A framework for diagnosing go-to-market problems from the outside in
Every sales leader has been there. The pipeline looks fine on paper. Marketing is running campaigns. The BDRs are busy. And yet — the number isn’t getting hit. Something is wrong, but nobody can quite agree on what it is.
This is the classic GTM diagnostic problem: symptoms are easy to see, but root causes are buried. You might start with “BDRs aren’t hitting their meeting goals” and end up discovering that the real issue is a misaligned ideal customer profile that was defined three years ago and never updated.
The framework I use to cut through this noise is what I call the Onion Diagram. Like an actual onion, a go-to-market organization has layers — and finding the real source of a problem means peeling them one at a time. Developed from working in or consulting to over 30 PE and venture back companies from $0 to $500M in ARR, the diagram is less something original, but more a collection of ideas, strategies and thought leadership I have collected along the way from other really smart people.
Why GTM Problems Are So Hard to Diagnose
Most revenue organizations are not broken in one obvious place. They are the product of hundreds of small, individually reasonable decisions made over months or years. A tweak to the ICP here. A new comp plan there. A positioning pivot that was never fully socialized. A new sales stage added to the CRM without updating the playbook.
Each decision made sense at the time. But the sum of all those decisions may have quietly drifted into misalignment. Nobody is doing a regular audit of whether the whole machine still fits together — because leadership is too busy running the machine.
You Already Know How to Solve the Problem
While most GTM problems are hard to diagnose, someone in the company already knows the problem and a likely solution. It is just hard for the entire company to get around the problem area for whatever reason. No consultant is going to show up with the answer. They can only guide you to test your own hypothesis and assumptions around your GTM strategy. The best way to solve these issues is lots of listening and probing the assumptions a company has made around their growth engine.
This is exactly where an outside perspective — or a structured internal audit — becomes valuable. The goal is not to assign blame. It is to systematically peel back each layer of the GTM onion until you find where things have come apart. Ninety percent of the time, where they come apart is not an exclusive sales or marketing issue. It is a collection of problems built up over time. But someone or a collection of people already know the problem, it just hasn’t been surfaced.
Introducing the GTM Onion Diagram
The Onion Diagram organizes your entire go-to-market into concentric layers, moving from the most foundational strategic elements at the center outward to the operational machinery at the edges. The onion provides a structure to interview, test and discuss the assumptions for GTM strategy. Here is how it breaks down:
Layer 1 (Core): Customer
At the very center of the onion sits your customer understanding. This includes three critical elements:
- Job to Be Done — What problem is the customer actually trying to solve? Not the features they’re buying, but the underlying job.
- Unmet Needs — Where are existing solutions falling short, and how does your product fill that gap?
- Compelling Events — What triggers a buyer to start looking? A new compliance requirement? A leadership change? A failed incumbent?
If the center of the onion is off — if your team doesn’t have a shared, accurate picture of who the customer is and what they need — every other layer will drift too. This is the foundation. Get it wrong and nothing downstream can fully compensate.
Layer 2: Market
Just outside the customer layer sits the Market layer. This is where you translate your customer understanding into a targetable segment. The three components here are your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), your segmentation model, and your sense of the market wave you are riding.
A well-defined ICP is not just a demographic description. It is a precise, testable hypothesis about which subset of the addressable market has the job to be done, the budget to act, and the organizational readiness to buy. Segmentation then operationalizes this ICP into territories, verticals, or firmographic tiers. The wave question asks: is your market category growing, and are you positioned to ride that tailwind?
Common issues at this layer: the ICP was defined early and never pressure-tested against actual closed-won data. Or the segmentation was built around sales territories rather than buyer fit. Both create silent inefficiency that compounds over time.
Layer 3: Product
The Product layer is where customer needs meet your actual offering. The key questions here span Requirements (does the product do what ICP buyers actually need?), ROI and Pricing (can buyers justify the investment and does the price make intuitive sense?), and Ecosystem (do the right integrations and partnerships exist to make the product work in a real customer environment?). Since this is a GTM analysis, there is a strong bias to selling what is on the truck. The goal here is to get everyone to agree to big rock issues that might be impacting growth. Second, undertanding the pricing model and ROI is important to ensure they align with the sales model and actual value a customer is receiving.
