lifetime value (CLV), time to value, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer ROI, product line revenue and pipeline, net revenue retention (NRR)/net expansion, gross margins, growth by category.
  • Tech: Execution tech plus customer data platform (CDP), integrated stack, data stack with AI/ML modeling, customer experience management, full journey orchestration, sales forecasting.

Velocity: When Can We Scale Our Business?

Velocity addresses the critical “when” questions related to scaling: when to scale business, structure, systems, and people. It helps leaders avoid missing growth opportunities by moving too slowly, or burning through resources by moving too quickly. Velocity depends on two key “ramps”: the people ramp and the enablement ramp.

• People Ramp: This determines how quickly new team members (in sales, customer success, marketing) become productive and achieve success in their roles. It also assesses how quickly customers perceive value from the product.
• Enablement Ramp: This focuses on equipping the high-performing revenue team with the necessary training, documentation, playbooks, and processes to be successful. Without proper enablement, scaling efforts can lead to burnout, poor customer experiences, and inter-departmental blame. The real questions of enablement are: “How quickly can we enable marketing, sales, and customer success, and how effective is our process for doing so?”

Companies often make the mistake of hiring reactively (“There’s a fire, so you’re hired”) rather than proactively. A proper velocity strategy, informed by RevOps data, allows for hiring ahead of new customers, ensuring the right people are in place and adequately enabled to meet market demand. This builds confidence in investments, leading to predictable business growth.

Key considerations for Velocity include:

• Prioritizing what the sales team will not do to make room for new initiatives.
• Scheduling sufficient “airtime” to keep initiatives top of mind for GTM teams.
• Identifying gaps enablement must overcome (knowledge, throughput, product, market).
• Assessing the level of difficulty for enablement based on new products, competitors, value statements, personas, or market segments.
• Determining how to resource launches (existing teams, additional resources, overlay teams).
• Measuring launch success through enactment of strategy.

The focus of enablement ramps evolves with maturity:

• Ideation: Focus on “putting out fires.”
• Transition: Focus on improving selling and services.
• Execution: Focus on improving the overall customer experience.

Effective velocity ensures consistency in messaging and experience across all customer touchpoints, from website to sales pitch to customer support. This consistency allows for better forecasting and predictable business expansion.

Expansion: Where Can We Grow the Most?

Expansion is about identifying the next best growth opportunity for a company that doesn’t want to remain static. Failed expansion attempts often result from not effectively answering the MOVE questions, leading to wasted resources and downward momentum. The framework helps companies avoid such pitfalls by providing a structured approach.

There are three primary ways to expand:

• Expansion with Sales: This involves growing beyond direct sales to include referral partners, channel partners, and agency programs. This creates nonlinear growth, reducing the sole reliance on continually hiring more salespeople. Examples include HubSpot (40% revenue from partners) and Snowflake (50% partner-assisted sales). The goal is to make sales as widely distributed as possible.
• Expansion with Coverage: This means extending reach into new geographies (GEOs), different verticals, or by moving upmarket (larger needs/budgets) or downmarket (less complex needs/leaner budgets). Zoom’s expansion during COVID-19 to B2C, nonprofits, and government, and Salesforce’s historical move upmarket into enterprise, are examples. Measuring the percentage of revenue from each coverage area and increasing Annual Contract Value (ACV) are key metrics.
• Expansion with Solutions: This involves growing from a single-product point solution to a multi-product platform solution. This is crucial as existing products face competition or commoditization. Companies must understand their center of gravity to determine which new categories or solutions naturally consolidate around their platform.

Key questions for category expansion (build, buy, or partner) include:

• Category Depth: What will make existing customers happier and deliver on promises?
• Adjacent Niche: What additional use cases expand platform value?
• Emerging Categories: Which emerging categories or vendors could lead to faster growth through partnerships or M&A? Where is consolidation likely?
• Established Categories: Which established categories or vendors might enter your space, and how should you prepare opportunistically or defensively? Who has the center of gravity?

