GTM Strategy
"Do you have GTM experience?" is the safe question. It tells you almost nothing. Here's what to ask instead.
By Shannon Kearns, published 2026-09-11, 9 min read.
What questions should I ask a go-to-market consultant before hiring them? When you hire a go-to-market consultant, stop asking whether they have GTM experience. Ask whether they can diagnose your specific problem, make hard tradeoffs, and leave your team with something it can actually run. The best questions test how they think: what they would investigate first, what they would need to learn from your customers, and what you will personally own versus what they will.
When a founder is about to spend real money on a go-to-market consultant and doesn't know what to ask, they ask the safe question: do you have GTM experience? Everyone says yes. Experience is table stakes at this price point, and a logo slide is easy to assemble.
What you're actually buying is judgment. Whether this person can diagnose your specific problem, make a tradeoff you've been avoiding, and leave your team with something it can run after they're gone. I've sat on both sides of this hire, as the person writing the check and as the go-to-market strategy consultant on the other end of it, and the questions below are the ones that separate those two things on a first call.
Here's the order I'd work through it:
The experience question has one answer, and you already know what it is. It also invites the most rehearsed thirty seconds in the consultant's repertoire, which is the opposite of what a first call should produce.
And experience by itself is a weaker signal than it looks. Ten years of GTM at companies nothing like yours transfers worse than three years at companies exactly like yours. A logo tells you where somebody stood. It doesn't tell you what they owned while they were standing there, or whether the thing that worked at a company with a sales team of forty has any bearing on your company with a sales team of one.
So replace it. Every question below forces the consultant to think about your business, out loud, while you're watching.
Give them context, not the answer. Send the deck, the site, the pricing page, and last quarter's numbers if you're willing to. Then ask what they think is most broken, and say nothing else.
You're testing two things at once. First, the questions they ask before they answer. Second, the shape of the hypothesis they form when they do.
A good answer sounds like: "My guess is the problem is upstream, because the deals you're losing look very different than the deals you're winning, and I'd want to look at X and Y to see what could be driving that." A weak answer recites a framework, or agrees enthusiastically with whatever you said first.
You're not fishing for a free diagnosis on a sales call (at least, I hope not). You're watching how somebody thinks about diagnosing a problem.
The hypothesis they just formed has to land somewhere, and the first place it lands is who this is for. So follow it there: how will you decide our ideal customer profile, and how will you decide which segment we go after first?
Listen for evidence-based segmentation. Who buys, who actually gets value, what triggers the purchase, and what each segment is willing to pay. Those are four different questions and they don't always point at the same customer. A consultant who collapses them into one is going to hand you a persona document instead of a decision.
Then listen for whether they'll make you choose. I sat through a round of customer interviews this month where the company's ideal customer profile turned out to be an only customer profile: the handful of accounts they already had, described back to themselves and relabeled as a strategy. Nobody had ever asked which of those accounts they wanted more of, so nothing was ever excluded, and "everyone" quietly became the target.
A consultant who won't make you pick a beachhead isn't doing strategy. Strategy is the exclusion. If you want the longer version of that argument, I wrote it up in how to make your product stand out when you sound like every competitor.
Once the segment is picked, two decisions follow immediately: what you say, and where you say it. Ask about both, and ask about them separately, because consultants are rarely equally good at the two.
On positioning, you want to hear how they'll distinguish you from competitors and from substitutes. The spreadsheet, the agency, the intern, the decision to do nothing at all. "We'll sharpen the messaging" is a copywriting answer to a positioning question. The positioning answer names what you're being compared against in the buyer's head and what makes you the better answer to that specific comparison.
On channels, you want to hear why a channel fits your buyers and your economics, not why it's the channel they enjoy running. Anyone who names a channel before they understand how your buyers decide is selling you their own toolkit. The honest version of this answer usually starts with your motion: whether you're product-led or sales-led changes which channels can even work, and that's a decision, not a preference.
Those decisions have to come out of the engagement as something your team can hold. So make them get concrete: at the end of this, what do I have?
A complete engagement produces artifacts with names:
"A GTM strategy" is not a deliverable. It's a category. Ask what the artifact is, who owns it after the engagement ends, and what would have to change for it to stop being useful. If they can't answer that, the scope isn't defined yet, and you'll be the one discovering that in month two. (Here's what I actually do, for a real scope to compare against.)
This is the sharpest question on the list, and it's the one most founders skip, because the deliverable list above makes it sound like it's already answered. It isn't. Somebody has to produce those artifacts, and somebody has to run them afterward.
Two separate conversations with other GTM people this month landed on the same pattern: founders describe go-to-market as "everything." Strategy, plus outbound, plus performance marketing, plus sales. And because it's all one word to them, they can't separate the strategy hire from the execution hire, which means they buy one and are surprised when they didn't get the other. I've written about that split before in boutique consultant vs GTM agency, but the version that matters on a first call is much simpler: who is doing the work, specifically, and which parts land on my team?
