By Rye Overly
One of the more interesting dynamics in enterprise software is what happens when a category becomes mature enough that the underlying products begin to converge.
The convergence is rarely absolute. There are still meaningful differences in architecture, performance, integrations, pricing, support and product philosophy. But the differences become less decisive as competitors continue to respond to one another. Features that once differentiated a vendor eventually become expected, and capabilities that would have been a reason to switch vendors a few years ago can become standard requirements in an RFP.
That creates a difficult problem for software companies. If the products in a category are all capable of solving the customer’s core problem, what actually determines the winner?
Increasingly, I think the answer has less to do with the feature set and more to do with the experience of interacting with the company.
This is where the GTM motion starts to become part of the product.
When an enterprise evaluates a technology vendor, it is not simply evaluating whether the software works. It is also trying to understand what it will be like to work with the organization behind it. The sales team, solutions engineers, customer success organization, implementation team and executives all become part of that evaluation, whether the company has intentionally designed them that way or not.
That matters because enterprise software is fundamentally a trust decision. A customer is committing budget, engineering resources, operational dependency and often several years of their technology roadmap to a vendor. The software needs to work, but the customer also needs to believe that the company will behave predictably once the contract is signed.
The buying process is one of the first places they look for evidence.
The buying experience has become part of product differentiation
Imagine two vendors with relatively similar technical capabilities. One has a sales team that understands the customer’s architecture, a solutions engineer who can answer difficult questions without turning every conversation into a pitch, and a POC that is structured around the customer’s actual requirements. The other requires the customer to repeat its requirements several times, produces inconsistent answers and turns the evaluation into a prolonged exercise in proving that the software works.
The underlying products might be comparable.
The buying decision probably will not be.
This is not because enterprise buyers are choosing the company with the nicer salespeople. It is because the buying experience provides information about the risk associated with the purchase.
A technically strong evaluation team suggests that the vendor understands its own technology. Clear communication suggests operational maturity. Honest conversations about limitations suggest that the company is less likely to create unpleasant surprises after the sale.
None of those things are product features in the traditional sense, but they influence the perceived value of the product and, perhaps more importantly, the perceived risk of buying it.
As products converge, that distinction becomes increasingly important.
GTM is one of the first ways a customer experiences the company
Software companies tend to think about product and GTM as separate functions. Product builds the thing, while GTM figures out how to sell it.
From the customer’s perspective, the separation is much less obvious.
Before a customer ever uses the software, they may spend weeks or months interacting with the company. They encounter the website and marketing, then an account executive, then a solutions engineer, then a proof of concept, then procurement and legal, and eventually an implementation or customer success team.
By the time they receive their production credentials, they have already developed an opinion about the company.
That opinion can be remarkably disconnected from the quality of the software itself.
A technically excellent product can be paired with a disorganized sales process and leave a customer wondering whether the organization is capable of supporting an enterprise deployment.
Conversely, a company with a relatively straightforward product can create significant confidence through an exceptionally competent buying experience.
Neither situation is ideal. The broader point is that the customer does not compartmentalize the experience the way the organization does.
They do not think, “The product is excellent, but the solutions engineering organization was poorly coordinated.”
They think, “This company was difficult to work with.”
That distinction is important because reputation is created at the company level.
Reputation is the accumulated result of the GTM experience
This is where GTM execution starts to have consequences beyond an individual opportunity.
Companies tend to think about reputation as something owned by marketing or communications. In reality, much of a technology company’s reputation is created through direct interactions between employees and customers.
A salesperson who consistently sets accurate expectations contributes to a different reputation than one who routinely stretches the truth to get opportunities across the line.
A solutions engineer who is willing to explain where the product is not a fit contributes to a different reputation than one who treats every technical objection as something to overcome.
A customer success organization that takes ownership of difficult situations creates a different reputation than one that passes customers between departments.
These interactions accumulate.
More importantly, they travel.
