Most B2B companies don't lose deals because their product can't do the job. They lose because no one — not prospects, not analysts, not even their own sales reps — can clearly explain what the company is actually great at.

That's the challenge Rob Karel, Principal of GTM Perspective, unpacked on this episode of Performance Delivered. With 25+ years in B2B marketing at companies like Precisely, Informatica, Forrester, Lattice, and Okta, Karel has seen the same pattern play out at startups and billion-dollar enterprises alike: too many use cases, too little focus, and a go-to-market motion that spreads resources so thin nothing gets through.

The website Test

Karel's fastest diagnostic for a company lacking focus? Look at the homepage. "The smaller the company, the busier the website, the bigger the risk that they're not going to succeed," he says. A young company claiming to solve every problem for every buyer has neither the customer proof nor the market credibility to back it up — and that confusion only compounds as companies scale into complex portfolios with dozens of ICPs and use cases.

Data over Wishful Thinking

For companies with existing revenue, Karel recommends grounding prioritization in win-loss analysis, call scripts, and frontline feedback from sales engineers and product managers — not internal assumptions about where the market "should" be. He's a proponent of the 80/20 rule: 80% of resources go toward proven, winnable plays; the remaining 20% funds experimentation into new opportunity spaces.

A Repeatable Scoring Model

The core of Karel's methodology is a two-axis framework — similar in spirit to a Gartner Magic Quadrant — that scores potential use cases on market opportunity and right to win. Questions include: Is there a clear buyer with budget? Is the market growing or commoditizing? Do we have credible product, proof points, and trained sellers, or are we starting from zero? Critically, the weighting of each factor should be customized to the company's specific market and stage.

The output isn't a sprawling list. Karel's guidance: pick three to five use cases if you're early-stage, and even at scale, keep outbound focus tight. When he deployed this methodology at Precisely — an $800M+ ARR company — they moved from 70+ scattered sales plays to 11 clearly owned, resourced "right to win" use cases for 2026, each with a dedicated owner driving messaging, enablement, and campaign alignment.

Focus Doesn't Mean Rigidity

A recurring theme: outbound and inbound demand different strategies. Companies can still publish content across a wide range of topics — but campaigns, enablement, and paid investment should stay concentrated on proven winners. Inbound interest becomes a live data source: if a deprioritized use case starts generating organic pull, that's a signal to revisit the scoring, not a reason to abandon the framework. AI-driven content production is well suited to this long tail — cheap to produce, useful for SEO and credibility, without diverting budget from core campaigns.

Where it Breaks Down

The methodology only works with full executive alignment. Karel's clearest warning: if a CEO or board member greenlights the process but then unilaterally chases a competitor's move outside the agreed framework, the whole exercise collapses into "strategy shelf-ware." His advice for leadership: build the scoring model together, commit to it, and route new opportunities back through the framework rather than around it.

Key takeaway: Winning in B2B isn't about capability — it's about credibility. And credibility comes from choosing a small number of fights you can actually win, resourcing them fully, and having the discipline to say no to the rest.

Episode Transcript

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Steffen Horst (00:05)

Welcome back to Performance Delivered, insider secrets to marketing success, the podcast where we explore what's truly driving results in today's fast moving marketing landscape. I'm your host, Stefan Horst. And today we're diving into a challenge that nearly every growing B2B organization faces. Focus. As companies scale, their products and services often expand to support dozens, sometimes even hundreds of potential use cases. But here's the reality.

Just because you can go after everything doesn't mean you should. So how do you decide where to focus your go-to-market efforts to actually win? Joining me today is Rob Carroll, principal of GTM Perspective. With over 25 years of experience, he has been working for a number of different companies, including Forster Research and was a marketing executive at leading B2B companies like Precisely, Informatica, Lattice and Okta. Rob brings a deep practical understanding of what separates effective GDM strategies from expensive distractions. Now, today we'll unpack a clear, repeatable methodology for identifying the few critical use cases where your organization has a true right to win and how to align your teams around them. Now, Rob, before we dive into frameworks and methodologies, I'd love to start with your perspective from the field.

From your experience working with B2B organizations, what's really going on when so many go-to-market teams feel like they are being spread too thin?

Rob Karel (01:31)

You know, I think the biggest challenge is there are, there are many opportunities where you can win products that are being built today for most B2B tech companies can do dozens and dozens or hundreds or thousands of wonderful things. But that doesn't mean you've got the budget and resources to actually educate the market on all of it. What it comes down to is.

