The sixteen-cell GTM

Most go-to-market plans I’ve read are a deck. One ICP, a list of channels, a revenue number, and a slide called “sequencing” that nobody opens again after the offsite.

They fail for a structural reason, not a lazy one. A deck treats the business as one thing, selling to one buyer, through every channel at once. No B2B business looks like that once it has more than a handful of customers. The same product gets bought by three or four kinds of company, and those buyers have different budgets, need different proof, stand in different rooms, and put different people on the signature page.

So I stopped writing GTM plans as decks and started drawing them as a grid. If you run growth, sales or a business unit and you’re building the motion for a B2B brand, this is the whole method. It fits on one page, and the page is below.

Four rows, one per category of buyer. Four columns, one per lane a buyer arrives through: inbound, outbound, events, partners. Sixteen cells. Every cell holds three lines. What’s true about that buyer in that lane. What’s missing. What you’re going to do about it this quarter.

CategoryLane	Inbound	Outbound	Events	Partners
Category 1 your largest buyer type	Insight What do they search for, and where do they land today? Gap The page or channel that buyer needs and cannot find. Play The one page or campaign you will build this quarter.	Insight Who are the companies, by name, and who signs inside them? Gap Which part of that universe no list has reached. Play The vetted list, the owner, the copy that carries proof.	Insight Which rooms do these buyers actually stand in? Gap The rooms you are absent from and no competitor owns. Play The two or three shows, and who from your team goes.	Insight Who already has this buyer's trust? Gap The intermediary you have no relationship with. Play The partner, the model (referral or resell), the first intro.
Category 2	Insight Same question, different buyer. Gap Different answer. Play Different play.	Insight Same question, different buyer. Gap Different answer. Play Different play.	Empty on purpose	Empty on purpose
Category 3	Empty on purpose	Insight Same question, different buyer. Gap Different answer. Play Different play.	Insight Same question, different buyer. Gap Different answer. Play Different play.	Empty on purpose
Category 4 the one you cannot staff yet	Empty on purpose	Empty on purpose	Empty on purpose	Empty on purpose

That’s the plan. What follows is how to fill it in, in the order that keeps you honest.

The rows: split by buyer, not by product

The first decision is the one most teams get wrong, because it’s the one that feels finished before you start. You already have a product list. It is not the row list.

Split by who buys and why. Two buyers belong in the same row when they share the person who signs, the proof they need before they’ll believe you, the rooms they stand in, and roughly what the deal is worth. If two rows match on three of those four, merge them. If one row hides two buyers that differ on three of the four, split it.

At GlamAR, one computer-vision product had a long list of names and exactly four buyers: beauty, eyewear, jewellery and home. A skincare brand and a makeup brand share a CMO profile, a trade-show circuit and an objection list, so they were one row. An optical chain shares none of that with them. Last month I ran the same exercise for an AI video platform selling to enterprises, and its buyers split into films, agencies, brands and corporate learning teams. Different product, same shape.

Four rows is not a rule, but it’s close to one. Fewer and you’re hiding a real difference inside a row. More than six and you can’t staff it, so the extra rows sit on the page looking like ambition.

One more thing about rows. They’re recursive. When a row is big enough to justify it, it splits again underneath, and the sub-rows get their own four lanes. “Brands” on the AI video grid became beauty, fashion, jewellery, furniture, FMCG, and only beauty went a level deeper, because that was where a deal was. You go deeper only where there’s a deal.

Before the columns: one account per row

A category is a description. An account is a company with a website, a buyer with a name, and a reason to move this quarter. The insight in each cell almost never comes from studying the category. It comes from studying one account inside it closely enough to find the thing that changes the plan.

The clearest example I have: a global beauty retailer that looked like one enterprise deal until the first pass of research showed it wasn’t one company. It was a brand owner plus a set of franchisees, each running its own markets, its own budget, its own vendor decision. Winning one market unlocked nothing. “One enterprise deal” was half a dozen mid-market deals that happened to share a brand book, and every cell in that row changed: the outbound cell became one account plan per territory, the events cell moved from the global flagship show to the regional ones where the franchisees exhibit, the inbound cell had to speak to a marketing lead in Kuala Lumpur rather than a CMO at head office.

None of that was visible at the category level. Pick the account first. The row will tell you what it needs.

The insight is in the account, not the category.

The columns: four lanes, three lines each

Every cell gets the same three lines in the same order. Insight, then gap, then play. The order is the discipline. Write the play first and you’ll write the play you already wanted to run.

Inbound. The lane where public data does most of the work, and where the gap is usually a missing page rather than missing traffic. Pull the traffic history, the top pages, the search terms. Then ask where your enterprise buyer lands. Often the answer is nowhere: the site was tuned for a different buyer, usually the self-serve one, and the senior person doing homework has no page written for them. The play is rarely “more traffic.” It’s the page, plus the unglamorous ones around it that rank when a buyer compares vendors. A second question worth an hour: where do competitors actually spend? When I checked the ad libraries for GlamAR’s category, every competitor ran search and nothing else, so we didn’t test Meta or LinkedIn. That’s a ten-minute decision if someone looks, and a two-week debate if nobody does.

