How startups can build a real Go-to-Market engine before it’s too late

When you talk to Simon Gerstler you understand immediately why founders keep bringing him back for advice. He has spent almost three decades in sales, built two tech companies from zero to acquisition, moved across countries to scale teams, and now sits inside the early stage chaos helping founders avoid the mistakes everyone else keeps repeating.

His style is direct. He does not dress anything up. If your startup is not generating revenue, nothing else matters. If your go to market motion is broken, the product will not save you. And if you ignore what the market is telling you, you will pay for it in cash and time.

Pipe Global, the company he co leads today, is basically the accumulated playbook of those lessons. After working with around two hundred startups, Simon has seen every version of what works and what doesn’t. You can feel the pattern recognition in everything he says.

From door-to-door selling to scaling thousands of customers

Simon’s first job in sales was almost primitive. A heavy bag full of jewelry and a long street full of shops. No automation. No pipelines. No ICP spreadsheets. Just knock, smile, listen and hope the door does not shut in your face.

That early grind shaped everything that came after. When he eventually moved into tech, he brought the same instinct for human connection and the same tolerance for rejection. He co founded his first company in legal tech, built the sales engine, and helped drive it into an exit. Then did it again with an edtech company that grew to more than two thousand customers before selling to a US private equity group.

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And through all of it, he noticed the same confusing contradiction

Startups talk a lot about product innovation, but the thing that kills them fastest is usually go to market.

That became the origin story of Pipe Global. Instead of building another SaaS product, Simon and his co founder built a company that helps other startups get the one thing every investor actually cares about: predictable, repeatable revenue.

Why most startups mess up their go-to-market strategy

Simon’s view is brutally simple

Your go to market is your company.

Founders love to obsess over features, over branding, over pitch decks and demo videos. They overbuild and under sell. They convince themselves the market “doesn’t understand the product” when in reality the signs were clear months before.

Before you ask “which channels should we use,” he says, you need to answer something far more important

What is your value proposition and who actually needs it?

Most early startups skip this step. They jump straight into lead gen without even knowing whether their message resonates or whether they are targeting the wrong persona in the right company.
And then they blame the channel.

Simon sees it constantly. A founder says outbound “doesn’t work,” but when he digs in, the problem is the ICP. Or the value prop. Or the way the message is framed. The market always gives the truth back quickly. Most teams just refuse to listen.

ICP and buyer persona work: wider at the start, narrow when the signals appear

One of the biggest lies early founders tell themselves is that they already know their ideal buyer.

Simon pushes hard against that. At the beginning, you have assumptions, not reality. You think your target is the VP of something. Then three months later you discover the real decision maker was in a different department entirely.

His advice is to cast the net wider in the first phase. Test multiple roles. Test several use cases. Pay close attention to who replies, who ignores you, and who actually moves the conversation forward.

And when someone turns you down, he says, don’t waste the moment. Ask why. Ask who else internally might care. Ask whether someone in their network would benefit from the solution. People are surprisingly willing to help when you approach them with honesty instead of entitlement.

Iteration beats ego every time.

Marginal gains: the sales methodology borrowed from Olympic cycling

Pipe Global’s internal method comes from an unexpected place: British cycling.

The national team famously transformed from mediocre to dominant by improving hundreds of tiny things that individually looked insignificant but collectively won them gold after gold. Everything from pillows to recovery routines to the exact cleanliness of the handlebars.

Simon and his team applied the same idea to sales, tiny optimisations across dozens of steps that sum into real performance.

Most startups think they need a dramatic restart. In reality, they need fifteen small fixes:

• tighter messaging
• clearer demo structure
• cleaner CRM
• more precise prospecting
• better follow up rhythms
• role clarity inside the team
  

None of these are glamorous. All of them move the number.

Tools founders should actually care about

When founders ask Simon for a tech stack, he does not give them a laundry list.

He gives them clarity.

You need tools that help you:

• identify the right people
• reach them efficiently
• analyse conversations
• and adjust based on real data
  

On the top-of-funnel side, he mentions the usual players: Apollo, ZoomInfo, Lusha. But he pays more attention to tools that help analyse how conversations actually land, not just how many were sent.

That’s why he likes Noesy a lot. It reads body language and emotional tone inside sales calls so reps can see cues that transcription tools like Gong miss entirely. Confusion, hesitation, discomfort. The signals that decide whether a deal progresses or stalls.

The message underneath this is clear

Tools matter, but not as much as knowing why you’re using them.

Personalisation at scale: what actually works

Everyone talks about personalisation. Most companies do it badly.

Simon has seen AI personalisation collapse in real time across dozens of teams. The messages sound robotic, the insights are shallow, and prospects dismiss them immediately.

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The startups that win are the ones that pick ten accounts a day and go deeper manually:

• read their posts
• check the panels they spoke on
• reference what they recently shipped
• comment on something meaningful, not generic
  

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Personalisation for the sake of personalisation is noise. Personalisation rooted in value is context.

And always ask yourself the question Simon asks every team

Why will this matter to the prospect more than it matters to you?

Will AI automate the SDR role?

Simon’s answer is honest: yes and no.

Email and LinkedIn? Highly likely. AI sequencing and AI prospecting will take over much of that traffic. Some of it is already here.

Cold calls? Not so fast.

Regulation in the US and Europe protects that channel from becoming a synthetic spam factory. Which means voice will remain the last defensible human frontier in outbound for a long time.

What this creates is a strange new split

SDRs who rely only on written outreach will feel increasing pressure. Sellers who can pick up the phone and build real rapport will become more valuable, not less.

AI will reshape the role, but it will not replace what humans uniquely do well: emotion, intuition, connection.

The mistakes Simon sees over and over

The list is long, but a few patterns keep coming back:

• founders treat sales like a single job instead of a process
• they expect one AE to prospect, nurture and close
• they delay hiring SDR support until the pipeline collapses
• they hide behind product instead of speaking to buyers
• they refuse to kill channels that clearly aren’t working
• they ignore social selling and hope the company page will carry them
  

The underlying error is always the same. They react instead of plan. They wait instead of test. They build in isolation instead of in public.

And then they wonder why revenue is flat.

The future of go-to-market looks like this

Simon believes two things will define the next era.

1. The first is AI as a co-pilot, not a replacement. It will speed up research, write content faster, analyse data instantly and create more leverage for small teams. But the winners will be the ones who use it without losing their human edge.
2. The second is something far older, sales that feel like real relationships. Founders who post and interact consistently. Sellers who show expertise, not neediness. Teams that understand that face-to-face meetings still close deals faster than five Zoom calls stacked together.
   

The companies that combine technology with emotional intelligence will move faster than the ones trying to automate humanity out of the sales cycle.

Final thought: revenue is the only truth

Simon does not sugarcoat anything. A startup can have hype, investors, a strong brand, and a beautiful product. But if it cannot sell, none of it matters.

You either grow or you die.

The good news is that go-to-market is not magic. It is a system. It is a set of skills. It can be built, repaired, refined and scaled.And as Simon’s own career shows, the teams that treat it with discipline are the teams that eventually get to the exit door—while everyone else keeps blaming the market.

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