You start the go-to-market planning process with a really good ICP. Like, actually good. Rich, specific, alive. It reads almost like a short story. Something like “a time-strapped founder, six years into building a $10M B2B SaaS company, who has just promoted their first VP of Marketing from inside and is terrified they promoted the wrong person. That is a real person. You can picture them. You know what kind of gum they prefer to chew. YOU GET THEM

Then you go to operationalize getting in front of that ICP. Seems easy - you have such a vibrant picture….

You build the outreach sequences, the targeting, the messaging. And somewhere in that process, the whole vivid portrait collapses into a pile of firmographics. Suddenly all of your marketing and sales motion is functionally aimed at every $10M founder-run B2B SaaS company as if they are all the same creature.

They are absolutely not the same creature.

The company that took ten months to hit $10M is a completely different beast than the one that took six years. The company that just took Series A funding is running on different fuel than the one that is bootstrapped and profitable. The company with a brand new CMO is living through a different kind of internal panic than the company that just rebuilt its entire sales team. These aren’t minor variables that change the game slightly, these are load-bearing differences in how that company thinks, what it needs, and what kind of partner it is looking for.

When your go-to-market motion treats all of them the same, your marketing does not meet your prospect where they are. It meets them where your spreadsheet thinks they should be.

That is a problem.

And guess what? That problem is only half of the picture.

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Most of the conversation about ICP and go-to-market strategy is focused entirely on the buyer side. Understand your buyers better. Segment more precisely. Build richer personas.

Good thinking. All valid. All useful.

But there is a second variable that almost nobody names directly, and it is just as important who are you as a potential partner?

Before you answer, you are NOT your service list or capabilities deck, or your case studies. What is the actual personality of your agency, what is the energy you bring into a room…what does it feel like to ACTUALLY work with you?

I spent years selling and marketing in a way that did not reflect what it was actually like to work with me. I am a bit of a nerd, so I led with numbers and trends and analysis. That part was real. I am also the person who makes stupid jokes in client calls, drops an f-bomb when the moment calls for it, and has been described by at least one client as "tough love from your funny uncle." (I have a lot of nieces and nephews - the funny uncle title fits.)

I did not bring the funny uncle to work, in my marketing, anyway. And while it was not a disaster, I know there was a gap between how I sold and what it was like to actually be in the room with me and my team. I was selling a slice of myself and calling it the whole thing.

I also knew, after enough experience, that there were some prospects who would never vibe with me no matter how helpful I was or how well my work performed. There are eal personality disconnects & real cultural mismatches. And rather than seeing that as information, I would try to close them anyway. (Editor’s note: That never went well.)

Eventually, I understood the point of all of this - all of the marketing, all of the outreach, all of the sales process - is to get a prospect’s attention and keep it long enough that your business becomes the biggest thing in their field of vision. That is it. That is the whole game.

The way you earn that kind of sustained attention is not by being perfectly optimized, but rather it is by you and your agency being irreducibly yourselves in front of the right people.

Let’s dive into the two halves of this equation, shall we? GTM Themes and Buyer Archetypes come on down!

I want to introduce the idea of your go-to-market theme. I want to be clear from the jump - this is not a tactic or a campaign type or a content format or a channel strategy. This is attitudinal. This is about the fundamental personality your agency brings to sales and marketing, and it has to come from your brand promise and the actual character of your team.

There are four broad themes. Most agencies camp in one, with some secondary flavor. Here they are:

This is the agency that leads with originality, provocation, and surprise. The marketing does not look like other marketing. The pitch does not sound like other pitches. The case studies are written in a way that makes you feel something rather than just nod along. These agencies attract clients who are tired of the same gray parade of vendor decks and want something that actually reflects how they think about the world. The risk here is obvious - weird without substance is just annoying. But weird with real craft behind it? Unmistakable.

This is the agency that earns attention by demonstrating that it understands the market, the economics, and the specific texture of the problem better than anyone else in the space. The marketing is authoritative without being pompous and the sales motion feels like a conversation between peers who both know what they are talking about. These agencies attract buyers who want to feel understood before and never sold to. They do not want to be impressed - they want game to recognize game.

This is the agency that leads with proof. What moved, how much, why, and what it cost. The marketing is built around outcomes and evidence. The pitch is structured around before and after. The case study is the hero, not the agency. These agencies attract buyers who are accountable to a number and need a partner who is accountable to the same one. They are not interested in philosophy. They want to know if this worked somewhere else and whether it will work here.

This is the agency that leads with stability, process, and track record. The message is not flashy, and it is not supposed to be. The value proposition is fundamentally about risk reduction. We have done this a hundred times. We know where projects go wrong & we will not surprise you. These agencies attract buyers who are not rewarded for creativity - they are rewarded for not screwing up. For those buyers, "safe as f*ck" is the highest compliment.

You probably see yourself in one of those themes, and of course there's nuance in those themes. But few agencies have a clear, confident, deliberate answer to the question - what kind of partner are we?

That matters, because without it, you just make marketing that looks like everyone else's marketing. I see this constantly, even with creative agencies that absolutely should know better. The stakes feel so high in their sales efforts that they squeeze all the life out of them. They become gray. They become safe by default, which is the worst version of safe.

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Every buyer you encounter is operating from a set of internal priorities that shape how they evaluate vendors, make decisions, and define success. These are not personality types in the Myers-Briggs sense, hey are more like decision postures. This is the stance a buyer takes based on what they are protecting, what they are rewarded for, and where they are in their career and company lifecycle.