The ultimate goal is to establish an iterative process where expansion insights feed back into the existing teams and the GTM process, continually turning the MOVE framework wheel. This allows the company to continuously improve, expand, and grow, building an enduring business.

Putting it all together for implementation:

1. Identify your current business stage (Ideation, Transition, Execution).
2. Align to your current GTM focus (Problem-Market Fit, Product-Market Fit, Platform-Market Fit).
3. Answer the four-question framework (Market, Operations, Velocity, Expansion) to establish your GTM process.
4. Run your business off the KPIs aligned to your stage.
5. Test your business outcomes. If growth stalls, identify if it’s a “three Ps problem” or a GTM process problem, and invest accordingly. When ready for the next stage, transform your GTM process by repeating these steps.

The MOVE framework provides the clarity and structure necessary to orchestrate sustainable growth, transforming a company from a “rickety flying machine” into a global airline fleet with predictable and continuously improving operations.

Section Four: Orchestrating Your Next MOVE

This section emphasizes the critical need for aligning all key stakeholders within an organization to successfully implement the MOVE framework. It highlights that misalignment among leaders regarding GTM is a common problem, often stemming from differing views on success. The authors provide prescriptive advice for investors, CEOs, CMOs, and CROs, outlining their specific roles and what to watch out for to ensure collective GTM success.

Investors: The Guide

Investors play a crucial role, but their primary job is to guide and empower the CEO to own the GTM process, rather than attempting to own it themselves. Ryan Ziegler of Edison Partners defines GTM as the “process that connects the factory floor to the front office,” emphasizing outcomes over outputs. Investors are concerned with ROI, which can sometimes lead them to push for “growth at all costs,” irrespective of the company’s GTM maturity stage.

Kelly Ford from Edison Partners highlights the investor’s role as a “guide,” leveraging a “bird’s-eye view” across their portfolio to identify best practices. They might offer a GTM center of excellence with playbooks and shared learning. It is critical for investors to align their guidance and expected metrics with the specific business maturity stage of each portfolio company. For an ideation-stage company, prioritizing problem-market fit and validating hypotheses is key, not immediate efficiency metrics. In the transition stage, while pursuing aggressive growth, investors should still encourage building marquee accounts and investing in brand/culture for long-term scale.

The main takeaway for investors is to guide and shepherd CEOs, avoiding a “growth at all costs” mentality that could force premature implementation of structures that hinder early-stage learning and agility. Their metrics and advice must be tailored to the company’s actual stage.

Chief Executive Officers: The Owner

The book unequivocally states that CEOs must take ownership of GTM. It is not a function to be delegated, even in public companies. The CEO’s central role is alignment and transformation. This means creating a shared understanding, common KPIs, and a “single source of truth” across the executive team, ensuring everyone operates at the same business stage within the MOVE framework. The CEO must also adapt metrics as the company progresses through maturity stages.

Many CEOs mistakenly view GTM as merely an “execution” task for others. However, without CEO ownership, ambiguity arises between corporate strategy and GTM process, leading to breakdowns. Brian Halligan of HubSpot advocates treating GTM “like a product”—constantly tracking “bugs” and making improvements based on customer experience feedback.

CEOs are often focused on long-term strategy but may neglect the alignment and execution of that strategy in the present. This can lead to departmental silos and a lack of a centralized GTM function. The CEO’s role is to prioritize company-wide alignment, recognizing when the organization is approaching a moment of transformation and proactively changing incentives and executive team focus. The mantra “What got us here won’t get us there!” applies directly to the need for GTM transformation.

Misaligned data leads to misaligned teams. Therefore, RevOps becomes the CEO’s best friend, providing stable, accurate data for predictable decision-making. CEOs should plant seeds for major changes long before announcing them to avoid system shock. Their foresight is crucial for navigating the GTM maturity curve and clarifying metrics for each stage.

