And why most B2B GTM fails them
Most B2B go-to-market strategies are built around supplier activity: leads, pipeline, conversion, influence. Even when teams talk about “buyer journeys”, they often just relabel the same internal process.
Buyers experience something very different.
For them, buying is work. It involves trade-offs, internal politics, and personal risk. B2B software purchases are not judged when contracts are signed, but months later, when outcomes are visible and enthusiasm has faded. Careers, credibility, and budgets are assessed with hindsight.
Most B2B buying decisions fail not because the product was wrong, but because the decision became indefensible later.
Customer-Led Growth works because it is designed around this reality. Buyers are not trying to choose the best product. They are committing to improvement under uncertainty and then living with the consequences once uncertainty collapses into results.
The buyer’s lifecycle
Buying does not progress through a linear funnel. It progresses through a set of risk-reduction jobs across four stages:
Choose → Commit → Deliver → Review
Buyers must commit before certainty exists and then explain outcomes later. Their job is not to be right in advance. It is to be defensible later.
This lifecycle is not navigated by an individual. Typically, four people form the core buying group, with ten or more involved overall. Technical, legal, and procurement roles often carry veto power without owning the decision. Each role faces different risks.
Suppliers focus on pain and gain. Buyers care about those too, but they also care about exposure, reputation, and career risk.
The six buyer jobs
To manage that risk while pursuing improvement, buyers must complete six jobs:
Choose
Prioritise a results gap worth acting on now
Buyers must choose one problem over all others. If nothing is deprioritised, nothing is truly prioritised. Suppliers often fail by proving their problem matters, but not that it matters more than competing priorities. Buying is a relative decision.
Define expected improvement
Buyers need commitments that are measurable, role-owned, and survivable if missed. Over-precise targets increase risk. Ranges beat false precision. Baselines are often assumptions, not facts.
Do enough diligence to choose without regret
Buyers are not seeking certainty. They need defensible sufficiency. Diligence fails when it has no stopping rule. The goal is not to explore every option, but to ensure no obvious alternative was ignored.
Commit
4. Secure approval by making risk explicit
Approval is not persuasion. It is the moment risk becomes visible and accepted. Masking risk to secure approval simply pushes exposure downstream, where it reappears with greater force during delivery or review.
Deliver
5. Trigger early evidence before patience decays
Silence after approval is interpreted as failure. Buyers need early signals that progress is being made, even before outcomes are measurable. Early evidence preserves confidence and prevents emotional disengagement.
Review
6. Defend the decision with hindsight integrity
Renewal is a second buying decision. Buyers must compare outcomes against original expectations and explain variance honestly. Rewriting goals or results destroys trust and suppresses learning.
Why this matters to CEOs and CROs
Most GTM failures are misdiagnosed as messaging, pricing, or confidence problems. In reality, they are decision-defensibility problems.
Customer-Led Growth shifts the focus from persuading buyers to helping them survive decisions by:
framing problems as high-priority results gaps
aligning buying groups around defensible targets
enabling diligence that is sufficient, not exhaustive
making risk explicit and shared
delivering early evidence of progress
Growth compounds when fewer decisions are regretted and more are repeated.
This article and a more detailed white paper covers the journey up to first results. A second paper will examine how repeatable results, renewal, expansion, advocacy, and churn are shaped by how well decisions can be defended over time.
