What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It

Episode 61 - Quick Fire Series: ICP Is Not Segmentation 

Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. 

We're two episodes into our Quick Fire series running through Louis's What B2B Forgot newsletter arc — and keen to hear what listeners think of the shorter, weekly format, so do let us know. Last time we set up the thesis that revenue is a system, not a sales number; today we get concrete, starting with one of the most misused terms in GTM: ICP. Here's the TL;DL: An ICP helps a seller find accounts that look plausible. Segmentation explains why groups of customers buy, what they value, how they need to be served, and whether the economics work. If that distinction is missed, the damage appears later as generic messaging, variable sales cycles, massive discounting, expensive onboarding and churn. 

Read more on this topic in the corresponding edition of Louis' What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It newsletter: ICP Is Not Segmentation. 

Other mentions in this episode: 

Louis' cryptic trademark LinkedIn post 

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Episode 60 - Quick Fire Series: Revenue Is a System Not a Sales Number 

Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. 

Louis previews a busy week ahead: he's speaking at the NEXO Conference on Friday, giving a fireside chat on scaling businesses across Europe, before co-hosting the Winning by Design London Impact Roadshowthe following week alongside Jacco van der Kooij and Mike Boogaard. 

We launch a brand new run on the podcast this time — a five-part Quick Fire series adapting Louis's What B2B Forgot newsletter arc, starting with the case that revenue is the output of a commercial system, not simply a sales number. Here's the TL;DL: B2B often treats revenue as the output of Sales, when it's actually the result of connected choices about market, proposition, price, channel, customer experience and value delivery. A modern CRO's job should therefore be to make the whole system coherent and to optimise the quality of revenue, not simply its volume. 

Read more on this topic in the corresponding editions of Louis' What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It newsletter: What B2B Forgot and Your CRO Should Think More Like an FMCG Brand Director. 

Other mentions in this episode: 

NEXO Conference 

Winning by Design London Impact Roadshow 

The Revenue Operating Governance paper, co-authored by Louis with Kevin Brown and Travis Brown 

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider. 

Episode 59 - Summer Cognoscenti Wrap-up with Ian Truscott 

Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. 

Louis marks a milestone before getting into the main topic — next week’s newsletter edition will be his 100th, two years since he started writing it. He also shares news that he’ll be co-hosting the Winning by Design London Impact Roadshow with Jacco van der Kooij and Mike Bugard on 7th October, an invite-only session for senior SaaS revenue, GTM ops and executive leaders. 

In a special wrap-up episode, Louis and Simon revisit this year’s Summer Cognoscenti Series to draw out the common threads running through it, joined by returning guest Ian Truscott, managing partner at B2B tech fractional leadership and advisory consultancy VelocityB. Here’s the TL;DL: SaaS doesn’t primarily have an execution problem — it has a governance and operating model problem that manifests itself through execution. The connective tissue running through this summer’s Cognoscenti series has been governance: organisations can optimise individual functions, metrics and tactics while still degrading the performance of the whole system. Under pressure, local optimisation becomes easier to justify, competitive imitation erodes tactical advantage, and faster execution can compound poor choices just as effectively as good ones. 

Huge thanks to our fabulous guests: Mark Walker, JD Miller, Kevin Brown, David Keene, Travis Brown and Gerry Hill. 

Listen back to all the episodes in the Summer Cognoscenti Series - 

Mark Walker on the RevvedUp shutdown 

JD Miller on the new CRO playbook 

Kevin Brown on governance before scale 

David Keene on technology architecture 

Travis Brown on governance at scale 

Gerry Hill on suppressing your own TAM 

Other mentions in this episode:  

Ian’s Rockstar CMO podcast and his 5 F’in’ Marketing Fundamentals 

The Revenue Operating Governance paper, co-authored by Louis with Kevin Brown and Travis Brown 

Simon’s LinkedIn article: How a Throwaway Line About Money Supply Explains the GTM Measurement Trap 

Excerpts from the Accenture Song Client Buying Index 2026 

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Episode 58 - Summer Cognoscenti Series - Gerry Hill: Stop Suppressing Your TAM 

Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. 