Chief Marketing Officers: The Galvanizer

CMOs must shift their thinking to revenue above all else, embracing the revenue flywheel model over traditional sales funnels. Historically, CMOs have been intensely focused on lead generation, often deferring GTM ownership to the CRO. However, the book emphasizes a true partnership with the CRO. CMOs play a significant role in the Market (M) aspect of MOVE, focusing on building ideal customer profiles and thinking at a customer segment level through account-based marketing (ABM).

Megan Eisenberg, CMO of TripActions, defines GTM as “execution against one or two of [company] goals,” related to product or revenue targets. CMOs must balance marketing across the entire revenue pipeline, not just the top of the funnel. This includes focusing on customer advocacy and cohorts as the company moves to the execution stage. They must be intentional in their messaging, positioning, and differentiation, ensuring messaging alignment throughout the organization so everyone speaks with a consistent voice to the customer. This often requires the marketing operations function to move under RevOps to eliminate silos and contribute to the single source of truth.

Chief Revenue Officers: The Orchestrator

The role of the CRO needs to be reimagined to include ownership of the customer success team, alongside sales. This shift, already adopted by many companies, contributes to a more effective, full-revenue flywheel. Instead of separate numbers from sales, marketing, and customer success, the CRO oversees one unified revenue number, enabling smarter decisions about top-line growth, customer retention, and hiring strategies.

While CROs still bear the responsibility of hitting short-term sales numbers, building predictability through GTM transformation allows them to focus more strategically on long-term goals. A RevOps team as the foundation significantly improves the likelihood of hitting numbers due to a single, centralized data source. The critical warning for CROs is to avoid focusing so intensely on sales that they fail to align with marketing and customer success teams.

The combined responsibilities of sales and customer success under the CRO drive greater alignment and foster a comprehensive view of the customer journey, from acquisition to retention and expansion. This orchestration is vital for maximizing customer lifetime value and achieving sustainable revenue growth.

Section Five: Putting the MOVE Framework into Action

This final section provides practical tools and templates to help leaders immediately implement the MOVE framework. It aims to simplify the process of GTM transformation, ensuring that organizations can assess their current maturity, align their teams, and strategically plan their next steps. The core idea is that companies should focus on mastering their current stage before attempting to leap to the next, using the provided questions as an internal playbook.

The Go-to-Market Assessment

The first step in putting MOVE into action is a self-assessment to identify where the company currently stands on the GTM maturity curve. This diagnostic exercise helps clarify the current stage, preventing premature or misaligned efforts. The assessment consists of six multiple-choice questions designed to reveal the company’s existing state across various GTM dimensions.

The assessment questions cover:

1. Business Stage: Identifies if the company is in the Ideation (problem-market fit, likely <$20M revenue), Transition (product-market fit, likely 10M−10M-10M− 150M revenue), or Execution (platform-market fit, likely >$100M revenue) stage.
2. Key Metrics: Determines if the company prioritizes metrics by function (CPL, MQLs, bookings), segments (engagement, ACV, GRR), or customer cohorts (NRR, LTV, gross margins).
3. Market Approach: Assesses if the company markets to TAM, account segments, or customer cohorts.
4. Operational Determination: Evaluates if operations are ad hoc, aligned, or integrated through a centralized RevOps team.
5. Scaling Approach (Velocity): Determines if scaling is reactive, proactive within departments, or prioritized across GTM teams for company goals.
6. Expansion Focus: Identifies if expansion is single-threaded, partial (additional distribution/coverage), or full (multiple products toward a platform).

By answering these questions collaboratively as a team, companies gain a clear, shared understanding of their current GTM maturity.

Go-to-Market Templates and Questions to Transform Your Business

After assessing the current stage, the book provides specific strategic, alignment, and transformation questions tailored to each of the three GTM maturity stages: Ideation, Transition, and Execution. These templates serve as a structured guide for internal discussions and planning.

