Five Definitions Around a Table

Try the experiment at your next executive committee. Ask each member to write down, in one sentence and without conferring, what Go-To-Market means.

You will get five answers. The sales director will write something about market coverage and team effectiveness. Marketing will write something about positioning and demand generation. The finance director will write something about acquisition cost and return. The operations director will write something about what the company is able to deliver. You will write something about growth.

None is wrong. That is the problem.

The Disagreement Is Not Where You Look for It

An executive committee that argues is a committee that works. Disagreement is visible, it is dealt with, it is settled — and once settled, everyone executes.

This chapter is not about that. It is about the opposite case: a committee that agrees on the words and is divided on the objects. No one opposes anyone, each approves, and each approves something different. There is nothing to settle because there is no conflict — there is only a misunderstanding that consensus renders invisible.

It is the most common configuration I have encountered, and the most costly. An explicit disagreement is resolved in one meeting. An ambiguous agreement is resolved in eighteen months of divergent execution, and no one will be able to say when it went off the rails.

Why Go-To-Market, and Not Finance

Ask those same five people what EBITDA is. You will get one answer. A single one, and the same one — not because they are more competent in finance than in markets, but because the word has a referent outside the company. It is standardised, it is audited, it is enforceable. The discussion may bear on the figure; it does not bear on what the figure designates.

Go-To-Market has no referent. No standard, no auditor, no enforceable definition. It is an imported term, untranslated, that reached France through the software literature, and that covers — depending on the speaker — a sales organisation, a penetration strategy, a marketing plan or a distribution model.

It is one of the few major objects in your company of whose definition you are the sole custodian. Strategy, culture, brand share this trait — but none is invoked as often, nor in as many operational decisions, without anyone ever checking that they were talking about the same thing. That is why the disagreement is invisible here: there is no external instrument to reveal it.

What This Produces, Concretely

Take up the three preceding chapters again. Each describes a missing arbitrage. They all share the same origin.

Price. The committee sets a grid and grants discounts. This is not incoherence: it is that “Go-To-Market” means positioning to one and market coverage to another. Both are right by their own definition. The grid and the discount are two faithful executions of two different definitions.

The segment. No one decided to abandon the segment converting at 8%. No one decided to serve it either. It is addressed because, in one of the five definitions, one addresses the whole market.

The channel. The distributor arbitrates premium against volume. It arbitrates because the committee sent it two definitions at once, and it chose one.

The three blind spots are not three problems. They are the same one, seen three times.

The market does not receive an ambiguous message from you — it receives five coherent messages, sent by five people who believe they are saying the same thing. That is far worse than a company that does not know what it wants. It is a company that knows five times over.

What I Am Not Going to Sell You

The shared-definition workshop. The alignment seminar. The half-day in which the committee agrees on a common sentence.

It does not work, and one must say why rather than simply decree it. Bring five executives together around a definition to be written jointly: you will get a definition acceptable to all. A definition acceptable to all is a definition that excludes nothing — hence arbitrates nothing, hence lets each leave with their own, now covered by a signed document. You have not resolved the ambiguity. You have ratified it.

And the diversity of thought on your committee is not a flaw to be corrected. It is what makes it worth more than you alone. A committee aligned by constraint no longer produces anything — it approves. The problem is not that they think differently. It is that they do not know it.

What Works

A fact that none of them can reinterpret.

That is the whole rationale of the sequence objectify, measure, compare, and the order is not decorative. Objectify: break the Go-To-Market down into named components, each of which designates a precise object, on which the five definitions can no longer overlap without contradicting one another. The model counts nineteen of them, spread across four pillars — the three levers (Go-To-Market, brand, reputation) and a Competitive lens. One no longer asks five people what “the Go-To-Market” is: one asks them where targeting stands, where channel execution stands, where measurement stands. Vague questions no longer have anywhere to lodge.

Measure: produce, for each component, not an opinion but a distance — between what the company believes it is signalling and what the market renders back. Compare: set the distances side by side.

The disagreement then no longer gets debated. It is displayed. The gap between the score the sales director assigns to the clarity of the offer and the one the market assigns to it is not one opinion against another: it is a distance. One does not debate a distance, one observes it. And once it is observed by all five people at the same time, arbitration becomes possible — not because they agree, but because they are finally looking at the same object.

That is the real function of measurement, and it is poorly understood. It does not serve to know. It serves to make the disagreement discussable — to lift it out of the register of personal conviction, where it is undecidable, and set it in the register of gaps, where it can be settled.

A committee does not lack courage. It lacks a common object.

It remains to be seen how one measures what the market understands, when one has neither a panel, nor a research budget, nor the time to wait six months.