What Adds and What Removes Friction in Your GTM Motion?

Friction manifests in countless ways. It's the deal that stalls in legal review for three months. It's the sales rep who spends two hours searching for the right battle card before a competitive pitch. It's the prospect who receives conflicting messages from your marketing and sales teams and quietly exits your pipeline. Each instance of friction represents wasted time, squandered resources, and lost opportunities.

The challenge isn't eliminating friction entirely. That's neither possible nor always desirable. Some friction is natural in complex B2B sales. The real challenge is identifying where friction adds no value and systematically removing it whilst preserving the high-touch, relationship-driven approach that makes your GTM motion effective.

The Big Picture on Friction

Before we explore solutions, it's worth understanding what creates friction in the first place. Two fundamental issues stand out above all others.

The first is unnecessary costs. When your customer acquisition cost balloons because you're targeting the wrong accounts, employing the wrong tactics, or simply operating inefficiently, friction multiplies across your entire GTM motion. Your sales team burns energy on low-probability opportunities. Your marketing budget gets scattered across too many channels. Your operations team drowns in tooling complexity that adds no value.

The second primary source of friction is targeting the wrong customers. When you chase prospects who don't genuinely need your solution or can't afford it, every step becomes harder. Qualification fails if done at all. Sales cycles extend. Win rates plummet. Customer churn accelerates. The entire revenue engine strains under the weight of misalignment between what you sell and who you're selling to.

On the other side of the equation, two factors consistently reduce friction. The first is selecting the correct GTM motion for your business. A product that requires extensive education and customisation will struggle with a low-touch, self-service approach. Conversely, forcing enterprise sales processes onto straightforward SaaS products creates unnecessary complexity. When your go-to-market approach aligns naturally with your product and market, friction drops dramatically.

When your go-to-market approach aligns naturally with your product and market, friction drops dramatically.

The second friction reducer is maintaining the proper amount of activities across your GTM functions. This isn't about doing more. It's about doing the right things at the right cadence. Too few activities and your pipeline runs dry. Too many and you create chaos that overwhelms your team and confuses your prospects. Finding that balance is central to building a high-velocity GTM motion.

Accelerate Your GTM By Reducing Friction

These five elements form the foundation of low-friction, high-velocity GTM. Get them right, and you'll find your entire revenue engine runs more smoothly.

Strong Product-Market Fit

Product-market fit is the foundation on which all effective GTM strategies rest. When you've achieved proper product-market fit, customers get clear value from your offering. This creates strong demand, repeat purchases, and positive word of mouth. These outcomes generate downstream benefits throughout your GTM motion.

With strong product-market fit, everything becomes easier.

With strong product-market fit, messaging becomes easier because you're articulating value that customers already recognise. Pricing holds because customers understand ROI. Acquisition costs drop because satisfied customers become evangelists who do your marketing for you.

In addition, proper product-market fit means your solution solves an urgent, meaningful problem for a specific customer segment better than any alternative. This alignment creates a natural pull from the market. Customers start to seek you out rather than needing to be heavily persuaded. Everything in your GTM engine, from messaging to retention, gains leverage because both sides feel the underlying fit between product and need.

Clear ICP Definition and Market Focus

Nothing accelerates GTM faster than ruthless customer segmentation. A well-defined ideal customer profile (ICP) acts as the central nervous system for your entire revenue engine. Companies that invest in a sharp ICP definition achieve faster sales cycles, higher conversion rates, and greater average contract values and lifetime value.

Your ICP should be quantifiable, prospectable, and defensible.

When marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams all understand exactly who the ideal customer is, they work in unison to win more of them. This alignment results in dramatically more efficient resource allocation. Marketing creates content that resonates with the right buyers. Sales pursues opportunities with higher win probability. Product prioritises features that matter most to your best customers. Customer success focuses retention efforts where they'll have the most significant impact.

Your ICP should be quantifiable, prospectable, and defensible. It's not just a demographic sketch but an actionable profile that guides every GTM decision from messaging to product development. When someone asks who your ideal customer is, you should be able to answer with precision and confidence.

Right GTM Motion

GTM motion refers to the core approach your company uses to acquire, engage, and grow customers. It defines how you reach your target audience, deliver value, and drive business growth through a coordinated combination of sales, marketing, product, and support activities.

Selecting the correct GTM motion is crucial because it directly impacts your speed to market, revenue growth, and ability to serve customers effectively. The wrong motion creates friction, increases costs, and slows growth. The right one aligns your approach with your customers' needs and buying behaviour, maximising your chances of success.