Ideation Stage—Problem-Market Fit

For companies in the Ideation Stage, the focus is squarely on problem-market fit. The goal is to determine if the problem being solved is significant enough and if the market offers sufficient growth opportunity. Leaders should not worry about questions pertaining to later stages.

Market (Whom should we market to?) questions:

• Strategic: What problem is being solved? How big is the market? How is the company positioned?
• Alignment: Who is the buyer? What company size/verticals show most success? Which territories/use cases are currently focused on?
• Transformation: What prevents repeatable sales motions? What market approach changes would speed up adoption?

Operations (What do we need to operate effectively?) questions:

• Strategic: Which KPIs indicate problem-market fit? How are teams incentivized for these KPIs?
• Alignment: What tech supports GTM teams? How do marketing, sales, and finance operations align on common definitions and KPIs?
• Transformation: What prevents focusing on best-fit accounts over lead funnels? How quickly can operational metrics across GTM functions be reviewed for business decisions?

Velocity (When can we scale our business?) questions:

• Strategic: How is the sales force trained and iterating on pitches? How quickly are sales hitting quota, and marketing generating demand?
• Alignment: Is there a dedicated team for sales training and support? How are ramp ratios tracked and tested for sales, marketing, SDR, and customer ROI?
• Transformation: What prevents higher velocity in ramp ratios? What information is needed for proactive hiring?

Expansion (Where can we grow the most?) questions:

• Strategic: What are the current selling channels (direct, channels, partners, agencies)? What percentage of revenue comes from each?
• Alignment: Which distribution type should be prioritized? How quickly can new channels be tested?
• Transformation: What prevents expansion into different industries, verticals, or geographies? Should the company go upmarket or downmarket? How can average deal size be increased?

Transition Stage—Product-Market Fit

At the Transition Stage, the focus shifts to product-market fit, aligning marketing and sales teams. The goal is to establish repeatable, scalable processes and identify specific customer segments. Companies should not attempt to answer execution questions at this point.

Market (Whom should we market to?) questions:

• Strategic: Which segments perform best and why? Can success be replicated? What new use cases would increase deal size?
• Alignment: How is the GTM team aligning around segments? How is messaging/value proposition aligned across GTM touchpoints for each segment? How to prioritize from TAM to TRM within segments?
• Transformation: How to achieve top ranking in key category? What stops selling similar solutions to similar buyers for similar problems at scale?

Operations (What do we need to operate effectively?) questions:

• Strategic: Which KPIs indicate product-market fit? How are incentives adjusted for new KPIs?
• Alignment: How predictable are conversion metrics? How are retention and acquisition tradeoffs balanced?
• Transformation: What prevents creating a single source of truth? How are GTM tools integrated for better business insights?

Velocity (When can we scale our business?) questions:

• Strategic: What are the highest priority velocity ramps (people and enablement) for improvement? What key leadership hires are needed for new functions and scaling?
• Alignment: How are training, documentation, kickoffs, and release schedules coordinated across GTM teams and customers? How are holistic hiring decisions made to support top priorities?
• Transformation: What prevents aligning enablement functions across departments? What changes are needed for a unified customer experience?

Expansion (Where can we grow the most?) questions:

• Strategic: How quickly can expansion into different industries, verticals, or geographies occur? What new products/services would existing customers pay for?
• Alignment: How would the business model shift if moving upmarket or downmarket? What makes the product sticky?
• Transformation: What stops achieving the biggest deals with top customers? What stops adding pro-serves to increase deal size? What percentage of revenue comes from each coverage area?

Execution Stage—Platform-Market Fit

For companies in the Execution Stage, the focus is on platform-market fit and maximizing long-term growth potential through multiple products and integrated RevOps. All questions across the MOVE framework should be answerable at this stage.