This matters more the smaller your team is. If you're a founder and two engineers, "we'll partner with your marketing team on execution" means you, at midnight. And with solo consultants and small firms, ask directly whether the person on the call is the person doing the work. You don't want to find out halfway through that you hired a name and got a subcontractor.
For early-stage teams where there is no marketing function yet and the consultant effectively is the team, that's a different kind of engagement with a different cadence. Mine is founder advisory, and the reason it's scoped separately is exactly this question.
Everything up to here has been about the work. This one is about the person.
Ask for the engagement they decided to walk away from. The prospect they turned down, or the project they ended early.
A consultant who has never walked away from an engagement has never been close enough to the work to find out one was going wrong, or to figure out why. Strategy work involves making a call with incomplete information, and anyone who has made enough of those calls has watched one go sideways. The specificity of the answer is the whole signal. Launches underperform for reasons that are visible beforehand, and someone who has actually seen things go wrong comes out of it knowing who they can help and who they can't, because they know which engagements were never going to work. That second list is what you're looking for.
Then go check the story against people who lived it. Relevant is the operative word.
A consultant who helped a $100M enterprise run a launch may be exactly the wrong hire for your ten-person startup, no matter how good the logo looks on the slide. Ask for references from companies at your stage, in something like your motion, with something like your budget. Two is enough, and the question to ask each of them is not "were they good." It's "what did your team have to do that you didn't expect," and "what are you still using six months later."
Those eight questions will generate a lot of talking. Here's how to sort what you hear.
| Green flag | Red flag |
|---|---|
| Asks you a lot of questions before prescribing anything | Opens with a proven 90-day framework and no customization |
| Talks about evidence and customer behavior, not just frameworks | Talks about slides and deliverables instead of decisions |
| Comfortable saying "I don't know yet, here's how I'd find out" | Recommends a channel before understanding your buyers |
| Separates strategy from execution and tells you which they're selling | Can't say how they would validate your ICP |
| Defines measurable outcomes at the start of the engagement | Promises revenue before understanding your business |
The pattern underneath both columns is the same. Green flags are things that only a person thinking about your company can produce. Red flags are things a person can produce without knowing anything about you at all.
If they've cleared everything above and you still want one more read, give them a real but limited problem from your business. Not the whole strategy. One decision you're stuck on.
Then ask three things: based on what you know so far, what would you investigate first, what would you test, and what decision would each test inform?
That last clause is the test. Plenty of people can list things to research. Far fewer can tell you what they'd do differently depending on the result, which is the difference between activity and judgment. And to be clear about what you're doing here: you're evaluating how they think, not fishing for a free plan. If the answer is good enough that you feel like you got something for nothing, that's your hire.
So if you're about to hire for this, ask the questions that show you how someone thinks. And if you'd rather start by working out what you actually need help with before you go hire anyone, the go-to-market readiness assessment is a free 60 minutes on my calendar.
Ask what they think your biggest GTM problem is, how they will decide your ICP and which segment to prioritize, how they develop positioning and choose channels, what you will actually have at the end of the engagement, what they will do personally versus what your team will do, how they decide who not to work with, and for two references from companies at your stage. Every one of those questions makes them think in front of you instead of reciting a background.
Evaluate judgment, not experience. Experience is table stakes and easy to dress up with logos. Judgment shows up in whether they ask you questions before prescribing anything, whether they will name a segment to deprioritize, whether they can describe a concrete deliverable list rather than "a GTM strategy," and whether their references come from companies at your stage rather than their most impressive one.
Green flags: they ask a lot before prescribing, they talk about evidence and customer behavior rather than frameworks, they are comfortable saying "I don't know yet," they separate strategy from execution, and they define measurable outcomes. Red flags: a proven 90-day framework applied with no customization, slides instead of decisions, a channel recommendation before they understand your buyers, no answer for how they will validate your ICP, and a revenue promise made before they understand your business.
Ask for the artifact list in writing before you sign. A complete engagement produces an ICP with prioritized segments, positioning and messaging, a channel strategy, a sales motion, a point of view on pricing, a launch plan, a KPI framework, and a 30/60/90 roadmap. "A GTM strategy" is not a deliverable. If the consultant cannot name the artifacts, the scope is not defined yet.
Hire a consultant when the work is bursty and decision-heavy: a launch, a repositioning, a segment choice, a pricing change. Build in-house when the work is continuous and you can describe what someone would do every day for six months. In practice a consultant sets the foundation the first in-house hire builds on, which also makes that hire easier, because you are recruiting against a defined job instead of asking a candidate to invent one.
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