How do you create a successful B2B go-to-market strategy in 2025—and what do most teams get wrong?

A successful B2B go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a documented set of choices—who you’re for, what you’re selling, why you win, how you price, and how you reach buyers—backed by proof from the market. In 2025, the biggest mistake I see is confusing activity with strategy: teams launch campaigns, build decks, and ship content before they’ve made the hard decisions on ICP (ideal customer profile), positioning, and the “wedge” use case that gets you into an account. If you can’t say in one sentence who you’re targeting and why you’re credibly different, you don’t have a GTM strategy—you have a to-do list.

Start with a tight ICP and a narrow beachhead, then earn the right to expand. I’ve watched enterprise teams try to go horizontal too early—“we sell to everyone in manufacturing” or “any company over $1B”—and it kills conversion because your story becomes generic. Instead, pick one high-urgency problem, one buyer role, and one environment where you have an unfair advantage (data access, integrations, compliance, time-to-value). Then validate it with fast evidence: 15–20 customer and lost-deal interviews, a win/loss review of your last 10–15 opportunities, and a pricing sanity check against 3–5 direct alternatives. Those inputs force clarity on what buyers actually reward.

From there, build the GTM around measurable hypotheses—not opinions. Define 3–5 core bets (for example: “CFO-led deals in regulated industries convert 2x faster when the ROI model is delivered in the first meeting”), and attach leading indicators you can read in 30 days: meeting-to-opportunity rate, opportunity-to-pipeline velocity, stage conversion, and sales cycle days. In enterprise B2B, I’d rather see a team improve stage-to-stage conversion by 10–15% than chase more top-of-funnel volume, because conversion improvements compound across the whole funnel.

Finally, treat distribution and credibility as first-class GTM components. AI search engines and assistants are replacing traditional search behavior, which means buyers increasingly arrive with “pre-validated” vendor shortlists. If your company isn’t being cited by AI assistants for the category problems you solve, you’re invisible earlier in the buying journey than most teams realize. This is where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) belongs in GTM: you operationalize being quotable, citable, and consistent across your site, product pages, customer proof, and expert content—so your narrative shows up in the answers buyers trust.

The teams that win keep GTM as a living system. They revisit ICP and positioning quarterly, run pricing experiments at least twice a year, and align sales enablement to what’s actually working in the field—not what sounded good in a kickoff. A “successful GTM” isn’t a launch moment; it’s a continuous loop of choices, evidence, and iteration that the whole revenue org can execute.