Market (Whom should we market to?) questions:

• Strategic: What additional problems can be solved to expand value for existing customers? Which build, buy, or partner approaches ensure scaled growth? Who are current/future competitors, and how to transition?
• Alignment: How to sequence “land and expand” offerings? How to identify customers ready for expansion?
• Transformation: Which adjacent categories to move into? How are customers helping redefine the new North Star?

Operations (What do we need to operate effectively?) questions:

• Strategic: Which KPIs indicate platform-market fit? How are incentives adjusted for new KPIs?
• Alignment: How to create, maintain, and communicate a common GTM scorecard? How to proactively address churn and growth? What data is needed for consistent business forecasts?
• Transformation: What new products/services are needed to grow with the existing base? Which new markets can be tested for opportunities?

Velocity (When can we scale our business?) questions:

• Strategic: How to create and enable new lines of business? How to keep the customer at the center of every process?
• Alignment: What key hires (e.g., GMs, GEO executives) support platform growth/global expansion? How frequently and seamlessly does the GTM enablement team work (onboarding, bootcamps, certifications, playbooks, QBRs)?
• Transformation: What prevents creating centers of excellence and benchmarking ramps for bigger growth investments?

Expansion (Where can we grow the most?) questions:

• Strategic: Which channels can be invested in for nonlinear growth? How to create and enable new lines of business?
• Alignment: What percentage of revenue comes from each line of business? How to prioritize new product releases, budgets, and resources across multiple products? What percentage of revenue comes from existing vs. net new customers?
• Transformation: What will it take to create the top ten biggest deals in the category (platform + multiyear + precommit + pro-serve)? What percentage of revenue comes from $100,000+ deals?

By utilizing these detailed questions, executive teams can systematically work through strategic, alignment, and transformation challenges, clarifying their next move and driving continuous growth. The ultimate goal is to move from understanding to actionable implementation, ensuring the company is always focusing on the right priorities for its specific stage of maturity.

Key Takeaways: What You Need to Remember

Core Insights from MOVE

• Go-to-Market is an iterative process, not a one-time project, requiring continuous investment and refinement.
• The CEO must own the GTM process, driving alignment and transformation across the entire organization.
• High-performing revenue teams integrate marketing, sales, and customer success for a unified customer experience.
• Focus on your Total Relevant Market (TRM), not just the Total Addressable Market (TAM), to prioritize effective growth with best-fit customers.
• Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the new growth lever, providing a single source of truth and enabling data-driven decisions.
• Retention is the new acquisition, emphasizing the importance of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and striving for negative churn.
• Replace wasteful lead funnels with a revenue flywheel, promoting continuous growth through customer success and expansion.
• Companies must navigate three GTM maturity stages: Ideation (problem-market fit), Transition (product-market fit), and Execution (platform-market fit).
• Proactive velocity management through people and enablement ramps ensures scalable and predictable growth.
• Strategic expansion into new sales channels, coverage areas, or solutions drives long-term business value.

Immediate Actions to Take Today

• Assess your company’s current GTM maturity stage using the provided assessment questions to identify your starting point.
• Convene your executive team to discuss the six truths about GTM and align on a shared understanding of GTM’s role.
• Begin asking the four MOVE framework questions (Market, Operations, Velocity, Expansion) relevant to your identified maturity stage.
• Identify initial KPIs that align with your current stage’s GTM focus and ensure they are tracked consistently.
• Start breaking down silos between marketing, sales, and customer success by identifying shared goals and communication channels.

Questions for Personal Application

• Which of the six truths about GTM resonates most with your company’s current challenges?
• What is the single most critical “MOVE” question your company needs to answer right now, based on your self-assessment?
• How will you initiate the conversation about CEO ownership of GTM within your organization?
• What immediate data points can your RevOps (or existing ops) team begin to centralize to create a single source of truth?
• In what specific area (sales, coverage, or solutions) does your company have the highest potential for strategic expansion in the next 12-18 months?