We close out our Summer Cognoscenti Series with Gerry Hill, VP Customer Strategy at TitanX, who returns to the show to make the case that most GTM teams are suppressing their own TAM. Here's the TL;DL: While AI has made outbound activity almost free, buyer attention has never been more expensive. The response has been to shrink the market to the accounts displaying visible intent, then hammer the same small pool of buyers everyone else is chasing too. Gerry's challenge is that we are suppressing our own TAM. We need an architecture in which brand creates memory, intent informs sequence, conversations create evidence, and expensive sellers are deployed where they can generate the greatest economic return. 

Other mentions in this episode: 

Gerry previously joined us on Episode 23 to discuss cold calling. 

Louis and Simon first unpacked TAM, SAM and SOM back on Episode 2. 

Louis references Simon’s Goodhart's Law article discussed in the previous episode. 

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

Episode 57 - Goodhart, Governance and the GTM Machine 

Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. 

Louis kicks things off with news of his move from London to Porto. With the move itself out of the way, Louis is turning his attention to what's next — he's looking for a new senior GTM leadership role helping scale a SaaS business through that $20 to $60 million revenue range, ideally in a European remit spanning sales, revenue, or go-to-market management. Read more, and get in touch! 

This week Louis and Simon dig into why go-to-market teams keep making the same mistake: noticing a measure that correlates with success, turning it into a target, attaching incentives, then acting surprised when people optimise the measure instead of the outcome. Here's the TL;DL: Targets change behaviour. Revenue Operating Governance asks the harder question: if that's inevitable, how do we design the system so the behaviour we induce is driving the outcomes we actually need? 

Other mentions in this episode: 

• Simon's LinkedIn article: How a Throwaway Line About Money Supply Explains the GTM Measurement Trap 
• Mark Walker's LinkedIn post on aligning everyone around the real goal of revenue 
• The conversation with Mark Stouse on correlation, causality and data attribution 
• The conversation with Travis Brown on Revenue Operating Governance and the Revenue Operating North Star 
• The conversation with Kevin Brown on the discipline of walking away from bad-fit deals 
• Simon Sinek's TED Talk, "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" 

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider. 

Episode 56 - Cognoscenti Archive: Andy Champion & Wayne Starritt 

Welcome to What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. 

This episode heads back into the Cognoscenti Archive to revisit the original conversation with Wayne Starritt, Founder & Managing Director of Bullingstone Associates, and Andy Champion, Global Head of Enterprise Sales Atlassian and a returning friend of the show, recorded following Bullingstone's CROs Who Succeed research into why so many Chief Revenue Officers fail within 18 months. Louis explains why the conversation is worth hearing again rather than leaving it in the archive: when it was first recorded, the discussion was framed principally as a people question — hiring for adaptability over pedigree, diagnosing before prescribing, holding strong ideas lightly. Having since spent much more time on revenue architecture, growth architecture, and revenue operating governance, Louis now hears the same conversation differently — not just as a question about the individual CRO, but about the system they're placed into. Fragmented objectives, incentives that reward local optimisation, and a reliance on one heroic leader holding everything together can undermine even a very capable CRO. 

Here's the TL;DL: Great revenue leadership matters, but sustainable performance comes when great leadership is supported by great architecture and great governance. 

Other mentions in this episode: 

CROs Who Succeed The Bullingstone Associates white paper behind the original conversation. 

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider. 

Episode 55 - Summer Cognoscenti Series - Travis Brown: From Leadership Intent to Organisational Behaviour 

Welcome to What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues. 

Louis confesses to a new addiction: The Rest Is Football, with Gary Lineker, Micah Richards and Alan Shearer, which has had him up at both ends of the day throughout the World Cup. Simon, no football fan himself but equally swept up in the tournament, flags a tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn post he put together imagining fake commentary lines for every World Cup host city. 

Continuing the governance thread picked up with Kevin Brown earlier in the Summer Cognoscenti Series, this episode turns to Travis Brown, CXO at Opiniion and co-author of the Revenue Operating Governance Working Paper, who explores how governance moves from principles a founder believes to routines and behaviours an entire organisation consistently follows. Here’s the TL;DL: This episode isn’t primarily about the seven revenue operating governance principles — it’s about the gap between knowing the right thing and getting an organisation to repeatedly do it. Where Kevin’s episode explored governance as internalised founder judgment, Travis explores how it becomes distributed organisational judgment. 

Other mentions in this episode: 

Revenue Operating Governance Working Paper 

Winning By Design's Bow Tie model 

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni 

Kevin Brown's episode 

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider. 

Episode 54 – Summer Cognoscenti Series - David Keene: AI, Trust and GTM Architecture 

Welcome to What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.

