Your Product Isn't the Problem. Your Go to Market Has No Tension.

Here is one I watched die twice.

The first time, the company had shown real interest and the deal did not close. We did what everyone does. We built a theory: the process was weak, the account executive had not run it well, we would do better next time. Two years later the opportunity came back in discovery and we ran it properly. The demo landed. The champion was engaged. And then he would not let us move.

We read it as mistrust. He was being hermetic, we had not earned the right to the room, we needed more time with him. He told us the budget was approved. Every week the decision maker was travelling, or the meeting was about to be scheduled, or he would come back with an answer. He never came back with an answer. The deal mattered more than its own size, because in that market the first customer becomes the reference for every customer after it.

Eventually I had an honest conversation with him, and it turned out he was not protecting the buyer from us. He was protecting us from something else. He was furious with his own company. They had promised him things and delivered none of them, including the budget he had told us was approved. He had been fighting a battle inside his organisation that he was losing, and none of it had anything to do with our product. Nobody on their side ever came to tell us what had happened.

When I went back over the file, the actual failure was embarrassing in its simplicity. Nobody had ever mapped who decided. Not once, across two attempts and two years. Two clicks on LinkedIn found the people who could sign. We contacted them, the conversation reopened, and it ended in a trial.

We had spent two years refining a theory about the person closest to the truth, and the truth was that we had never drawn the room.

When a good company loses a deal it should have won, the founder reaches for a thread. A lower price. A rewritten deck. A new channel. A different sales hire. The market is delighted to sell more thread, forever.

I have sat in the meeting where this gets decided, and what strikes me is not the wrong answer. It is what nobody in the room can answer. Nobody has calculated what it costs to convert a customer by segment, so nobody can say whether an account is being handled well or badly. Nobody has imputed the cost of sale into the price, so there is no acquisition cost to appeal to, and no parameter for how much time, dedication and resource an account deserves. In one case the cost of running a single demo had never been quantified. Discounts were irrational because there was nothing to make them rational against. Churn was high and treated as a customer success problem. And when I asked for the pricing structure, the answer was the one I always get: we are a SaaS company, our margin is around 80 percent.

If none of that is known, then you cannot tell whether you are efficient, you cannot set a quota your sales force can hit, and you do not know what a new customer costs you. Therefore you are not running a go to market. You are waiting for a miracle at the end of each month, hoping something closes, without knowing whether it will renew. And renewal is where the money comes back.

There is a structural reason the thread never works.

The founder builds a pitch for one person, the technical champion who understood. But the decision is not made by one person. It is made by a group across functions, each with its own definition of value and its own quiet power to veto. Finance cannot see the return. Security has questions. The champion, who genuinely loved the product, cannot defend it in a room you are not in, and sometimes, as in the deal above, cannot defend himself in it either.

The research is consistent and slightly brutal. Gartner, surveying 632 buyers in May 2025, found unhealthy conflict inside 74 percent of buying committees, and that the committees which reach genuine consensus are 2.5 times more likely to close a high quality deal. Win rate collapses as the room grows: between 38 and 52 percent with one to three stakeholders, and between 18 and 30 percent with ten or more. Messaging aligned to outcomes rather than features correlates with a 43 percent higher win rate, per Forrester. And the cost of acquiring a genuinely new customer keeps rising: the 2025 Benchmarkit study puts the median new customer acquisition ratio at $2.00 of sales and marketing for every dollar of new ARR, against $1.00 for expansion.

So the deal does not get a no. It gets no decision, which is worse, because a no teaches you something and a silence cannot even be forecast.

A pitch does not survive a room you are not in. One story does, but only if it is one. And your champion is going to walk into that room whether or not you have prepared him for it. Do not send him in without armour and without weapons.

That is the whole of it, and it has a shape.

Picture a loom. The vertical threads are the warp, and they stay under tension the entire time: your foundations, the structural truth about why this company deserves its price. The horizontal thread is the weft, woven across: execution across channels, inbound, outbound, content, sales enablement. The weft only holds because the warp is tight.

Two threads matter most, and they are the two almost everyone leaves loose. The red thread is the single narrative line that leads a buyer out of the labyrinth of features, the one truth that nothing downstream is allowed to contradict. The gold thread is economic value made visible and billable, every capability translated into the buyer's own currency. Gold, because it is the thread that gets paid for.

And then there is tension, which is the part that matters. Threads are commodities now. Positioning, channels, a return calculator, you can buy all of them this afternoon. What almost nobody supplies is the tension that turns separate threads into one cloth. The market sells thread. The work is the tension.

The method is called The Loom, and it is four hands on the frame, in order. I am going to give you all four, including what each one produces and one thing you can check tonight. I am also going to tell you where each one stops being a procedure and becomes a judgment, because that is the honest part and it is the part that decides whether it works.

You see the company as it is and mark every place the cloth is loose. You walk away with an honest diagnosis of incoherence.

Tonight. Look at your website, your last outbound sequence, and the way you describe the company on a call. Three expressions of one story, or three stories?