Layer 4: Financial
Wrapping around the product is the Financial layer: TAM, revenue targets, and the underlying business plan. This layer answers the question of whether the GTM motion is economically sensible. Are you chasing a large enough market? Are revenue expectations grounded in realistic conversion assumptions? Does the cost of acquisition pencil out at current pricing? For mature companies this is a quick conversation. For emerging companies, more time should be spent here.
Layer 5: Buyer’s Journey
The Buyer’s Journey layer captures how your actual buyers move through a purchase decision — not how your sales process is structured, but how they experience and drive the evaluation. This includes understanding influencers (who shapes the decision?), top problems (what is most painful?), evaluation style (do they run formal POCs or make fast decisions?), buying process (who signs, how are budgets approved?), and what success looks like to them.
Misalignment between the buyer’s journey and the selling process is one of the most common and most damaging gaps in a GTM system. If your sales motion requires six steps and the buyer only has patience for two, you will lose — and you may never know why.
Layer 6: Branding and Positioning
Now that you know your buyers journey, it is time to start to looking inward. Positioning problems — where what you say about your product does not land with buyers the way you intend — are often mistaken for sales execution problems. There are plenty of positioning frameworks to use to check if you are on the right track.
Branding is always important. Depending on the stage of the company it might be critical or less important. This stage of the alignment looks for obvious mismatch issues. For example, an ICP that doesn’t match the brand. Your team knows the answer here. Just ask them.
Layer 7: Selling Process
The Selling Process layer is where strategy meets execution. This includes the defined sales stages (Awareness, Consideration, Evaluation, Purchase, Upsell/Cross-Sell), the models your team uses to qualify and progress deals, and the supporting motions from sales, marketing, and support.
Issues here tend to show up as interlock problems between sales and marketing. With good enough sales and marketing leadership, each organization can run processes. The problems come when the two are misaligned.
Layers 8 and 9: Goals, Results & Organization
The outermost layer is where the observable data lives plus the goals that drive the behavior of all the teams: revenue results, pipeline, lead volume, activity metrics, compensation plans, and the organizational structure of the sales, marketing, and BDR teams. This is typically where leaders first notice that something is wrong — and where the mistake of stopping the diagnosis too early is most common. The goals level here is so critical especially for marketing. Marketing chasing the wrong target will negate all the other layers of the onion.
How to Use the Onion: Start with the Symptom, Peel Toward the Cause
Not every GTM review needs to start at the center and work outward. In practice, most engagements start with a specific, visible problem — a tactical issue on the surface of the onion. The discipline is in not accepting that surface symptom as the root cause.
Sometimes you get lucky and the issue is close to the surface — a process fix, a training gap, a tool that isn’t being used correctly. But sometimes the peeling takes you all the way to the center: the job to be done was never correctly identified, and the entire GTM system is built on a faulty foundation.
The onion framework doesn’t tell you which layer the problem is in. It gives you a disciplined path to find it — and makes sure you don’t stop too early.
Unlocking a Shared Language for Diagnosis
The real value of the Onion Diagram is that it creates a shared language and a shared map. When a CRO says “the problem is sales execution” and a CMO says “the problem is lead quality” and a CEO says “the problem is positioning,” they are often all right — but they are pointing at different layers. The onion puts everyone in the same conversation.
It also provides a diagnostic sequence. Rather than debating opinions, you can work through each layer systematically, gather data and interviews, build consensus on where the gaps actually are, and then prioritize a roadmap of improvements.
In future posts, I’ll go deeper on each layer — what to look for, how to gather the right evidence, what good looks like, and the most common failure modes I’ve seen across 30+ PE and venture-backed companies. But the starting point is always the same: understand the layers, identify the symptom, and start peeling.
The GTM Onion Diagram is part of a structured five-part review framework covering Customer Consensus, Buyer’s Journey, Revenue Generation Machinery, and Implementation Roadmap. Future posts will take a deeper dive into each layer.