Just because you can do many things doesn't mean you can build the market credibility to prove that you can do it. Doesn't mean you have customers that are going to test testify that they are getting value from every one of those things. And honestly, your product organization isn't necessarily investing their roadmap to support every single one of those. So the reason you prioritize is because if you, you know, I like to say you spread the peanut butter really too thin.

Guess what happens? Nothing gets focused. No one that actually is looking into you as a vendor is actually understanding what is it you're great at? What is it that you differentiate at? Which means they might go to someone who is a lot clearer on where they specialize. And in this day and age, folks have lots of choices. So the need to focus is just, I relate to this on outbound.

It doesn't mean that you can't take any inbound question and answer how you can maybe support that. But in terms of sales outreach and marketing campaigns and educating analysts and other types of media, you've got to focus so people understand what your investment strategy is and where you're putting your resources.

Steffen Horst (03:07)

Yeah. Yeah. I think going after everything, you know, if you, if you have a big bank account with lots of money in there, you know, that might be something you could do. But as you said, if your budget is limited, which for many companies, the reality you got to focus on what really. Where's the biggest impact to the business? You know, where can you, where can you win easier?

Rob Karel (03:23)

Mm-hmm.

Steffen Horst (03:27)

over others, you where does your product has an advantage over your competitors? Where can you tell a better story and focus on those things before you then say, we conquered that part. Now let's see what other areas we can go after next. We're saying this. So you work with a wide range of B2B companies from high growth startups to established enterprises. What are the most common signals that a company lacks focus in its go-to market strategy?

Rob Karel (03:40)

Exactly.

You know, the first thing you look for for any company is their website. Is their website clear? You know, and it's almost this reverse correlation where the smaller the company, the busier the website, the bigger the risk that they're not going to succeed. Because even if let's assume you're a series A startup with 100 employees and even if

Steffen Horst (03:58)

Mm-hmm.

Rob Karel (04:17)

your product that you built can do everything you claim, you don't have any credibility in the market. You certainly probably don't have enough customers to prove you can do everything. So you gotta pick your battles and just focus. And doesn't mean you can't have those conversations, like I said, but then when you get bigger at scale and you're talking about companies that are in the hundreds of millions or even billion plus dollar.

companies, same problem, even more so because you probably have a really complex portfolio. Maybe this big platform play, tons of ICPs, tons of use cases, tons of industries and segments. Even more so now you are confusing everyone on who you really are and what you're really doing. And you, even if you have all the riches in the world, you can throw all the sales reps in the world. Are they all going to hit quota?

because they don't know what to focus on and where they can win. And unless you're like a market monopoly, you probably have some competitive conversations going on. And where do you want to put those sales and marketing resources? Don't you want to focus on the ones where you have a better chance of winning versus you got a good story, but the competitor has just got a better product and better credibility. So you're going to spend a lot of time and energy losing deals. Is that where you want to put your time?

Steffen Horst (05:34)

Yeah.

Yeah. That's almost like an uphill battle, right? I mean, again, focus on where you really know your strength or where you're strong. And that will help you to bring in more clients, which feeds all the rest of the machine in the end. Now, let's talk about narrowing things down. So you highlighted the fact that small companies, want to do a lot because they want to have as many opportunities to win new clients. But in doing so, they are putting themselves at a disadvantage because they come across as kind of, we can do everything, but we're no expert in anything, so to speak. Now, when identifying use cases, what inputs matter most? And how do you distinguish between real market opportunity and internal wishful thinking?

Rob Karel (06:05)

Yes, the wishful thinking is biggest danger, but doesn't mean you should ignore it. ⁓ And so when, if you're somewhat established where you actually have customers and revenue and, you know, retaining these customers, you could actually be a little bit more data-driven in that where are you winning? This is where win-loss analysis comes in. This is where call scripts come in. This is where, you know

Steffen Horst (06:23)

Mm-hmm.

Rob Karel (06:42)

field frontline sales rep, sales engineer, even product managers that are in those discussions can provide frontline feedback of here's why we won. This is what they were looking for. This is what we're appreciated on. And the messaging might not even catch up to the sales cycle. So it's a good opportunity to improve messaging. But if you have, if you're winning somewhere, maybe start there. Right. What does it mean that there aren't

Steffen Horst (07:00)

Ciao.

Rob Karel (07:08)

New innovations that you've created, new products, new go-to-market strategies that you're trying to pilot because you think that there's a TAM out there, an addressable market that you deserve a piece of. You do have to block out some energy for some new opportunities, but I'm a big proponent of the 80-20 rule. I sure hope you're putting 80 % of your resources in your investment into where you a pretty credible chance of winning, that leaves a 20 % of investment for the long tail of future growth opportunities where you maybe will differentiate. Maybe there's a new growing market that you want to explore. If you're winning those 80%, you have the opportunity to invest in those other things. If you're not winning those, you don't have room for experimentation.

