The GTM Power Hour: Grade Your Strategy on Evidence

By Ryan Vanshur

Open the go-to-market plan your team approved last quarter, find the sentence that names the customer, and ask the person who wrote it how they know. In most rooms the answer is a pause, followed by a customer who was never asked, or a memory of a meeting where the answer simply felt right, and that pause is the whole subject of this guide.

Most go-to-market strategy gets built that way, and a GTM strategy checklist is how you catch it before a renewal does, or before a funded competitor shows up in a deal the plan never considered. A positioning statement gets written in a meeting, a price gets picked the same afternoon, and the launch turns out to be a date on a calendar. Nothing in that plan was checked against a buyer, and it doesn't feel broken until something outside the room exposes it. The GTM Power Hour is a one-hour session that shows which parts of your strategy are facts and which are still hopes.

The Example Company

This guide uses one example from start to finish: PlotIQ, an invented software company for cemeteries and funeral homes. PlotIQ is fictitious, but it stands in for a real vertical SaaS company, so every step has a concrete answer we can all check against.

Step 1: Write the Ten-Row GTM Strategy Checklist

Write one sentence per row, and describe what you currently believe rather than what you wish were true.

1. Target customer, by role, not by market.
2. The problem, in the customer's words.
3. The solution, in one sentence.
4. The value proposition, and the proof behind it.
5. Pricing, and the alternative it's priced against.
6. Channels, the one or two you're betting on.
7. Competition, what the customer does instead of buying from you.
8. Differentiation, the sentence a competitor can't say.
9. The first ten customers, by name or by shape.
10. The one metric that says it's working.

For PlotIQ, row one reads "the cemetery general manager," not "cemetery operators," and row seven reads "paper plot maps and a shared spreadsheet," not "other software vendors." Rows like these earn their place because they're specific enough to be wrong, and a row that can't be wrong can't be checked.

Evidence is expensive to gather by hand, so most teams skip it and call the skip "innovating fast." The sheet makes that skip visible in one hour, which is far cheaper than finding it after a launch.

Step 2: Grade Every Row

Give each row one of four grades, based on what you've seen rather than on how confident the room feels.

• Assumed. Nobody outside the room has tested it.
• Heard. A buyer has said it, in their own words.
• Seen. Buyers have acted on it, and you can point to the record.
• Confirmed. At least five separate cases agree, and five is the floor. Four cases make a strong hunch, but not a confirmed row.

The essay's printed sheet grades each row high, medium, low or unknown, and these four rungs are the same ladder with the evidence named, so a low or unknown row is an assumed one here. Most first sheets come back mostly assumed, and that's the useful result, not a failure, because the sheet measures how little the plan rests on, and we'd worry more about a sheet that came back all confirmed. The assumed and heard rows are the discovery agenda, and the Discovery skill is one way to work through them in order.

Picture PlotIQ filling in its sheet. Row one, the cemetery general manager, starts as assumed, and after two calls in which general managers named that role as the person who signs, it moves to heard. Row seven, paper plot maps and a spreadsheet, is seen, because the properties that still use them can show what they spend each month keeping those records current. Two rows, two grades, and two different amounts of work still to do, and we don't build a launch on either one until that work is finished.

Step 3: Run the Evidence in Order

The grades tell us where to look, and the order tells us what to do first. Discovery finds the customer, and positioning tests the statement against what buyers would do instead, so the launch team can pick the one or two channels that get the money without guessing at the message. Growth then turns the launch into experiments that keep running after the people who ran the launch have gone back to their day jobs.

Run them out of order, and we'd expect every stage to be guessing about the one before it. For PlotIQ, discovery named the cemetery general manager as the buyer, a person who trusts referrals from other properties and association events over ads. Positioning rejected a first draft that any vendor could have written, because it didn't survive the test for uniqueness, and the second draft, built on compliance and trust fund reporting, passed, so launch scored community-led and partner-led as the lead motions, with outbound as the experiment.

Each stage writes to a shared foundation and reads from it, and discovery fills that foundation with evidence about who the customer is. Positioning writes back a position it can defend, and launch writes back the motion, the kill rules and the proof it will lead with. When the customer changes, the change reaches every stage, so nobody has to restate the market in a new deck to find out.

Step 4: Apply the Two Launch Guardrails

Write these two rules into the plan before anyone gets attached to a channel.

• No more than 30% of the budget on one unproven channel. Spreading money thin is how a team ends up executing five channels badly.
• Kill any channel with no signal within thirty days. Its money moves to the next channel on the list instead of sitting in a pile.

For PlotIQ, outbound is the experiment, so it gets at most 30% of the launch budget, and that ceiling holds even when the early numbers look good. If it produces no signal within thirty days, the line item closes and the money moves. The rule is written down now so nobody has to defend it later, when the case for keeping a channel always sounds reasonable.

Step 5: Run the GTM Strategy Checklist in One Hour

Invite the people who own sales, product and the buyer relationship, since they're the ones who will have to act on the grades. Put roles on the invite, not personal names, and keep the group to five people at most, because that's small enough for everyone to grade. Then we run the hour in order.

Print the sheet at the end and put it where the next strategy session starts, because a printed sheet is the one people actually pick up before they walk into the room. The hour leaves four things behind: the graded sheet, a discovery agenda, the two launch rules with a date on each channel, and one owner for every open row. The rest of the strategy reads those four artifacts, so we'd keep them current, and that matters more than the hour itself.

Go Deeper

• The GTM Operating System, the essay this guide grew out of.
• Vertical SaaS GTM Framework, the full playbook this hour sits inside.
• GTM Operating Scorecard: Metrics That Matter, for choosing the metric in row ten.
• Vertical SaaS GTM Strategy: The Complete Playbook, the long-form strategy reference.
• Discovery skill, for working the assumed and heard rows.

The Monday After the Hour

Picture the Monday after the hour, when PlotIQ's sales lead opens the sheet and finds three rows now marked seen and one marked confirmed, and every open row has a name beside it and a date. The outbound line has a thirty-day clock on it, and the check-in is already on the calendar, set for the day the first signal is due to show up or not. Nobody has to ask what the plan rests on, because the sheet answers that before the meeting starts, and the meeting can move straight to the decisions.

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