The first 30 days

I have never opened an engagement with a strategy session.

Four engagements. GTM Buddy, Vendasta, Pazo, LucioAI. Every one started the same way: find the belief the team was already paying for that turned out to be wrong.

They split into two shapes.

Shape one: the assets exist and nobody uses them

GTM Buddy sold a sales enablement product. Their own reps were winging first calls.

I audited every asset by sales stage against two things they already owned: rep engagement data, and which assets reps actually sent customers through their own digital sales room.

Nobody had read that data as a messaging problem. They had read it as an adoption problem.

What it showed:

• Assets nobody opened.
• Messaging that changed depending on who wrote it.
• Deals stalling mid funnel, at exactly the stages where the unused assets sat.

One cause under all three. The messaging spoke to product marketers, sales heads and CROs at once, so it landed with none of them. And it was feature heavy, in a category where nobody buys the feature.

They needed a value first narrative carrying causal metrics:

• Win rate
• ACV increase
• Pipeline influenced
• Ramp time reduction

Not adoption of their own product. Adoption is not a result. It is what happens before the result.

Then the rebuild, stage by stage: first call decks, call scripts, an onboarding guide, videos, case studies, battlecards, campaign assets, blogs. QBR decks came later, built with customer success.

Vendasta had the same problem inverted. The assets existed and were scattered across everywhere. I built a proxy enablement tool in Notion: one place, organised by product suite, every asset carrying a note on when to use it. Design, implementation, maintenance.

Neither needed a new strategy. Both needed someone to read what was already sitting there.

Shape two: nothing to audit, so the target is the risk

Pazo and LucioAI had no outbound motion at all. No assets, no data, nothing to read.

So month one goes into the target definition, because that is the assumption nobody has tested and everybody is about to spend money on.

LucioAI sold to law firms. Law firms do not answer cold email.

That is not a copy problem. Rewriting the email a fourth time does not fix it.

So we changed who we scraped:

• Small firms, not large ones.
• UK only, where response rates held up.
• A sharper promise as the target narrowed: do more with less, at a fraction of what the market leader charges.

Then the boring part. Batch the sequences. Route every lead into the CRM. Tell the founders exactly where a human needs to step in.

Pazo sold into enterprise facilities management. Same order, different market.

Two logos won from cold outbound, in a company that had never run it.

What month one is actually for

You are not paying me for an opinion in week one. You are paying me to find out which of your current beliefs is expensive.

• If you have assets, I read the engagement data before I read the assets.
• If you have no assets, I test the target before anyone writes copy.
• If you have both, I start with whichever one you are most certain about.

That last one is deliberate. The belief nobody questions is the one that has been wrong longest.

What you have by day 30

• The audit, in writing: which assets are dead, which stages leak, and what each is costing you.
• First assets shipped, not proposed.
• A target definition either confirmed against response data or replaced.
• One number we both agree the next 60 days move.

And if the answer is that your problem is not marketing, I tell you in week two. That has happened twice out of four.

Book 30 minutes. Bring what you already have, exactly as messy as it is. The mess is the diagnosis.