Did you know that 82% of product GTMs fail to hit their goals? That’s how Oryan Aviner, Product Marketing Team Lead at AppsFlyer, started her talk at one of Envy’s recent events, before immediately admitting she made the number up.
But the number doesn’t matter. What matters is, you would have believed it, wouldn’t you? Cause whether you're launching a feature, platform pivot, or pricing update, you’ve probably lived it yourself. The PR hits, the launch email is out, social buzz is up, and your content engine is humming. Everything looks like it’s working, until you check product usage two weeks later. No lift, none at all! The adoption graph is flat! Sales can’t point to a single deal that moved forward because of the launch! But the CEO still thinks it was a win because it got “good attention…”
This is exactly what the problem with most B2B GTM strategies is, they’re still optimized for visibility, and not adoption. We’re in 2026 and dominant GTM frameworks still haven’t caught up to how complex B2B products are bought, adopted, and monetized. So if you want a product launch to actually impact revenue, you need to build GTM like it’s an actual infrastructure, and not just a PR campaign.
You can either watch Oryan’s talk below, or keep on reading:
When Oryan joined Duda as Product Marketing Director, she inherited a massive GTM checklist organized by asset count and categorized by the perceived “size” of the launch. The problem was that the checklist didn’t map to what customers actually needed. Instead, it was structured around how “big” the news was internally. And as she quickly realized, that news rarely mattered to the buyer.
This is the most common GTM pitfall we still see in B2B marketing: teams start with a deliverable list, not a business goal. Campaigns become a sprint to complete the checklist, not a system to drive adoption. When asset creation becomes the measure of progress, the team hits its launch deadline without ever validating whether the campaign has moved a single meaningful KPI.
But a bloated checklist isn’t the only reason go-to-market efforts underperform. In our work with B2B tech companies at Envy, we see these patterns come up again and again:
In most companies, GTM is everyone’s job… and nobody’s. Marketing owns the announcement, product owns the roadmap, sales wants new pipeline, and CS is just trying to avoid churn. Without one clear GTM lead and tight alignment across functions, the result is mixed signals. Messaging gets watered down. Each sales rep and SDR is pitching “in their own words”. Product team doesn’t get the feedback it needs. And there’s a lack of consensus on what success looks like.
You can't fake alignment. If Sales, Product, Marketing, and CS can't all articulate the same customer value statement, nor the KPIs that will measure success before launch, you're not ready. But don’t worry, we’ve got more on that below!
Many launches get greenlit because the product team is excited. Not because… the market is. There’s a major difference between “this is a big deal for us” and “this solves an urgent problem for our ICP.” When teams skip customer validation, or worse, assume that brand awareness is the same as relevance, they end up launching features no one asked for, with messaging no one understands. If you’re hearing more hype internally than clarity externally, that’s a red flag.
Most GTM recaps still center on traffic, impressions, or email clicks. The problem is those are attention metrics, not adoption metrics. They tell you who looked, not who acted. And they definitely don’t tell you whether the product moved pipeline or revenue.
You don’t need better email open rates. I mean, yeah you do. But you also need to know how many accounts adopted the feature, how fast they completed onboarding, and what it did to retention, expansion, or sales velocity.
Before creating any assets, ask yourself: What’s the one adoption metric this launch is supposed to move? Is it onboarding completion? Feature activation rate? Pipeline attribution? That’s your GTM foundation.
Marketers looooove a good spike. Guilty as charged! It’s visual, immediate, and easy to present. Social media mentions, website traffic, campaign clicks, they all feel like momentum. But those spikes often fade within days and leave zero trace in the metrics that matter.
Oryan shared a painful example from her time at Wix, where her team launched a product designed to help users configure their websites for better search visibility. The launch followed all the standard motions: internal coordination, PR, community activation, email campaigns, and social push. The buzz was undeniable. The traffic charts looked great. Everyone celebrated. But when she checked the actual product usage two weeks post-launch, the graph was flat. The tool wasn’t being used. Users knew it existed, but they didn’t understand how to use it or why it mattered. Despite the surface-level success, the launch hadn’t driven real behavior change. This forced her team to shift from campaign thinking to adoption thinking. They reworked the onboarding experience inside the product. They renamed the flow to feel simpler. They shortened the process. They built help content focused on practical outcomes. They stopped treating launch as a moment and started treating it as a system. The result was striking: customers who interacted with the revised GTM materials had a 31% completion rate on the SEO onboarding. Customers who didn’t engage with the marketing? Just 8%. This means a 287% lift in usage directly attributed to GTM being rebuilt around adoption, not awareness.