Outbound. The lane with the most budget and the least thought behind it. Every underperforming outbound campaign I have ever audited failed at the list, not at the copy. A keyword search for “eyewear” in a contact database returned employees of a tech company that happens to make smart glasses. A Middle East campaign filled with Australian retailers. An existing client got a cold email. The fix is a rule, and as the leader you’re the one who has to hold it: companies first, contacts second, and the database never decides who you target. Someone builds the company universe by hand against the row’s ICP, tiers it, checks it against every company already in a live campaign, and then you approve it. Only after that does anyone pull contacts, and never more than a handful per company. Your strategic accounts never get a cold email at all. They’re in this column, but their play is you.

Events. The lane digital-first teams skip, which is why it’s on the grid. Enterprise buyers in most categories cluster at a handful of shows, and the ones you most want are the least reachable by search or email. Draw the events cell against a competitor map: which rooms does the incumbent own, and which does nobody? You don’t out-booth an incumbent in their own hall. You show up where they aren’t. At GlamAR that meant skipping the flagship beauty and optical rooms and taking the regional shows where no try-on vendor exhibited. The events row then turns into a staffing table on its own, because two shows in different countries in the same week means two people, and the grid tells you that before anyone books a flight.

Partners. The lane I have the least proof on. The insight is simple enough: somebody already has your buyer’s trust, whether that’s the agency of record, the platform they run their store on, or the distributor who holds the rights in that territory. The gap is usually a decision you haven’t made rather than a relationship you haven’t built. Referral or resell? At GlamAR that question sat open for months while deals waited on it. Decide the model before the second partner, not after. And expect this column to overlap with outbound: a regional reseller is a prospect in one cell and a channel in the next, and it wants a different pitch in each.

Every outbound failure I’ve audited was a list failure wearing a copy problem’s clothes.

Leave cells empty on purpose

This is the part leaders resist, because an empty cell looks like something you forgot.

It isn’t. An empty cell is a decision. It says: we looked, and either there’s no insight yet or there’s no play we can staff this quarter. When I drew GlamAR’s grid for this year, a third of the cells stayed empty. The home category had one filled cell, events, and only because the interiors show sat on the same trip as the beauty and optical ones. Home inbound, outbound and partners stayed empty because there was nobody to run them and no proof to run them with.

The rule for choosing which cells to fill: feet on the ground beat opportunity size. Fill the cells in regions where you have people, live customers to reference, and a competitor gap. Leave the rest visibly empty, on the same page, where the whole team can see them. The empty cells are next quarter’s roadmap. The plan for next quarter isn’t a new deck. It’s the same grid with one or two more cells filled in, usually because a deal in a neighbouring cell taught you something.

Resist the urge to write something in every box so the grid looks complete. A grid filled to look complete is a lie, and your team will know which cells are real.

An empty cell is a decision. A cell filled to look complete is a lie.

Run the grid, don’t present it

A plan that lives in a deck gets presented once. A grid gets walked.

Every filled cell has an owner. The weekly pipeline review walks the grid row by row: what moved in category one’s outbound, what the show produced, whether the partner pitch got a reply. Nobody asks whether you should be doing events. The question is always which cell, and that question has an answer someone can point at.

I draw it in a mind-mapping tool rather than a spreadsheet, for one reason: it stays readable when a row goes a level deeper. Business, then category, then account, then the four lanes, each with its three lines. The same shape at every level. Anyone in the company can open it and find the cell they own.

And it gets redrawn, not rewritten. Each quarter, same sixteen cells, one question per cell: is the insight still true? Usually two or three have changed, and one of those changes the play. The franchise structure on that retailer was that kind of change. So was learning the whole category advertised on search only. Neither would have survived contact with a deck, because decks don’t have cells to update. They have slides to replace.

What you own as the leader

Three things, and not the fourth.

You own the split. Nobody below you can decide the rows, because the rows decide headcount.

You own the gates. The company list before contacts are pulled. The model before the second partner. The show before the flight.

You own the empty cells. Every one is a bet you’ve declined to make, and you should be able to say why in one sentence.

You don’t own the plays. The people in the cells do. If you find yourself writing the outbound copy or picking the booth, the grid has a staffing problem, not a strategy problem.

What changes

Mostly the conversations.

“We need more outbound” becomes “category two’s outbound is a list problem, category one’s is a copy problem, and category four shouldn’t have outbound yet.” “Should we go to that show” becomes “it’s the incumbent’s room, and we have an empty events cell in a region where we have people.” “Let’s partner with agencies” becomes “which row, which territory, referral or resell.”

The grid doesn’t make the decisions. It makes them small enough to argue about with evidence, and it keeps the ones you’ve deferred visible instead of forgotten.

If you’re building the motion for a B2B brand, draw it before the next planning cycle. Four rows for the buyers, four columns for the lanes, three lines per cell. Fill only what you can staff. Then put it where the whole team can see the empty cells.

That’s the plan. The deck is optional.