As we look ahead to fiscal 2025, many founders are grappling with how to structure their go-to-market strategy to align with shifting market conditions. Whether you’re in a hyper-growth phase or working to refine your product-market fit, the decisions you make now will impact your company’s long-term trajectory.
With that in mind, we recently hosted a go-to-market AMA session with Madrona portfolio company CEOs to explore what teams should consider while planning for the next fiscal year and are sharing the key takeaways in this guide to help others navigate their FY 2025 planning. From staying focused on core priorities to unifying the team around shared revenue goals, these five insights provide founders with actionable strategies to streamline their efforts, boost revenue generation, and set their startups on a path to success for the year ahead.
Stay Focused: Don’t Change Strategy Every Quarter
In today’s dynamic market, it’s tempting to pivot strategies if you don’t see immediate results. However, constant changes can lead to confusion and lack of progress. Warren Buffet’s famous 5/25 rule offers a helpful approach to staying focused. Write down your top 25 goals, then circle the top 5 that will have the most significant impact. The critical part? Avoid the other 20 at all costs.
This principle is especially important for startup founders who can easily be drawn into new opportunities or initiatives without giving their core strategies time to bear fruit. A common pitfall is launching multiple GTM strategies only to abandon them after a few months when results aren’t immediate. Instead, stay disciplined. Choose a few core areas where you believe you can win, establish leading indicators to measure progress, commit to them, and track them weekly for signs of success vs waiting to see revenue. This will give your team more clarity, and you’ll be able to track progress more effectively. When strategy shifts occur too often, momentum is lost, valuable insights that could have come with patience are left unexplored, and the resources allocated in your annual plan are not optimized for success.
Abandoning a strategy too quickly often causes regret. Before abandoning an initiative, ask yourself: Did we give that long enough to be successful? Do we have conviction around the signals that would suggest it wasn’t working? And did we give it a fair shake/do everything we could to make it successful?
Make FY 2025 the year of disciplined focus
Always Focus on the Customer
No matter how innovative your product is or how well you’ve optimized your GTM strategy if it’s not aligned with your customer’s needs, it’s destined to fall short. Founders should regularly ask, “How are we solving our customer’s largest challenges?” and “How do they want to interact with our product and team?”
Building your GTM strategy based on customer needs is essential. Instead of trying to model your sales organization after the most successful SaaS companies, go directly to your customers. Learn how they experience your product, how often they need support, and how they prefer to engage with your sales and customer success teams. You don’t want to be the company that realizes you have 50 touchpoints a month with a customer from different departments — marketing, customer success, sales, and product. That leads to frustration, inefficiency, and an inflated 2025 budget.
Structure your organization in a way that makes customer interactions seamless and adds value at every touchpoint. When in doubt, ask the customer how you can better serve them. Their answers often provide more clarity than internal discussions or competitor benchmarking.
Let FY 2025 be the year you truly listen to and act on the voice of your customers
Align Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product Around Revenue Goals
Alignment across the entire organization is critical to achieving revenue goals for any startup. Founders need to ensure that every department — sales, marketing, customer success, and product — is signed up for the revenue target. Each team should understand how they directly contribute to achieving the target and, in most cases, a number they own and report on.
Sales owns the primary responsibility for closing deals, marketing shares the responsibility for lead generation and awareness, customer success should focus on churn reduction, customer health, and adoption, and product must create solutions that drive retention and growth. Without a clear understanding of how each function impacts revenue, it’s easy for teams to operate in silos, working toward separate goals that don’t translate into the company’s overall success.
Establish clear revenue targets and communicate them across all functions. Ensure each department tracks its performance against this goal and that the team reviews leading and lagging indicators with leadership at least monthly. This creates opportunities for cross-functional collaboration, ensures everyone is moving in the same direction, and ensures accountability at every level.
Make FY 2025 the year your entire team rallies around shared revenue goals and accountability
Set Your GTM Team Up for Success
If your product has achieved market fit, your next challenge is ensuring your GTM team has the resources and support they need to succeed. This includes ensuring their book of business is fair and balanced and that quotas are realistic based on those assignments.
Startups can often make the mistake of setting aggressive quotas for some sales reps while giving them unproductive or saturated territories. This creates frustration, burnout, and turnover. As a founder, you need to ensure that territories have enough white space to allow for expansion and meaningful contributions toward quota.
Moreover, enable your team with competitive intelligence, detailed product training, and a deep understanding of the customer pain points that your solution solves. If they’re going to hit their numbers, they need to be armed with the tools and knowledge necessary to confidently engage customers and differentiate your product from the competition.
One metric we discussed in our session was sales rep participation, which represents the percentage of their quota they achieve. One best practice we noted is to ensure that 70-80% of your reps are hitting 70-80% of their quota. You cannot survive on a few heroes carrying the team, and achieving these numbers represents a team you can scale. If your reps are not hitting this level, then take time to determine what is causing the challenge — messaging, competition, product issues, or poor territory assignments can all cause issues for quota attainment.
Ensure FY 2025 is the year your GTM team is fully equipped and empowered to hit your revenue targets
Pipeline is Your Lifeline
Pipeline is the foundation of any successful GTM strategy. It’s the lifeline that ensures a steady flow of revenue and keeps your sales team on track to hit their targets. Yet many startups fail to emphasize pipeline creation and management. Don’t fall into this trap.
Every team responsible for revenue — sales, marketing, product — needs clear pipeline goals. It’s critical to measure leading indicators like the number of new opportunities generated, meetings booked, and customer engagements secured. Without a steady flow of prospects, even the most talented sales team will struggle to meet their targets.
Hold your teams accountable by implementing a process for regular pipeline reviews. Is product delivering? Is marketing’s demand generation strategy creating qualified opportunities? Is the sales team actively prospecting at a level to build their own pipeline? By setting clear pipeline goals and regularly assessing progress, you’ll ensure your team stays on track to hit ramp times and quarterly or annual goals.
Finally, make sure you have a process in place to measure success. Are your teams hitting their pipeline creation targets? Are they getting meetings with potential customers? These leading indicators are the lifeblood of your GTM strategy.
Let FY 2025 be the year you build and maintain a healthy pipeline that drives sustained growth to meet your annual plan
Are you ready for FY 2025?
FY 2025 presents both challenges and opportunities for founders, especially when it comes to aligning your GTM strategy and programs as a foundation for your annual plan. Remember, success isn’t built on quick pivots or scattered initiatives. It’s built on thoughtful planning, disciplined execution, and relentless focus on solving customer problems. Stay the course, and let FY 2025 be the year of sustained growth driven by intentional strategies and a relentless commitment to execution.
This guide came from our September portfolio company GTM sessions. The next session, on December 4, will cover how to diagnose and address revenue challenges when you’re not hitting your goals. We’ll dive into identifying whether it’s your GTM team, the product, or the market and explore the metrics and signals that could indicate where changes are needed. Keep an eye out for the next guide following that session.