If you want your next GTM to actually prove value, use this simple framework: track attention (lightweight), adoption (core), and revenue (long-tail). Below is a breakdown of what to measure, and what to ignore:
These metrics are useful for directional insight or early momentum, but they do not indicate GTM success on their own:
| YES, because... | NO, because... | |
| Pageviews on the launch blog | Helps test messaging appeal | Doesn't tell you if users took action |
| Press coverage/media mentions | Good for branding of investor visibility | Rarely moves pipeline or product usage directly |
| Social media shares and comments | Can validate resonance | No tie to customer behavior or funnel movement |
| Email open/CTR on the launch email | Useful for optimizing campaigns | Doesn't indicate intent or activation |
Basically, you should treat these like signals, not outcomes.
These are the actual usage behaviors that reflect whether the GTM worked. If you’re not tracking at least 2–3 of these, you’re flying blind:
This is the heart of GTM measurement. If your product usage doesn’t change post-launch, your GTM didn’t work, no matter how good the branding was.
Adoption is a necessary step. But leadership will still ask: Did it generate revenue?
You don’t need to tie every GTM launch to revenue in week one, but over time, your campaigns should show measurable impact in the funnel.
You don’t need all of these for every launch. But you should pick one adoption metric and one business impact metric for every GTM effort you run.
A failed GTM doesn’t always come from poor execution. Often, it comes from a team that doesn’t agree on the value proposition to begin with. This misalignment shows up in inconsistent messaging, confused sales calls, and missed expectations in the customer onboarding experience. And it all stems from skipping the alignment step before asset creation begins.
That’s why we push every client to start with a cross-functional GTM planning pod. Mind you, this is not a 14-person committee, rather one stakeholder each from Product, Sales, CS, and Product Marketing. Get them in a room before a single asset is scoped. Align on these things:
If each team can’t repeat the same sentence about why this feature or change matters, you’re not ready to launch. Because like Oryan said:
“Trust is every GTM’s infrastructure. Don’t build a product only to learn from Sales during kick-off that it brings no value to the customers. Include Sales in planning from the start.”
When done well, GTM moves users from awareness to adoption to advocacy, and moves prospects from problem-aware to pipeline. Which is why we can’t understand why most B2B companies still treat GTM as a single campaign sprint. That’s how they end up with launches that spike traffic but change nothing downstream.
Your GTM should plug directly into your HubSpot setup. If you’re launching a new feature, HubSpot should:
If your CRM only shows the campaign email click rate, that’s more like sending announcements and not running a GTM campaign 🤷🏻♀️
Here are the four building blocks every B2B GTM strategy needs, whether you're launching a net-new product or a single feature.
Build a small core team that includes Product, PMM, Sales, and CS. Before a single asset is scoped, align on one business goal: What are we trying to drive? Is it adoption, ARR, expansion, or qualified leads? Define how it will be measured and tracked.
Every team in the pod should be able to articulate why this launch matters in a single sentence. It must speak to an urgent customer problem, not just a shiny new capability. If you can’t agree on the value prop, delay the launch.
Set dual KPIs, one for the launch, one for long-term growth. The launch KPI might be onboarding completion or demo requests. The growth KPI could be ARR, expansion revenue, or churn reduction. Both should be tracked in HubSpot.
Treat GTM like product development. After launch, run a structured retro. What worked? What didn’t? What changed behavior? GTM isn’t a one-off campaign. It’s a playbook you should improve with every launch.
Pressure test your next launch using this simple scorecard:
If you answered “no” to more than two, your GTM isn’t ready.
At Envy, we build product launch engines, not hype machines. Our GTM strategies are built inside your actual infrastructure, run on HubSpot, and designed to drive the only thing that matters: revenue. Book a call with Idan to get a 30-minute teardown of your GTM motion and how to make it better.