Selecting the correct GTM motion is crucial because it directly impacts your speed to market, revenue growth, and ability to serve customers effectively.

Sales-led GTM is suitable for complex and high-value solutions. Salespeople engage prospects before they try the product, guiding them through the evaluation and buying journey. This approach works when product complexity is high, average deal sizes are significant, and customers need guidance, customisation, or multi-stakeholder decision-making.

Product-led GTM relies on users discovering value independently, often via free trials or freemium models, converting without talking to sales. This works when the product is easy to adopt independently, has a clear value proposition for self-serve onboarding, and can scale to many users at low cost.

Partner-led GTM uses a network of partners, including resellers and systems integrators, to reach markets that are difficult to access directly. This motion proves valuable when entering new verticals or geographies where partners have established relationships and credibility.

Aligning your GTM motion ensures you're using the most effective, frictionless path to revenue, tailored to your company's strengths, product characteristics, and ideal customer profile. The alignment between what you sell, who you sell to, and how you sell represents one of the most powerful levers for reducing friction and accelerating growth.

Data-Driven Decision Making

High-velocity GTM teams make decisions based on evidence rather than intuition. Businesses that leverage data-driven decision-making are also more likely to make correct decisions. This approach involves using data to understand market trends, customer behaviour, and internal operations to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

Businesses that leverage data-driven decision-making are also more likely to make correct decisions.

The shift toward data-driven GTM is powered by advancements in AI and machine learning that enable predictive analytics. Organisations use these tools to forecast customer behaviour, optimise pricing, segment audiences with precision, and predict future sales performance. Rather than waiting for quarterly business reviews to analyse what went wrong, leading teams implement real-time optimisation loops that continuously monitor performance and even trigger automated adjustments.

Key metrics depend somewhat on your selected GTM motion, but the most important shared ones are customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value. The first shows how efficiently you're acquiring new customers, while the latter measures the total value a customer brings throughout their relationship with your business. The ratio of lifetime value to acquisition costs should ideally be 3:1 or higher, indicating healthy unit economics.

For those pursuing sales-led growth, sales velocity is a good metric to track, too. These metrics connect to form a complete picture of GTM health. When you track them consistently alongside a few other selected KPIs and use them to guide decisions, you continuously reduce friction and accelerate growth.

Sales Enablement and Buyer Enablement

Leaning a bit more into sales-led growth, sales enablement bridges the gap between strategy and execution by equipping teams with the right tools, resources, and training to execute on their GTM motion effectively.

Organisations that centralise resources and create clear GTM playbooks reduce confusion, improve efficiency, and accelerate revenue growth.

Organisations that centralise resources and create clear GTM playbooks reduce confusion, improve efficiency, and accelerate revenue growth. They provide just-in-time training, battle cards, ROI calculators, and case studies that sales teams can deploy in the moment rather than searching for materials. This immediacy reduces friction in the sales process and ensures consistent, high-quality customer interactions.

Buyer enablement extends beyond the primary contact. Internal champions need support to sell your solution to their colleagues. Providing presentation-ready materials, business cases, and implementation timelines empowers these advocates to build consensus within their organisations. When you enable your champions, you reduce friction in the complex, multi-stakeholder buying processes standard in B2B sales.

The combination of sales enablement and buyer enablement creates a comprehensive approach in which both parties to the transaction have what they need to move forward efficiently. This reduces friction throughout the sales cycle and creates a better experience for everyone involved.

Avoid These Friction Traps

These five friction points make your life miserable. They're the silent killers of any velocity, often invisible until the damage is done. Do your best to avoid them, and fix them immediately if you encounter them.

Cross-Functional Misalignment

When sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams operate in silos, chaos ensues. Messaging gets muddled, handoffs become clunky, and opportunities stall. Siloed teams create mixed messages that confuse customers and erode trust. Different teams using different definitions for key metrics create an "everyone hit their numbers" problem, where no one actually knows what's working.

The friction created by misalignment is particularly insidious because it's often invisible to leadership until problems reach crisis levels.

The sales cycle extends when prospects encounter inconsistent experiences. Conversion rates drop when handoffs between marketing and sales fail to maintain momentum. Externally, customer experience deteriorates because buyers encounter inconsistent messaging and disjointed interactions between different functions in your organisation. Internally, then, various teams using different definitions for the same metrics create confusion about what actually drives results. Marketing might define a qualified lead one way, whilst sales uses different criteria. This definitional mismatch means reported numbers don't reflect reality, making it impossible to optimise performance.