The judgment. You will find a dozen loose threads, and the useful question is not which one is worst. I will be honest about how this actually goes, because the textbook answer is a lie. You attack where you have leverage. In one company everything pointed at innovation, pioneering, technical capability, all excellent vectors for category leadership and all meaningless to a buyer who has to put investment against return in front of a committee. The first move was not the most sophisticated one available. It was to connect the pain to what the product actually solves, which is step one and sounds like nothing. Only once that stopped bleeding did we earn the right to the next move, which was to connect the solution to a lever, the lever to a KPI, and the KPI to money. Get the order wrong and you spend a quarter rewriting things that were never bleeding.

You articulate the position that holds and make the value visible and billable. You walk away with the gold thread, spun from value you already had and never counted.

Tonight. Take one capability and write it in three moves, lever, KPI, euro. If you cannot reach the euro, you do not have value. You have a sentence.

Here is the structure I use, and I am giving it away because it is the map, not the calibration. Three improvement levers per project. One to three KPIs per lever, so the improvement is measurable rather than asserted. Then the forecast in the buyer's own currency: what that solution costs on the market, what the problem costs if it is not solved, and what they save by solving it before it becomes a problem.

The judgment. Which of those levers this particular committee believes. In the case above the shift got us in front of the head of purchasing and the CFO, rooms we had never reached, and the lever that moved was forecast accuracy. The founder wanted to push a different one, the one about being unique and being the best, which is the lever founders always want. He was not wrong that they were the best. He was wrong that it was purchasable. Choose the lever the room does not believe and you produce an impeccable business case that nobody defends in your absence.

You read the buying committee and pass both threads through every channel and every actor. You walk away with the deck, the playbook and the narrative each function can carry.

Tonight. Count how many people in your last committee saw material built for them. It is usually one.

The judgment. Finding the detractor who never objects. I lost a deal to one. Small company, high revenue, and a contact who presented himself as the most refreshingly honest man in the world: I do not pay for nonsense, I can do this myself, I know my way around a spreadsheet. He confirmed several times that he was the decision maker. Every phase went well, every question was answered, and then it ended in an email saying they had chosen another solution. I wrote to him. He replied that he had been delighted, that it had been perfect, and that perhaps a demo using his own data would have helped, which was not how we ran demos at the time. He then hired someone internally to engineer what we had proposed. He was never objecting to the price. He was objecting to what an external solution would do to his own position, and that objection is never spoken out loud, so if you have not built for it you will never hear it.

You do not win them all. I left that door open deliberately, because an internal rebuild of something a specialist has already solved tends to arrive late, and when it does, the person who has to explain that internally will need someone who already understands the problem.

You put the pipeline in motion and hold the coherence so it does not fray. You walk away with a go to market that runs, repeats, and can be bought by a committee.

Tonight. Three measurements. Total assigned quota against the number in the plan, and if the first is larger, that gap is your margin of fiction. Cost of conversion by segment against what that customer contributes over its life. Touches, and people reached inside the committee, before close, set against deals won and lost.

The judgment. What you do when the measurement contradicts the founder's conviction. That is political work, not analytical work, and it is the only part of this that cannot be delegated to a tool. It is also where most engagements quietly fail. The measurement gets installed, the result gets ignored, and six months later the same forecast comes back wearing a different explanation.

Notice what you do not walk away with. You do not walk away with a tapestry, which is a poem you hang on a wall. You walk away with your go to market.

And notice what this essay has not done. It has not withheld the method. The shape of this work is not a secret and pretending otherwise would be an insult to anyone who has read Dunford. What is not in here, because it cannot be written down, is the calibration: which of the twelve threads is bleeding, which lever this room believes, who in that room is quietly protecting his own position, and what to say when the number contradicts the founder. Four judgments. Everything else is the map, and the map is now yours.

You can run this alone. It will take you longer, and you will find out which of the four judgments you get wrong by losing deals to it. That is a legitimate way to learn and it is the way I learned. The sprint is not knowledge, and it is not company. It is execution, judgment and speed, applied by someone who has seen the four seams fail in enough different rooms to recognise them early.

Start with the diagnosis anyway. Run the three measurements this quarter, whoever runs them. At the end you will know whether your problem was the seller, the story he was given to walk in with, or the room nobody ever drew.

You already have the threads. That is the hard part and you have already built it. What you are missing is the tension, and tension can be added, in order, by hand.

The cost of not acting is your biggest competitor. It is quieter than the others, and it wins more often.

If you would rather start with your own company, I built a short, free self-assessment, the Committee Readiness Audit, that scores whether your go to market can survive a buying committee.

Josué Urízar, MBA, is a fractional CMO for B2B scale-up go to market. He weaves a company's whole go to market into one story a buying committee buys. The method is called The Loom.

Sources: Gartner buyer survey, May 2025, 632 buyers. Ebsta and Pavilion, 2025. Forrester, via engsales.substack.com. 2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmarks, Benchmarkit, N=73.