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collabs — gtm strategy

Decide what
marketing does next.

An assessment of where your marketing stands, and a committed 90-day plan for what to do about it.

A three-to-four week sprint for B2B tech teams with more marketing ideas than capacity to run them. It settles the priorities before you commit budget to building anything.

Book a call →

what it is

An assessment of where your marketing stands, and a plan that drives your short and long-term growth engine.

The sprint runs at the point before the decision has been made. Ask a founder, a head of marketing and a head of sales what marketing should do next, and you will often get three answers with no agreed way to choose between them. This settles that, in three to four weeks.

Half one — the assessment

Where your marketing actually stands

A marketing maturity assessment across six areas and twenty-nine sub-areas. Each is scored against a five-level scale and a target set for your stage, with the evidence behind the score and how confident it is. Two weeks of desk research, competitive review, and your own documents, analytics and call recordings.

Half two — the plan

What you are doing about it

A 90-day plan built from the assessment and agreed with you in the room. Workstreams in dependency order, each with an owner, a share of the budget and one metric it will be judged on. Plus the register of work you are declining this quarter, and a check on whether the budget can buy the goal.

what it settles

Three questions.

01

From the assessment

Where does it break?

The upstream problem

Anyone can produce a list of everything that could be better. The assessment looks for the one or two upstream problems that explain the downstream symptoms, so that fixing them resolves several complaints at once. A paid channel that will not convert is often an ICP or differentiation problem rather than a creative one. Flat content output is often a positioning problem. Sales calling the leads bad is often a scoring and handoff problem.

Settles what you are treating as the cause, and what you are treating as noise.

02

From the plan

What are we committing to?

Named moves, in dependency order

Every route to market is on the table and gets a verdict: paid, organic search and content, lifecycle and email, partner and ecosystem, community, events, PR, outbound, and the website itself. Each becomes a build, a hold or a stop, with an owner, a share of the budget and one metric. They are sequenced by what depends on what, because paid spend against unclear positioning, or a content engine with no conversion path, will not return anything.

Settles which channels get funded, who runs them, and how they get judged.

03

From the plan

What are we refusing?

What you are declining, and why

An explicit register of the work that is not happening this quarter, with the reasoning against each entry. Usually it catches the channel nobody wants to admit is not working, the conference sponsorship booked out of habit, the rebrand that would stall everything else for a quarter, and the second content format nobody has capacity to sustain. Without it, initiatives nobody formally stopped carry on consuming budget, and the same proposals return every few weeks.

Settles what is off the table until the next planning cycle.

the assessment

Six areas,
29 sub-areas.

Coverage is fixed rather than chosen, so the assessment reaches the areas nobody thought to raise as well as the ones already being argued about. Each sub-area is scored, evidenced, and given a confidence level.

Targets are set to your stage. What good looks like at seed is not what good looks like at Series B, and a scorecard that ignores that will tell a fourteen-person company it is failing at things it should not be doing yet.

01

7 sub-areas

Strategic Foundations

ICPPositioningDifferentiationMessagingBrandProofCoherence

02

3 sub-areas

Customer & Market Intelligence

ResearchWin/lossCompetitive monitoring

03

3 sub-areas

Buyer Journey & Lifecycle

Journey mappingSales handoffPost-sale

04

7 sub-areas

GTM Execution

ChannelsDigital experienceDemand genContentPRCustomer marketingEcosystem

05

5 sub-areas

Operational Maturity

PlanningMeasurementAttributionCross-functionalBudget

06

4 sub-areas

Team, Tools & Resources

TeamTech stackAI & automationExternal resources

The same framework is published as the Marketing Audit blueprint if you would rather run it yourself.

how it works

Four phases.

Three to four weeks end to end. The assessment runs async and takes most of the calendar. Three sessions are scheduled with you and they are part of the scope, not an optional extra: the one in the middle is where the diagnosis gets tested before any of the plan is written.

01 — Kickoff

Set the question.

A 90-minute session to agree what the sprint has to answer, the goal it serves, the budget envelope it has to fit inside, and who decides. Ends with the evidence request.

Output: the question, agreed and written down.

02 — Assessment

Build the evidence.

Two weeks, async. Desk research, competitive review, your documents and call recordings, and maturity scoring across all six areas. The findings are then read across sources into a set of strategic threads.

Output: the scored assessment, and the threads worth testing.

03 — Interpretation

Test the analysis.

