Insight - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
Scale-up growth is often derailed by constant, knee-jerk GTM shifts. Learn how the ‘gut-plan-gut’ framework helps you slow down to go faster.
In any scaling business, momentum is everything. But as you grow, the sheer volume of external noise and stimulus increases exponentially.
You are suddenly managing investor expectations, attending industry events, and hearing what your competitors are doing. Every week brings a new ‘urgent’ opportunity or a suggestion from a board member that you need to pivot your GTM strategy, launch a new channel, or chase a different customer segment.
Part 01
This constant stimulus creates an incredibly common scale-up trap: the knee-jerk GTM reaction.
Without a properly roadmapped strategy, your commercial team ends up constantly zigging and zagging. You launch half-baked campaigns, restructure sales territories on a whim, and chase loose leads. This uses a massive amount of internal energy, frustrates your team, and ultimately leaves your revenue flatlining because you are moving sideways instead of forward.
To survive this phase and scale sustainably, you need a framework that filters out the distractions while preserving your entrepreneurial speed.
Part 02
In business growth, gut instinct is highly valuable. It is the creative, fast, and intuitive spark that helped you build your company in the first place. But as you scale, gut instinct alone becomes dangerous. You cannot build a £10M–£30M commercial engine purely on a feeling.
You need to wrap that instinct in structure. This is what I call ‘the gut-plan-gut sandwich’:
By using this approach, you force your team to momentarily slow down in order to ultimately go faster. The plan acts as a strategic filter, ensuring that you only deploy resources behind ideas that genuinely align with your long-term goals.
Part 03
This framework is not just theoretical. I implemented a highly structured five-stage growth plan with a UK B2B PPE and workwear manufacturer that had hit a revenue plateau.
Their sales pipeline had become entirely reactive, and their business development team was burning energy chasing short-term wins without any clear differentiation between immediate, mid-term, and long-term opportunities.
By stepping back, mapping out a clear five-stage growth roadmap across four revenue streams, and linking every marketing activity directly to a specific strategic stage, we eliminated the daily distractions. The team stopped chasing shiny objects and focused on a structured cross-sell, upsell, and structured outreach program.
Questions
A knee-jerk reaction is when a scale-up makes sudden, drastic changes to its sales or marketing strategy based on a single external stimulus, such as an investor’s offhand comment or a competitor’s new feature, without analyzing if it fits their long-term framework.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) force you to define what success looks like before you spend any budget. If a new idea does not align with your current OKRs, it is shelved or delayed, protecting your team’s focus and energy.
Slowing down allows you to validate your assumptions, align your messaging, and build the right operational infrastructure. Doing this upfront prevents the wasted effort of executing a flawed strategy, ensuring your team moves forward rather than sideways.
If you are tired of your team zigging and zagging, or if you need to build a commercial roadmap that protects your focus while driving real revenue, let’s talk.
Book a Free Discovery Workshop: Let’s spend two hours tackling a specific commercial challenge in your business, live. No pitch, just practical strategy.
Book Your Free Workshop →Read The Five-Stage GTM Framework: Learn the exact strategic framework I use with every scaling client to build a go-to-market plan that actually converts.
Read the Free GTM Framework →