The friction created by misalignment is particularly insidious because it's often invisible to leadership until problems reach crisis levels. By the time symptoms appear, typically missed revenue targets or elevated churn, the underlying misalignment has already done extensive damage to pipeline velocity and customer relationships.

Addressing this requires more than occasional alignment meetings. It demands cross-functional goals and KPIs, shared language and definitions, integrated systems for a single point of truth, and a culture where cross-functional collaboration is the default rather than an afterthought.

Weak or Complicated Messaging

Crafting a value proposition that's too complex or full of jargon confuses potential customers. If audiences cannot immediately understand how your product solves their problem, they won't engage further. Inconsistent messaging across channels creates confusion, diluting impact.

Sales and marketing misalignment creates friction at every stage of the buyer journey.

When marketing emphasises one value proposition but sales pursues a different angle, buyers receive mixed signals that erode trust. This misalignment creates friction at every stage of the buyer journey. Prospects struggle to understand what you actually do. Sales conversations start from scratch because marketing materials didn't sufficiently prepare prospects. Opportunities slow down as confused buyers seek clarity from multiple sources.

Successful organisations develop compelling, benefit-focused messaging that clearly articulates the unique value proposition. They ensure all internal teams are aligned and messaging stays consistent across all platforms and materials. Value statements map to specific buyer journey stages and personas, becoming the foundation for all GTM motions, including content, marketing campaigns, and sales conversations.

The test of good messaging is simple. Can a prospect understand your value proposition in 10 seconds? Can they explain to a colleague what problem you solve? If not, your messaging is creating friction rather than removing it.

Slow Decision-Making

Slow decision-making creates dangerous friction in GTM motion by allowing opportunities to slip away whilst competitors move faster. In B2B environments, prolonged decision cycles mean opportunity windows close. By the time decisions are made, market conditions may have shifted, buyer priorities may have changed, or competitors may have captured the opportunity.

In B2B environments, prolonged decision cycles mean opportunity windows close.

Momentum loss compounds the problem. Sales teams lose energy and focus when decisions drag on. Opportunities that sit idle grow cold, requiring additional effort to re-engage prospects. The longer a deal remains stagnant, the less likely it is to close.

Resource misallocation follows from slow decisions. Without timely decisions on priorities, teams continue investing in low-value activities whilst high-impact opportunities remain under-resourced. The opportunity cost of delayed decisions often exceeds the risk of making wrong decisions quickly and correcting course.

Buyers themselves become frustrated. Modern B2B buyers expect responsiveness. Slow internal decision-making translates to slow responses to prospects, damaging credibility and trust. When your organisation takes two weeks to approve a custom proposal whilst competitors respond in two days, you've already lost competitive advantage.

The inability to course-correct may be the most damaging aspect of slow decision-making. GTM strategies require continuous optimisation based on market feedback. Slow decision-making means teams continue executing ineffective approaches long after data signals the need to pivot.

High-velocity teams establish clear decision-making frameworks with defined owners, escalation paths, and decision deadlines. They empower teams closest to customers to make operational decisions quickly while reserving strategic decisions for leadership review on predictable cadences. Speed becomes a competitive advantage in itself.

How to Start Lubricating the GTM Engine?

You've now seen what reduces friction and what creates it. The question becomes how to apply this knowledge to your own GTM motion.

GTM Club leans heavily towards sales-led growth. We help sales leaders reduce friction and accelerate growth. We've developed practical resources designed to address the challenges discussed in this article. Operators design them, for operators, focused on solving real problems rather than theoretical exercises.

Our Sales-Led GTM Checklist helps you evaluate your readiness and identify gaps in your current approach. The checklist includes 18 questions to assess companies' readiness and fit for a sales-led GTM journey.

The Annual Sales Planning Resources provide structure for crafting a winning GTM plan. These templates guide you through market analysis, ICP definition, resource allocation, and goal setting. You can join in immediately and start planning your path to reduced friction and higher velocity.

Our AI-powered Sales-Led GTM Playbook brings together proven strategies and tactics for sales-led growth. It draws on real-world experience to help you avoid common pitfalls and accelerate your journey from where you are to where you want to be.

The path to low-friction, high-velocity GTM isn't mysterious. It requires clear thinking, disciplined execution, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about your current state. Start by measuring where you are, identifying your most significant sources of friction, and systematically addressing.

Your GTM motion can be smoother, faster, and more effective. The question is whether you're ready to do the work required to get there.