Enterprise buyers move between companies. Engineers change organizations. Executives talk to one another. Consultants work across multiple customers. A person who has had a strong or poor experience with a vendor can eventually influence another buying decision somewhere else.
The reputation of a software company therefore exists outside of its formal marketing.
It exists in the experiences people have had with the organization.
The incentives inside GTM can make this difficult
There is an uncomfortable tension here because many of the behaviors that create short-term GTM success can undermine long-term reputation.
A salesperson has an incentive to maximize the opportunity. Marketing has an incentive to generate interest. A solutions engineer wants to prove that the product can work. An executive wants the strategic account.
Those incentives are not inherently problematic, but they can produce a situation where every function optimizes for its own stage of the funnel while the customer experiences one continuous journey.
Marketing creates an aggressive expectation. Sales reinforces it. The technical team discovers that the use case is more complicated than originally presented. Implementation then has to reset expectations.
Internally, each team may have a reasonable explanation for what happened.
Externally, the customer simply experienced a company that did not align its promises with its delivery.
This is one of the reasons I think GTM leadership will increasingly have to care about the quality of the customer journey rather than simply the efficiency of individual funnel stages.
A higher win rate is not necessarily better if it is being achieved by selling customers who are unlikely to be successful.
More pipeline is not necessarily better if the messaging is creating expectations that the product cannot support.
A larger initial contract is not necessarily better if the customer feels that they were sold something they did not need.
Those decisions may look good in a quarterly report and become expensive later.
The best GTM organizations create confidence
This does not mean that good GTM should be passive or overly cautious.
Enterprise sales is competitive. Customers often need to be challenged. Deals need momentum. Salespeople should be able to make a strong case for why a customer should change.
The difference is whether the GTM motion creates confidence or simply pressure.
Confidence comes from understanding the customer’s environment, being technically credible, setting realistic expectations and demonstrating that the organization has thought through what happens after the sale.
That can actually make a company more aggressive, not less.
If a salesperson understands the customer’s business well enough to identify a problem the customer has not fully addressed, they can challenge the customer in a way that creates genuine value.
If a solutions engineer understands the architecture, they can have a much more sophisticated conversation about tradeoffs.
If the company is comfortable acknowledging where the product does not fit, customers have more reason to believe the claims it makes about where it does fit.
There is a difference between being conservative and being credible.
The latter is a much more valuable GTM asset.
This becomes a competitive advantage as markets mature
I suspect this will become increasingly important as enterprise software categories consolidate.
When there are twenty vendors competing in a category, the product itself can provide enough differentiation to drive a buying decision. When there are three or four credible vendors that have largely caught up to one another, the rest of the experience carries more weight.
That does not make GTM more important than product.
It makes the boundary between the two less meaningful.
A product that is difficult to evaluate is harder to buy. A product that is difficult to implement is less valuable than its feature set suggests. A product backed by an organization that customers do not trust carries more perceived risk than an equivalent product backed by an organization with a strong reputation.
In that sense, the GTM motion becomes part of the product’s perceived value.
And because that experience is repeated across hundreds or thousands of interactions, it eventually becomes part of the company’s reputation.
The companies that recognize this will have an advantage
The strongest software companies will still win because they build products customers genuinely need. GTM cannot rescue a product that does not deliver.
But once the technology is good enough, the experience surrounding it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss as secondary.
The way a company runs a sales process tells the market something about the company.
The way it handles a POC tells the market something about the company.
The way it responds when a deal goes sideways tells the market something about the company.
The way it handles a customer after the contract is signed tells the market even more.
Over time, those experiences form a reputation that no marketing campaign can fully manufacture.
That is why I think the GTM motion is becoming part of the product.
Not because sales has somehow replaced product development, but because the customer is increasingly evaluating the entire experience of working with a vendor rather than the software in isolation.
As the products in a category become more similar, the companies that create the most confidence around those products will have an advantage.
And that confidence, built deal by deal and customer by customer, is ultimately reputation.