Steffen Horst (07:56)

Yeah, yeah. How do you help the organization to buy into that? You know, if they so far literally just went after everything and everyone who raised their hand.

Rob Karel (08:07)

Yeah. And you know, I'm very big on cross-functional alignment. That product marketing is in my blood. That's a lot of my background. And by definition, that's a hub and spoke role. You have to have real trust and credibility with the product organization, with the sales organization, with the marketing organization. If you're a massive renewals business with the account management organization with renewals.

And so the way to kick off this initiative is you start by bringing leaders or the proxies you get buy-in at the executive level saying, these are the people that know the business. They know the customer, they know the innovation roadmap, they know where we're winning and losing, what the competitive threats are. You start with a brainstorm. There are no bad ideas when you're talking about what are, it's a typical card writing exercise in a workshop, simply.

No wrong answers. Where would you like to win? Where are we winning? And then you start bundling them and you let them work together, here's sales, sales ones, here's what's product one, here's what marketing wants. You're working together, you're discussing and debating, and then you're trying to level set them that they're all at the same level. know, a product team, I've had examples where they're not giving you actual use cases or plays, they're giving you features. Someone wants to use this feature.

That's not a play. Let's level it up. What are they solving for? Sometimes it's too generic. Modernization. No, no. What are they actually modernizing? Once you get to that level, then this is where everything is equal. My methodology is all about scoring and waiting. Again, you make it a very transparent, clear process to say, and two very clear axes. Is there money to be made?

Do we deserve to make it? You know, if you, and there's a whole bunch of questions in that methodology that's asking for, is it a highly crowded competitive? Is it becoming more commoditized? Hence the money to be made goes down. Is it a really exciting market with tons of money being spent, but we do not have a competitive offering yet. It's mostly services and not software yet. Our competitors are ahead of us.

Steffen Horst (09:52)

Mm-hmm.

Rob Karel (10:13)

Once again, are you really going to put massive investment there until maybe you want the product or maybe our sales reps have no clue on how to talk about it. They don't have any credibility. So we need to train them or hire for that space first. These are the questions you asked to really get, you know, some quantitative weights. then you can compare them heat map style, portfolio management style against one another and say, this one's ranking higher than this. Does that vibe?

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Steffen Horst (10:36)

Yeah.

Makes sense. Now what tends to surface in those sessions? You know, the data alone can't review, obviously data point is kind of almost black and white, right? But, but sometimes there, there is story behind the data that, know, it's not easy to read out.

Rob Karel (10:53)

Yeah, especially if you're an earlier stage and you don't have a ton of customers yet. The whole point is you're validating product market fit. You think this is where you should go. And so a lot of it will be market opportunity. Yes, there are others in this space already making money and budget is clear. There's third party research and validation that money is being spent to solve this problem. So hence product market fit is a exciting thing. We've done something on the

Steffen Horst (11:05)

Mm-hmm.

Rob Karel (11:19)

product or services side, doesn't have to be a product company, it could be a services company, that is unique and valuable, that's not currently offered. And we believe it's a worthy enough ⁓ tech to see that we think our future is going to be based on those differentiators. We think that there are obstacles for competitors to keep up with that differentiation. Could be whatever.

That's enough. You don't need to have the data to prove it. That's enough to, especially if you're earlier stage, you got to do the work to define product market fit. My point is you shouldn't find 20 or 15 use cases for product market fit. You should pick three to five. You got to start small and prove and then earn the right to invest in additional ones.

Steffen Horst (12:06)

Yeah, yeah. You already just mentioned, you know, your methodology around balancing the two-dimensional market attractiveness and companies ability to execute and kind of a scoring model. Can you talk a little bit more about that and why it's so effective influencing strategic decisions?

Rob Karel (12:24)

Yeah. And the, and the important thing and the great thing about this model is it can be made and customized to be unique to the business that's using it. So think of like a Gartner MQ or a Forrester wave in terms of their two by two, that all these criteria X and Y axis, no different. It's consulting one-on-one, but each of these questions around, let's talk about market opportunity. Depending on what market you're in.

the weight of how important that is may differ. So you change the weighting based on the market you're in. So do we know who the buyer is and do they have an available budget? You'd think it's a massively important question for anyone. But is there a market event or some customer pain driving urgency? Some of this stuff is just, you have to invest in these things to keep the lights on, hence.

