Josh Norris: Why Early Startups Fail at GTM and How to Build a Sales Engine?
When you talk with Josh Norris, founder of Josh Norris Consulting, you understand instantly why early stage founders keep him close. He speaks with a calm intensity that only comes from having rebuilt his life two times. As he puts it,
“I’ve nearly died twice. You don’t walk away from that without an unreasonable belief that you can figure things out.”
That belief shapes everything he teaches startups about go to market. And it is the reason so many founders pull him in before they even reach their first million.
The Mindset That Saves Companies
Josh is not a typical sales operator. His story starts in product, crosses through cybersecurity consulting, touches CS, and eventually lands in the world of GTM design. But the turning points in his career were not professional. They were physical.
A catastrophic accident in 2016 kept him on bed rest for over a year. Doctors told him he would never run again. He runs today. Then long covid hit in another wave of uncertainty, and again he rebuilt himself from zero.
When he says, “I don’t take failure from myself. I let the world reject me before I reject myself,” you understand this is not a motivational line. It is a survival framework. And it is the same mindset he installs in founders who are facing rejection from every angle.
What GTM Really Means for a Startup
Ask ten founders what GTM means and you get ten slogans. Josh strips it back to something painfully simple. “If you want to get paid, you need a go to market. The debate isn’t whether you need it. The debate is how you do it.”
His version of GTM starts with deep customer truth. Who feels the pain? Why now? What old world are they living in, and what new world are you leading them into? If a founder cannot answer that in ten seconds, the rest of the strategy never lands.
The second part is narrative. Josh trains founders to speak in a way that stops buyers from tuning out. “You have ten seconds before their brain files you under ‘just another salesperson.’ Your story decides if they keep listening.”
Teaching Founders to Sell Like Humans Again
One of Josh’s most underrated strengths is how he turns technical founders into natural storytellers. Not through scripts, but through clarity.
He sits with teams and rewrites the entire pitch around a single shift: the old way the market works versus the new world the product enables. Borrowing from Andy Raskin, he uses narrative structure as a competitive weapon.
A founder who speaks only about features disappears in the noise. A founder who says, “Here’s the shift happening in the world, and here’s why only we’re ready for it,” gets taken seriously.
Building the First Sales Motion Without Burning the Company
Josh has seen more early stage GTM attempts than most operators will ever encounter. The pattern is always the same. Founders hire too fast, hire the wrong experience level, or hire and then refuse to give autonomy.
His rule is simple.
“Don’t bring in sales until customers would be pissed if you took the product away.”
In practice that means early sales should come from the founders themselves. Only when they feel the first signs of product Market fit — users talking about the product unprompted, usage patterns rising, repeatable outcomes — should they bring in a salesperson or advisor.
His favorite early setups are hybrid. A founder stays deeply involved, a single AE executes, and a fractional operator like Josh multiplies the motion with research, strategy and narrative. It keeps burn low and learning fast.
The Future of Sales: Two Worlds, One Winner
Josh does not sugarcoat the next decade. He believes sales will split into two groups.
“People who fail to adapt to AI are going to struggle. People with real business acumen who use AI to multiply their output will thrive.”
In smaller ACV, he predicts more content led motion, more automation, and fewer SDRs. In larger ACV, he sees SDRs becoming specialists who multi thread deals and collaborate with AEs inside live opportunities.
And the long term future? He goes further than most.
“In ten or twenty years, it will feel as annoying to talk to a salesperson as it feels today to call an airline.”
The shift he sees coming is simple. Buyers will prefer AI because AI answers instantly, deeply and with perfect context. Humans will still matter — but the bar will rise.
Content as the Last Human Advantage
Josh believes the one thing bots cannot steal is the emotional connection built through content. Founders who don’t create, don’t share, and don’t speak publicly are already behind.
As he says, “If you don’t have an online brand right now, you’re four years too late.”
The next wave of trust will be built through human voice, human story, and micro communities where authenticity matters more than automation.
Why Founders Keep Calling Him Back
Josh is not selling hacks. He is selling clarity. He is selling belief backed by evidence. He is selling a way of operating that helps early teams avoid years of wasted cycles.
In his own words, “I’m not here to reject your idea. I’m here to make sure the market is the one rejecting it — not you.”
This is why early stage startups hire him. Not for scripts. Not for templates. But for a mindset that refuses to quit and a process that builds real revenue, not hope.
If your startup is on the edge of learning or collapsing, Josh Norris is exactly the person you want in the room.
