Are your Marketing & Sales operation driving scalable growth with customer data?
As investors, you are constantly analyzing business fundamentals, team capabilities, and unit economics. But when it comes to marketing and sales, are you going far enough? Are you challenging portfolio companies on how well they are aligning their go-to-market engine around real customer needs, behaviors, and feedback?
“How effectively is the company aligning its marketing & sales touchpoints around real customer needs, behaviors, and feedback—across the entire journey—to drive not just conversions, but lasting loyalty and advocacy?”
This question isn’t just rhetorical. It’s the blueprint for unlocking high-efficiency, compounding growth.
At the2Guys, we call this Growth Velocity: a methodology that transforms traditional, siloed sales and marketing tactics into a tightly aligned, customer-led, and data-driven system that produces scalable, predictable growth.
This blog unpacks how investors should evaluate GTM strategies using a bottom-up, customer-centric lens, and introduces the Sales Narrator—a tool we use to synchronize messaging, journey orchestration, and conversion efficiency.
1 – From Funnel to Flywheel — Why Most GTM Models Underperform
Most companies still operate with a legacy funnel mindset: a top-down sequence that prioritizes volume over relevance, conversion over continuity, and acquisition over experience.
This is where many growth strategies begin to erode. Why? Because real growth is not just about getting more customers—it’s about building systems that:
– Acquire the right customers,
– Engage them with aligned narratives,
– and retain them through measurable value delivery.
Ask yourself:
– Are the funnel stages clearly mapped to customer intent signals?
– Are we moving leads through a mechanical pipeline, or guiding humans through decision journeys?
– Is the company capturing post-sale insights to feed future acquisition and product refinement?
The best GTM models behave less like funnels and more like feedback loops. This is how you move from growth tactics to growth velocity.
2 – Build the Funnel Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down
The2Guys approach flips the traditional model on its head. Instead of asking, “How do we fill the top of the funnel?” we ask:
“What experience does a high-value, high-retention customer need to stay, grow, and advocate—and how do we reverse-engineer our GTM around that?”
Why bottom-up works:
– It ensures revenue and retention become the design inputs, not just outcomes.
– It bakes in customer lifetime value into every marketing and sales motion.
– It fosters operational alignment between teams: product, CX, sales, and marketing speak the same language.
Key elements of a bottom-up GTM design:
– Define your Ideal Retained Customer (IRC): Not just an ICP, but the profile that stays, expands, and refers.
– Map backward from the expansion loop: What did this customer experience before they upgraded or renewed?
– Rebuild your pipeline stages to reflect real customer decision points, not internal quotas.
– Instrument feedback loops: Tie every stage to customer data, not just CRM progress.
This is how scalable, predictable growth gets engineered.
3 – Data, Not Gut — Using Real-Time Customer Insights
Customer-centric marketing and sales depends on insight density. Vanity metrics won’t cut it. Leading companies build their GTM engines around:
– Product usage behavior,
– Onboarding friction points,
– CX feedback loops,
– Sales call intelligence,
– NPS/NES and referral triggers.
This data needs to be:
– Actionable: Can the sales rep or marketer do something today with this insight?
– Integrated: Are insights shared between teams?
– Continuous: Are they updated in real time, not quarterly reports?
Companies that execute Growth Velocity well treat data as a customer conversation. They listen, learn, and evolve every touchpoint.
4 – The Sales Narrator — Aligning Sales Messaging, Intent, and Conversion
Here’s where most GTM strategies break down:
– Marketing tells one story.
– Sales tells another.
– Product delivers something else.
The result? Friction, churn, and missed growth.
At the2Guys, we introduce a unique mechanism called the Sales Narrator.
The Sales Narrator is the fully automated & personalized narrative thread that connects marketing content, sales messaging, and onboarding experiences—built entirely around the customer’s problem, language, and success criteria.
What does the Sales Narrator solve?
– Clarity on what the customer actually cares about.
– Personalized storytelling at scale troughout the funnel journey
– Unified messaging across channels.
– Jointed buyer journeys with consistent CTAs.
– Sales team regaining 30% of selling time back
What it includes:
– A clear, repeatable story framework that evolves with each customer segment.
– Messaging aligned with actual buying triggers, not product features.
– Integration with email cadences, demo scripts, landing pages, and onboarding.
– Collaboration across teams, including marketing, product, and CX.
When every team uses the same language and narrative scaffolding, customer trust compounds.
5: Metrics that Matter for Velocity
Too often, companies celebrate Lead gen volume;, CAC efficiency, SQLs created
But these metrics can mask inefficiencies and false positives. A Growth Velocity GTM model tracks:
– Conversion velocity per segment
– Time to first value (TTFV)
– Net retention linked to acquisition cohort
– Advocacy rate (customer referrals per segment)
– Sales cycle alignment with value realization milestones
These metrics tell the truth about compounding growth potential.
6: From Strategy to Ops — How the2Guys Build It
Every engagement with the2Guys includes a hands-on, structured process:
1 – Deep GTM diagnostic: Funnel audit, journey mapping, retention analysis, Cross-functional interviews
2 – Sales Narrator development: Message hierarchy, journey narratives, value proofing
3 – Bottom-up funnel redesign: IRC back-mapping, customer-led stage definition, KPI alignment
4 – Operational enablement: Cadence building, CRM alignment, feedback loop wiring
5 – Velocity dashboard creation: Visibility across strategy, execution, and impact
We don’t leave behind a slide deck. We co-build your growth engine and make sure it runs.
Final Thought: Are you challenging the right questions?
So the question isn’t just “Is the GTM strategy strong?”
It is:
– Does the GTM strategy start with the retained customer?
– Is it wired to scale with velocity, not volume?
– Is the Sales Narrator in place to unify the journey?
– Can every decision be traced back to customer insight?
– Is growth treated as a system, not a result?
Because the companies that win the next market cycles won’t be the ones with the biggest funnel. They’ll be the ones with the tightest narrative, clearest insight loops, and the most customer-aligned GTM system.
Let’s talk if you’re ready to build Growth Velocity into your portfolio.
👉 Comment below or message us directly to share how you’re thinking about customer-centric growth.