There doesn't have to be a compelling macro event or something going on to invest in this technology. So maybe you weigh that lower, right? But, then market growth potential, you look at what are the analysts saying, you know, do we feel that this is a double digit kegger or is this something that, you know, that's kind of a leveled out and 3 % kegger. You probably want to know that based on what you're going to invest in. Cause if you don't see that kind of growth, you're just, you're fighting for what's left.

Steffen Horst (13:39)

Sure, that makes sense. Now, they're waiting. Yeah, that makes sense. And it needs to be based on every company's situation, because every company has a different situation, and that situation needs to be taken consideration when building that scoring model, basically. Yeah.

Rob Karel (13:39)

And so waiting is important there.

Exactly.

Steffen Horst (13:55)

So there's always tension between staying focused and staying flexible. How do you recommend leaders prioritize their go-to-market investments while still remaining agile enough to respond to new opportunities or shifts in the market?

Rob Karel (14:09)

Yeah. Those are kind of two points I brought up earlier that I'll kind of reinforce. One is really educating everyone that there's different strategies for outbound versus inbound. You could still create content and social and have a lot of web copy about as many use cases as you want, but does not mean you invest in campaigns.

Steffen Horst (14:30)

Mm-hmm.

Rob Karel (14:33)

And you invest in enablement and you invest in partnerships and other channels of go to market for every single one of those outbound. You typically have a more limited budget. Got a really large sales force. Be honest. These people are human and there's just so much in it from an enablement standpoint that they could absorb and own and feel confident in delivering. to ask your sales reps to.

really be experts at an infinite number of use cases. It's not fair to them. And that's not what's going to make them hit their numbers anyway. So again, understanding that the focus is for outbound. And then there's nothing to stop you from using inbound as a data point to say, we are getting a whole lot of interest in this thing that we didn't prioritize. Guess what? We should now prioritize it. This isn't a once and done exercise. You have new data.

that changes the score. Because guess what? You have customer interest, you have some ability to execute, you're winning deals in something that wasn't an outbound priority. Maybe it should become an outbound priority the second half of the year based on that change.

Steffen Horst (15:35)

Yeah. Yeah. And it's obviously, it's

much easier to create some content pieces and put it on a website and see what the pickup is on that and take these signals then when there's a positive movement compared to saying, you know what, we want to advertise these five, 10 different products that we have, whether there is a big ask for it or not. And we're just throwing money at it. And then hopefully someone raises their hand and says, yep, I want this. And by doing so, you could throw a lot of money out of the window and literally doing nothing. then marketing gets massively under pressure in the end.

Rob Karel (16:10)

and Stefano, and even say this is one of those places where the AI efficiencies and scale that everyone's looking for, this is where you spend it. This is where you use it. On those go-to-marketplace, I hope you have judgment and expertise in those. But on this long tail of all those other opportunities, you can create videos really quickly, very inexpensively for product demos. You can create blogs and content that might be relevant and useful to just set

The stage that, what, from a SEO, GEO standpoint, we're talking about it. We're in this conversation from an expertise and credibility standpoint. Yes, this is something they talk about. It's just not the thing there's events for, or not the thing they're, you know, investing in these massive digital campaigns for, et cetera, et cetera.

Steffen Horst (16:42)

Yep.

No,

and still gives you a chance to be ahead of the curve, right? Because once people start searching for it and once they kind of request information about it, when you have something out there that satisfies that need, you you still get the signal earlier than some people that don't have anything out there, you know, and have to wait for, you know, for a store garden or whatever come up, it's like, here's where the new train is going, you know, so it's a more cost efficient way in kind of identifying trends, I would probably say.

Rob Karel (17:24)

Yeah.

And as a former Forrester analyst, I'd just be very blunt that analysts are kind of looking backwards. They're trying. They do a lot of what they're doing in terms of their research and their speaking is trying to look forward. But a of their proprietary research is backward looking. They're not able with their waves and their MQs and their marketscapes and whatnot to really, they can't predict the future as much as I tried to and failed horribly as an analyst.

Very often it's the vendor that educates the analyst. I learned more from my vendors and my customers than I did from any proprietary research I did.

Steffen Horst (17:58)

Yeah, yeah. So once the top GTM plays are selected, execution becomes everything. How do you operationalize those priorities and avoid them becoming what many call strategy shelf-ware?

Rob Karel (18:03)

Yes.

Yeah. And it starts with strategy. And if you're evangelizing something, you better be on the same page with product. That not only can the product do what you say it can do, but their roadmap and their product strategy aligns with a clear line of sight that the things you're promoting are the things that are being invested in. So it starts there. Then...

Steffen Horst (18:26)

Mm-hmm.