Simon recently hosted the Rethink B2B Customer Growth event in London, run under the Accenture Song umbrella, which brought together research, client perspectives and practitioner insights on B2B growth strategy. Simon shared findings from the Customer Buying Index study, led a session on revenue planning, and made the case for planning at the buying group level in enterprise settings — arguing that account-level planning lacks the fidelity needed to align renewal, expansion and multi-motion strategies. He also published a roundup post drawing together attendee reflections and key data points from the day. Louis noted that several of the themes — revenue architecture, growth architecture and revenue governance — dovetail closely with recent content arcs on the podcast.

In this episode, continuing the Summer Cognoscenti Series, David Keene, Co-Founder and CRO at Agentive — who brings three decades of experience across Google Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and Wipro — joins Louis and Simon to explore what’s really broken in B2B go-to-market and where agentic AI fits in. Here’s the TL;DL: AI won’t fix broken GTM — it’ll expose it. The opportunity isn’t to automate more activity; it’s to move from systems that record what happened to systems that help revenue teams decide what should happen next. But that only works if the business has clear architecture, good governance, trusted data, and a genuine focus on customer impact rather than internal activity.

Other mentions in this episode:

Simon’s Rethink B2B Customer Growth 2026 roundup post

Episode 52 with JD Miller on The New CRO Playbook

Episode 53 with Kevin Brown on Governance Before Scale

Episode 51 with Mark Walker on AI-Native SaaS

Pavilion — peer community for GTM leaders

CMO Circle — peer community for senior marketing leaders

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

Episode 53 - Kevin Brown - Governance and Building the Operating Discipline Before Scale

Welcome to What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.

This episode continues our Summer Cognoscenti Series, with Kevin Brown, CEO and co-founder at SMVue, joining the conversation. Here’s the TL;DL: Governance isn’t bureaucracy, and it isn’t something you bolt on after scale — it’s the discipline of making trade-offs conscious before they become accidental strategy. For founders, that means how you avoid turning short-term survival decisions into long-term operating drift.

Other mentions in this episode:

Revenue Operating Governance working paper, co-authored by Louis Fernandes, Kevin Brown and Travis Brown.

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.

Episode 52 – Summer Cognoscenti Series – JD Miller: The New CRO Playbook 

Welcome to What’s Broken in GTM and How to Fix It with Louis Fernandes and Simon Daniels. Each week, together with occasional guests, we explore the challenges that face go-to-market leaders in SaaS scale-up businesses and suggest solutions to common issues.

Before getting into the main conversation, Louis shares news of the launch of the Revenue Operating Governance working paper, developed together with Kevin Brown and Travis Brown in conjunction with the Winning by Design Growth Institute, and recently presented at the Winning by Design Impact Summit Virtual. The paper addresses why well-designed revenue systems still break under pressure, arguing that while revenue architecture provides the system design and growth architecture explains how the system behaves, organisations also need a governance layer to keep the system aligned as short-term pressures and local optimisation pull it apart. Simon, meanwhile, flags two upcoming speaking engagements: the Accenture Song B2B Customer Growth Conference, where he will be discussing revenue planning, and the SME Forum for asset management distribution sales and marketing leaders, where he will be covering go-to-market measurement.

Kicking off the Summer Cognoscenti Series, this episode brings a conversation at the intersection of private equity, revenue leadership, and AI, with guest JD Miller, Operating Partner at Rothschild Five Arrows and a multi-time CRO. Here’s the TL;DL: CROs can no longer rely on heroic selling, instinctive deal judgment, or a single forecast number. In a PE-backed environment, they must understand the investment thesis, translate it into the revenue architecture, and communicate early and clearly with the board. AI raises that standard further but it cannot replace trust, judgment, leadership, or the human dynamics of complex B2B buying.

Other mentions in this episode:

The CRO’s Guide to Winning in Private Equity by JD Miller

The AI Handbook for Sales Professionals by JD Miller

JD's AI Handbook bonus materials – free 90-day AI adoption plan

CROs Who Succeed report and our ep37 discussion with Wayne Starritt and Andy Champion

Episode 19 with Joel Harrison

Episode 21 with Andy Champion

Follow us, get in touch, share your thoughts on anything discussed, or suggest ideas for what we should cover in future episodes via our LinkedIn page. We also appreciate comments and ratings on your podcast provider.