Missed H1? Product Leaders: This Is Your Moment to Lead GTM Reset

Half the B2B market likely missed H1. The finger-pointing begins. The CRO didn't deliver. Marketing didn't generate enough leads. Sales didn't convert the pipeline.

But in many early-stage companies, the root cause of missed quarters often lies upstream in the narrative. The story your teams are telling doesn't match the story your customers are living.

And that's where product leaders have a unique opportunity to step up and lead the recovery.

Why Product Should Own the GTM Reset

At early and growth-stage companies, you're already the custodian of the most valuable GTM asset: customer truth. You own the ICP definition, understand the problem space better than anyone, and have direct access to the struggling moments that trigger buying decisions.

While sales blames marketing and marketing blames sales, you're sitting on the insights that could fix both. You've heard customers explain their pain points in user interviews. You've seen the feature requests that reveal their real priorities. You understand the workflow disruptions that create a sense of urgency for change.

The problem is that most GTM narratives are built from internal assumptions rather than these customer insights. Marketing creates personas based on demographics, and product marketing develops pitches around product features. However, neither is grounded in the actual switching moments (when customers decide to quit using a product) or the decision dynamics involved in selecting a different approach, which you can hear directly from customers.

When the revenue story drifts from customer reality, pipelines stall—no matter how hard your commercial teams work.

The Narrative Gap That's Killing Your Pipeline

In most first meetings, your sales team presents your solution before establishing why the customer should change at all. They jump to "why us" without first landing on "why change" and "why now."

This is both a sales skills problem and a narrative alignment problem.

Your customer-facing teams need a story that reflects how buyers think and make decisions. They need to understand the moments of struggle that create urgency, the decision dynamics that shape choices, and the outcomes customers are purchasing, not just the features they're buying.

As a product leader, you have access to this customer truth through user research, support tickets, feature requests, recorded conversations, and churn interviews. However, it's likely trapped in Notion documents, your CRM and Slack threads rather than embedded in your GTM narrative.

How Product Leaders Can Drive GTM Realignment

The path forward isn't complicated, but it does require product leadership to step outside traditional boundaries and actively shape the commercial narrative.

1. Start with Customer Truth, Not Internal Assumptions: Audit your recent customer interviews, user research, and support conversations for the struggling moments that triggered evaluation. What workflow broke down? What process became unsustainable? What event created urgency for change? This is the foundation of "why change now."
2. Map the Real Decision Journey: Your CRM stages don't accurately reflect how customers make purchasing decisions. Use your customer insights to map the evaluation process, including who gets involved, what concerns emerge, and what outcomes are being measured. This becomes the framework for how sales should facilitate rather than push the buying process.
3. Translate Features into Outcomes: You understand your product capabilities better than anyone, but more importantly, you understand what customer problems they solve. Help your commercial teams articulate value in terms of customer outcomes rather than product features. The struggling moment leads to the desired outcome, which leads to your solution.
4. Build the Narrative Bridge: Create the connective story between the customer's struggling moments and your solution's impact. This ensures that your teams can confidently answer why customers should change, why they should change now, and why your solution creates the outcomes they need.

What Success Looks Like When Product Leads

When product leaders drive GTM narrative alignment, several things happen quickly. Sales conversations become more consultative because reps understand the customer's problem context. Marketing messages resonate because they reflect real customer language and priorities. Product roadmap discussions align with commercial strategy because everyone understands what customers are trying to achieve.

More fundamentally, your entire GTM function begins operating from a shared customer truth, rather than competing internal assumptions.

Sales cycles shorten because conversations start with established relevance. Pipeline quality improves because qualification happens earlier and more accurately. Product feedback loops tighten because commercial teams understand what customer outcomes to measure and report.

Your Moment to Lead

If you're a product leader watching your business miss its numbers, you don't need permission to lead the recovery. You already own the customer insights that could realign your entire GTM approach.

The question is whether you'll act on what you already know about your customers before someone else tries to make an educated guess.

Your commercial teams are looking for direction, the executive team needs answers, and you're sitting on the customer truth that could reset the entire H2 trajectory.

This is your moment to lead with the insights only you can access. But if your team is still guessing at customer truth, we can help.

Our 30-day GTM Activation Sprint captures real buyer insights and transforms them into a narrative your teams can use immediately to realign your GTM and rebuild momentum quickly.

Find out more -> get a free 45 minute GTM Audit