Rob Karel (18:36)

B2B 101, you start with product marketing building out. What is the differentiated positioning and messaging around these use cases? Who's the target audience? Why is this, what are their biggest challenges? Why is this valuable? How are you truly distinctively, credibly differentiated from other options in the market? What are some proof points there from customers or other third party sources and build out this narrative that then goes to all your execution teams.

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build out sales enablement content to make sure there's technical enablement. This is how the product solves it. SEs, board engineers, this is how sellers should be talking about it and qualifying. Then at the marketing execution level, whether it's media and comms or whether it's demand gen or events, this is the stories. These are the messages and they build out, you know, the channel mix is still a marketing execution function. They decide,

What are the channels that are going to drive pipeline? But by creating this messaging and focus, you're going to increase the opportunity to chances you're going to bring in qualified pipe that can be converted and accelerated in the sales cycle. That's the whole point.

Steffen Horst (19:43)

Yeah,

yeah. Now, what does good look like when it comes to sales enablement, marketing campaigns, and cost functional execution?

Rob Karel (19:52)

What is good or great? think you think you're brilliant by asking for good because great is maybe not even necessary. yeah, no good. Good looks like again, I'm such a big proponent of just focus and prioritization that good looks like. You have even for precisely my last company where I deployed this methodology and they launched 2026 with a focus on.

Instead of in past years, they've had upwards of 70 plus use cases, sales plays that were not, they didn't go deep in all of them because it's just too much. With a very large 800 million plus AR company with a massive portfolio, they went to market this year with 11 use cases that are right to win use cases. And each one of those use cases had an owner that was driving messaging, enablement, product strategy and marketing campaign mapping to each use case to the different campaigns. So what good looks like is alignment. And it looks like that they're not one team's doing one thing, one team's doing another, and this is self-ware. That's what bad looks like.

Steffen Horst (20:56)

sense, makes sense. And now looking back on your career across product marketing, analyst relations and category creation, what lessons stands out the most?

Rob Karel (21:05)

I think the number one lesson, especially as you start growing and scaling, when you're, when you're at a series A, like I've been, have a small, ⁓ a small team that can all be in a room together to determine strategy. You could have, you can have the debates and you can kind of come to agreement as you start to scale and grow and you dealing with hyper growth. You've got to have leadership that believes in the approach. Okay. If you have, an executive team across sales and marketing and product that are completely aligned saying, this is how we're going to do it. And then the CEO throws in a grenade and says, I just heard from our VC that, ⁓ one of our competitors is doing X. So now I think we should all do X. What you're doing is you're breaking the company's ability to act intelligently. Now, if the CEO said,

Can you include X opportunity in your scoring and let me know if we actually need to win there. Perfectly reasonable. That's not what happens. What very often happens is, and it might not be the CEO, it might be a board member. It might be an investor. might be a, one of the leaders isn't on board and they're like, yeah, you go do this, but I'm still doing what I want to do. Don't bother. This is a, this is a investment.

this type of exercise. If you don't have complete executive leadership team alignment that this is how we're going to define our outbound go to market strategy, don't do it. It's too time consuming and it will become shelf wear. So you got to get that my end quick. I've seen both happen. I've seen an amazing Informatica great results precisely. really looking forward to seeing how they succeed. I've seen this work really well. I've also seen this fail miserably because of what I just shared.

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Steffen Horst (22:49)

Yeah. Yeah. Rob, thank you so much for joining the Performance about Podcast and sharing your insights on how to prioritize the right go-to-marketplace. This idea of focusing on where you truly have the right to win. And I think is something that we hear, for example, at Simplon.digital, we discuss quite often, you know, what are the solutions we have right to win? mean, we talked before we came on about

Rob Karel (22:58)

My pleasure.

Steffen Horst (23:11)

the fact that ⁓ sometimes you're just not focused enough and you want to do all of these things because you hope that gets more business in. in the end, as you just said throughout the conversation, the problem becomes that you're not deep enough on the things that you're really good at because you're trying too many things and you don't stand out anymore. And you just become another number that does all the same thing.

Rob Karel (23:31)

Exactly.

Steffen Horst (23:34)

Now, for listeners who want to learn more about your work, your methodology or follow your insights, work in Necronyck with you.

Rob Karel (23:40)

Thank you. Please go to my website, gtmpov.com. And I've got a newsletter where I've published a lot of my best practices and a lot of my thinking, including my right to win methodology. ⁓ I've got a podcast that I've launched. Season one is near complete with season two picking up soon. And, you know, feel free to contact me. I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone

Steffen Horst (24:03)

Perfect. As always, we leave the information in the show notes. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode of Performance Delivered, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. To learn more about Symphonic Digital, visit us at symphonicdigital.com.