There are seven that I see show up consistently:

The Culture Maker is building something and wants partners who are building, too. They value originality and have strong opinions about aesthetics, voice, and brand. They are easily bored by conventional thinking. If your pitch sounds like every other pitch, they have already mentally left the room.

The Truth-Seeker wants to be in a conversation with someone who genuinely understands their market and their problem. They are not looking for flash or even for proof; they are looking for accuracy. They will push back on oversimplification and lose trust quickly if they think you are making things sound tidier than they are. What earns their attention is nuance and reality.

The Performance Optimizer is accountable to a metric. They do not care how the sausage gets made. They want to know what moved, by how much, and what it is going to cost to do it again. They are not unfriendly, but they are impatient with anything that does not connect directly to outcomes.

The Risk Guardian is protecting the organization - and themselves - from a bad decision. They are often not the final decision-maker, but they can absolutely kill a deal. What they need from you is the ability to explain the choice to their boss without flinching. Creativity reads as risk & established process reads as safety. Your job is to make the decision feel defensible, not exciting.

The New Guy just got hired or just got promoted, and they have something to prove. They are not trying to maintain the status quo - they are trying to put their fingerprints on everything. The previous vendor relationships, the existing strategy, the way things have always been done? All of that is on the table. They want to make changes that signal they are not just a placeholder. Which means if you can position yourself as the partner who helps them build their version of things, you become part of their agenda instead of part of the furniture they are about to rearrange.

The Institutionalist has been in this organization forever and has deep institutional memory that most vendors never bother to acknowledge. They know where the bodies are buried. They have seen vendors come and go. They are not opposed to new thinking, but they need it to come wrapped in respect for what already exists. Do not walk in and tell them everything they have been doing is wrong.

The Cheapskate is primarily motivated by price. Not always because they are cheap people, but sometimes they are operating with real constraints. But price is their dominant filter, and if you can not speak to that filter, you are going to find yourself in a negotiation that erodes your margins before the contract is even signed. Know this archetype fast and qualify accordingly.

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Here is where it gets interesting & where most agencies leave money on the table.

The natural instinct is to target the buyer archetype that most obviously matches your GTM theme. WEIRD agency goes after Culture Makers. Insight agency goes after Truth-Seekers. Results agency goes after Performance Optimizers. Safe agency goes after Risk Guardians. That all makes sense, and yes - those are your natural fits. Pursue them hard.

But your market is not going to hand you a perfectly sorted list. You will encounter Performance Optimizers even if you are a deeply weird, creative, motion-and-meaning agency. You will encounter Cheapskates even if your entire value proposition is built on strategic insight. The question is not how to avoid the mismatch. The question is how to find the common ground.

Here is how I think about it:

If your agency runs on WEIRD and you find yourself in front of a Performance Optimizer, the bridge is not to pretend to be a different kind of agency. The bridge is to connect creativity to the thing they care about. Something like: we use creative provocation to generate hypotheses, and then we use data to test them, and then we feed the results back into the creative process. That is not a lie. That is actually how good creative agencies work. But now you are speaking a language the Performance Optimizer can hear.

If your agency runs on INSIGHT and you are sitting across from a Cheapskate, the bridge is not to discount. The bridge is to connect insight to the thing a cheapskate actually wants, which is not low cost - it is low waste. Something like: insight reduces waste, and waste is the thing that makes everything expensive. If you can back that up with some specifics, you might even be able to structure a deal with a performance kicker - lower base, upside on results - and now you are speaking their language. Low price. Skin in the game. No sense of getting ripped off.

This is the work. Not personality type matching. Not firmographic targeting. The work is understanding your own GTM theme deeply enough to translate it for buyers who are not your natural fit - and understanding buyer archetypes specifically enough to know which ones are worth translating for and which ones are genuinely not a match worth pursuing.

Because here is the thing most agencies never figure out - your GTM theme is not a cage, it’s an axis & everything else orbits it.

Two questions worth sitting with seriously before you build another campaign, write another sequence, or update that deck for the third time this quarter.

The agencies that answer both of those questions with real specificity are the ones whose marketing stops looking like everyone else's. Sales calls stop feeling like auditions monologues & their deals close faster because the fit revealed itself early and both sides understood they were in front of the right people.

This is not a positioning exercise. It is being aware of who your agency is and being able to translate that so you mesh well with your market.

There are a bazillion go to market tools vying for your attention. Here are the GTM Tools that are in my stack on the regular:

For finding and reaching prospects: Apollo just dropped end-to-end AI agents, waterfall enrichment, AND a Claude integration (yes, that Claude). Pair it with Instantly or Lemlist for outreach that doesn't make people want to throw their laptop.

Before you ever get on a call: Stop winging it. Discovery Lab and Copy.ai's Prospect Intelligence exist so you walk in knowing something. Radical concept, I know.

On the call: Call Lab gives you real-time intelligence so you stop flailing mid-conversation. Fireflies records and transcribes so future-you can figure out where past-you screwed up. (Try the instant sample — takes 2 minutes.)

For landing pages and pitches: Landingi scales. Instapage personalizes. Landing Rabbit builds from what you already have (bless them). Gamma for decks that don't look like 2009 PowerPoint.

Video that doesn't suck: Descript makes AI avatars easy, & ElevenLabs make human sounding voice a snap. Personalized video used to require effort. Now it just requires clicking.

And if you have a productized service or software offering: Partnerstack is a killer partnership platform (and if you want to recommend software to your clients, PartnerStack has an array of software you can get paid for recommending. Dub is making a good run in this space, too. You are welcome.

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