Two hours, live. I present the analysis and you argue with it. Threads are confirmed, reframed or dropped in the session. Everything in the plan is built from what survives it, which is why it is the phase that carries the weight.

Output: a diagnosis your team has stress-tested.

04 — The plan

Commit to it.

90 minutes, live. The plan is built from the interpretation session, then walked through and adjusted with the people who own the work. Ends with the next move named.

Output: the committed plan, and the first move.

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outputs

What you
leave with.

Yours to keep, and to hand to whoever executes, including someone other than me.

01

A committed 90-day plan

Workstreams in dependency order, each with an owner, a budget allocation and one metric.

02

A 12-month arc

What the 90 days is building toward, so the quarter sits inside a longer direction.

03

A refusals register

What is being declined this quarter, and the reasoning against each entry.

04

The full maturity assessment

All twenty-nine sub-areas scored against stage-appropriate targets, with the evidence behind each score and how confident it is.

05

An affordability check

Whether the budget on the table can buy the goal you have set. Sometimes the answer is no, and it is better to know in week three.

06

A prescribed next move

The first thing to do, and the reasoning for it.

This is the engagement that decides where the next £100k+ of marketing budget and headcount goes.

fit check

Who this is —
and isn't — for.

The sprint has real prerequisites. Self-qualifying upfront saves us both time.

A good fit

  • Series A to growth-stage B2B tech
  • A marketing function that exists but isn't compounding
  • Leadership who can name a revenue goal with a number and a date
  • Enough history that there is something real to assess

Not yet

  • Pre-PMF. There is not enough to assess, and the plan would be fiction
  • You already know what you want built. Go straight to the relevant build sprint rather than paying to decide something you have decided
  • No goal, no budget envelope. The plan includes a check on whether the budget can buy the goal, and without real numbers that is guesswork. This one is a disqualifier
  • You want it delivered async. The live sessions are the product

what comes next

Often the plan points at one of the build sprints, which is the sequence working as intended. Sometimes it points at a hire, an agency, or work best done in-house. The plan recommends what the evidence points at, including work Inference doesn't sell.

All sprints → Ongoing support →

next step

Find out whether
this is the right shape.

Bring the goal, the budget envelope, and the thing your team disagrees about. 30 minutes. If the priority is already clear, I will point you at the build sprint you need instead.

Book a call →

frequently asked

Questions.

The ones worth answering up front.

Isn't this just an audit?
The assessment is half of it. An audit tells you what is wrong. This also settles what you are doing about it, in what order, who owns each piece, and what you are dropping to make room. A findings document on its own is easy to agree with and then ignore.
How is this different from the Marketing Audit blueprint?
They share the framework. The blueprint hands you the six areas and twenty-nine sub-areas to run yourself, so you do the scoring and you make the calls. This sprint runs the assessment for you and adds the part the framework cannot do on its own: interpreting what the scores mean in your situation, and turning that into a plan your team has agreed to. The blueprint gives you the method. The sprint gives you the decision.
We already know what's broken.
Then a build sprint is probably the better buy, and I will tell you which one on a call at no cost. This sprint earns its money when the diagnosis is genuinely contested, or when the priorities are not obvious enough to defend to the board.
How much of our time does this take?
Three sessions across the four weeks, of 90 minutes, two hours and 90 minutes. Plus an evidence pack at the start and access to a handful of people. The evidence request is specific: existing plans and decks, analytics and CRM access, and three recorded sales calls if you have them. Everything between the sessions sits with me.
Can you just send us the report?
No. The session where you argue with the diagnosis is what turns an outsider's opinion into a plan your leadership team will back. A plan that arrives cold tends to get read once and filed. If a document in your inbox is what you want, this is the wrong engagement and it is better to say so now.
What if the plan recommends something you don't do?
Then it says so. A plan that only ever recommends the things I sell would be worth discounting, and you would be right to discount it. Sometimes the honest recommendation is a hire, an agency, or work best kept in-house.
How is this different from the AI Readiness workshop?
They answer different questions. AI Readiness asks where agents and automation could change the economics of your marketing. This asks what your marketing should be doing at all. If the question is specifically about AI, start there. If you are not sure which you need, book a call.
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start with a conversation

Let's settle what's next.

Tell me the goal, the budget envelope, and where the disagreement is. 30 minutes, and no cost if the answer is that you need something else.

Book a call →