68% of Executives Say This One Thing Would Make Them Hit Their Numbers (with Sangram Vajre from GTM Partners) | Ep. 19

Most B2B companies are running inbound and outbound because they're comfortable, measurable, and feel like a spreadsheet they already know. That's exactly why the motion that creates the biggest deal sizes and longest customer relationships stays chronically underinvested. ㅤ David Walsh, founder of Limelight, sits down with Sangram Vajre, co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners, to get into the real mechanics of go-to-market: how teams lose alignment, why partner-led motion outperforms everything else, and what it actually takes to build content that 175,000 people read weekly. ㅤ Sangram has been in the rooms where these decisions get made. He ran marketing at Pardot through a $2.5 billion Salesforce acquisition, co-founded and scaled the ABM platform Terminus to over $100M in revenue, and now runs the go-to-market research firm he built from zero to ~$10M without raising a single dollar. ㅤ **Guest Bio** Sangram Vajre is co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners, a data-driven go-to-market analyst and advisory firm he built alongside Bryan Brown, Lindsay Cordell, and Judd Borakove. Before GTM Partners, he co-founded Terminus, one of the companies that created the ABM software category, and before that ran marketing at Pardot through its acquisition into Salesforce. He's the author of three books on B2B go-to-market, including *MOVE*, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller co-written with Bryan Brown. He's spoken at UNBOUND (formerly INBOUND) for ten consecutive years and hosts the GTMonday research newsletter, now published as Run on GTM OS, with over 175,000 subscribers. ㅤ **What We Cover** - **Why marketing is a silo of silos:** The graphic designer, the demand gen manager, the ABM lead, and the social team often have no shared understanding of what they're collectively trying to accomplish. - **Renaming meetings as a GTM alignment tool:** A "marketing attribution meeting" signals the conversation is about justifying marketing's existence — rename it "pipeline velocity" and the whole orientation shifts. - **How Henry Schuck runs alignment at ZoomInfo:** He replaced weekly executive meetings with a daily 9 AM go-to-market session: no decks, no status updates, just the team watching how decisions get made in real time. - **68% of GTM executives say clarity would make them hit their numbers:** When given a list of external pressures, nearly 68% of executives said clarity on their own go-to-market strategy would matter more than fixing competitors, AI, or macroeconomics. - **The six go-to-market motions and why partner-led wins:** Of the six motions GTM Partners tracks, partner-led produces the largest deal sizes and highest business value — and is chronically underfunded because it takes the longest to build. - **The Salesforce and Bombora playbooks for partner-led growth:** Bombora skipped building a sales team entirely, embedded its intent data inside Terminus, Demandbase, and 6sense, and took a revenue share on every deal. - **Story first, content format second:** The CEOs who build the strongest brands are the story — what works for successful creators isn't the posting cadence, it's that they have something real to say. - **How GTMonday grew to 175,000 subscribers without paid ads:** GTM Partners wrote original research every week instead of blog posts, and one day 600 IBM employees subscribed because someone dropped the link in an internal Slack channel. - **LinkedIn as an LLM and the case for commenting over posting:** Comments on high-followership accounts can generate more impressions than standalone posts — for anyone starting out, commentary is a faster path to visibility. - **The bet on GTM fractionals as the next wave:** Sangram's thesis is that operators in their 40s and 50s who feel disrupted by AI are sitting on their most valuable asset: two decades of judgment that AI execution can now amplify. ㅤ **Resources Mentioned** GTM Partners: Sangram's go-to-market analyst and advisory firm, home of the GTM Operating System framework. Run on GTM OS: GTM Partners' weekly research newsletter with over 175,000 subscribers, formerly published as GTMonday on Substack. ZoomInfo: B2B data and intelligence platform whose CEO Henry Schuck recently changed the company's Nasdaq ticker from ZI to GTM; mentioned as a GTM Partners client and daily alignment case study. HubSpot: B2B CRM and marketing platform mentioned as an example of a company that scaled by making partners central to its revenue motion. Bombora: B2B intent data company that grew without a direct sales team by embedding its data inside ABM platforms and taking a revenue share. Demandbase: ABM platform mentioned as one of the partners that distributed Bombora's intent data. 6sense: Account-based marketing and revenue intelligence platform, also a Bombora distribution partner. PartnerStack: Partner relationship management platform David Walsh considered building before launching Limelight, and a current Limelight integration. impact.com: Partnership and affiliate management platform mentioned alongside PartnerStack as a reference point for the partner-led motion category. Beehiiv: Newsletter platform GTM Partners migrated to from Substack for segmentation and support at scale. Substack: Publishing platform where GTMonday was originally hosted before the move to Beehiiv. ㅤ *Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.*