Most go-to-market failures in cyber don’t announce themselves. They show up as a confusing quarter.
Leads and opportunities are up, but pipeline is flat. Your CRO and your marketing lead tell you slightly different stories about the same ninety days. Opportunities get stuck and then die. The Board asks questions.
You try some things that don’t work; then, some months later, somebody is “not a fit.” The next hire inherits the same broken inputs, and you run the movie again with a new cast.
Everything in that story is a symptom, and that’s where most of us start. Pipeline is soft, so you buy leads. Your marketing lead can’t explain the number, so you replace your marketing lead. Both are reasonable. Both treat what you can see. And next quarter the same thing happens again with different names on it.
A failure mode is the layer underneath — the mechanism producing the symptom. There turn out to be a manageable number of them, they repeat from company to company, and fixing one stops the problems from recurring. That’s the whole difference between a patch and a durable fix.
I’ve written before about G2M drag: the friction that wastes money and time, the thing that separates companies that compound from companies that grind. Failure modes are how you find the drag. Chasing symptoms is how you add to it — every patch is another program, another hire, another dashboard, none of it pointed at the thing actually slowing you down.
Does cyber punish this harder than other categories? I think so. Your buyer is paid — literally — to assume the claim is inflated, the demo is staged, and the reference was hand-picked. Elsewhere a weak foundation underperforms for a while and you get to fix it later. Here it reads as evidence against you.
So: a map. Seven modes, how each shows up, what each one costs. Then the questions that tell you which ones you’re living with.
1. Fuzzy positioning
- HOW IT SHOWS UP
- Prospects ask what you do after the demo. Analysts file you in a category you didn’t pick. Your site and your deck describe two different companies.
- WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
- The sentence never got written down and signed, so five people carry five versions.
- WHAT IT COSTS YOU
- The shortlist ranking, decided before you’re in the conversation. 94% of buying groups rank their shortlist in order of preference before they talk to a seller; the top of that list wins nearly 80% of the time.1
2. An ICP that doesn’t predict
- HOW IT SHOWS UP
- The target list changes deal to deal. Your best and your newest customers look nothing alike. Nobody can name who you walk away from.
- WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
- It came from a theory nobody tested, or from whatever closed. Neither one predicts who stays. And comp pays the same on a bad-fit deal.
- WHAT IT COSTS YOU
- Churn you could have seen coming. Deployments stall in accounts with nobody to run them, those customers don’t renew, and the logos you fought for come back off the board.
3. The buyer can’t build a case
- HOW IT SHOWS UP
- You lose to “we’ll use what we already own.” Your champion can’t get past their CISO without you on the call. Security review passes, deal dies on “why now.”
- WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
- The buyer can’t tell why you, and can’t justify the spend. Both stall in the same place, so it gets filed as a sales problem.
- WHAT IT COSTS YOU
- Discount. Reps close the gap with price — and the buyer who couldn’t justify the spend won’t expand next year either.
4. Marketing vs. sales as a structure
- HOW IT SHOWS UP
- Two functions reporting different numbers for one quarter. Sales says the leads are bad; marketing says they aren’t worked.
- WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
- Two scoreboards, and underneath them two comp plans pointed different directions. Your CRO is paid on bookings; your marketing lead on sourced pipeline.
- WHAT IT COSTS YOU
- A missed quarter nobody can explain, which becomes a people decision. Search fees, a year of ramp, and the deals nobody worked while the seat sat empty.
5. More at the top of a leaky funnel
- HOW IT SHOWS UP
- Pipeline is soft, so the plan is more leads. POCs sit past their exit date and nobody can say why. Your SEs are in every deal and the answer to that has been more top-of-funnel.
- WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
- You’re buying inputs into a funnel that leaks in the middle. Volume is the visible lever. Conversion is the slow one, so volume wins the budget conversation every time.
- WHAT IT COSTS YOU
- Nothing. That’s the trap — buy 25% more inquiries and you get 25% more deals at exactly the same cost per win. Lift three mid-funnel rates five points each and the same spend produces 44% more revenue.2
6. Founder dependency
- HOW IT SHOWS UP
- You close every deal that matters. Your first sales hire isn’t ramping and you can’t say what they’re missing. You rewrote your marketer’s post at 11pm.
- WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
- Closing twenty deals yourself proves personal repeatability. Whether anyone else can repeat it is a different test, and it’s the one that matters.
- WHAT IT COSTS YOU
- The company grows only as fast as your calendar — and that calendar is going to deals while product, recruiting and your team wait.
7. Pricing that can’t grow
- HOW IT SHOWS UP
- Everyone’s on the same SKU. Price barely moves when a customer triples their log volume. You’ve never sold a second thing to an existing customer.
- WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
- A model built to win the first ten deals, with no room in it for year three: no expansion module, no scaling metric, or a metric that scales so hard the buyer engineers around you.
- WHAT IT COSTS YOU
- Every new dollar comes from a new logo. At 90% NRR a $10M company growing 30% must sell $4M new. At 110%, $2M.3 Half the burden.
One more on mode 7, because it’s the newest to this list and the most cyber-specific: if MSSPs or managed providers are anywhere in your ICP, per-tenant packaging and partner margin are day-one decisions. Bolting them on at fifty customers means repapering fifty contracts.
Seven modes is not a complete operating system. There's nothing here about how fast your customers get value, or which product line deserves the next dollar, or which motion you should actually be running. Those are real, and they're not what this piece is for. This is the set that shows up first in cyber companies under $10M, and it's the set you can act on without hiring anybody.
Which of the seven are impacting you?
Twenty-six questions, less than five minutes. It scores your answers by mode and tells you what each gap is costing you — including telling you your go-to-market isn’t the problem, if that’s what your answers say.
It’s free, it’s anonymous, and it never asks for your email. Nothing is stored that could connect a set of answers back to you or your company.
Free · Anonymous · Less than five minutes · No email
Read the same seven the other direction and the diagnosis becomes a build list. A failure mode is a decision nobody made, described after the fact.
There’s an order to it, and it isn’t the repair order. Repair starts with whatever is bleeding. Building starts with whatever everything else depends on.
- Decide what you are — from the three customers who bought fastest and stayed, not the category you want. Write the sentence, then have everyone write it blind and compare.
- Then who you’ll decline. Walking away costs real percentage points of ARR at your size. Write down what would make you do it while no deal is on the table.
- Then why you, in the buyer’s own numbers. Get the before-and-after from two customers — hours, dollars, or an audit finding closed. Not a testimonial.
- Then what the price does when an account grows. Model what today’s customers pay you in year three. If it’s roughly what they pay now, you found it.
The first is an hour. The other three are a quarter each, honestly. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
One scoreboard and your mid-funnel rates come online when there’s a second person to align with — write those definitions before the hire. The seventh you can’t outrun: you are the system, and at the start that’s correct. It’s supposed to end, and it ends slower than anyone plans for. As my friend David Politis, multi-time founder and CEO coach, put it to me: “Investors don’t want to invest in a company that relies on the founder to do all the deals.”
All of it gets more expensive with every customer you sign and every person who joins carrying their own version of the story.
- Start with the one that produces the others. If founder dependency is live, start there — fix anything downstream while everything still runs through you and you’ll fix it twice.
- Then the four decisions: positioning, ICP, the buyer’s case, pricing. Yours to make, and they mostly don’t cost a hire.
- Then the two operating ones — one scoreboard, and the leaky funnel. Those need a cadence rather than a decision. Start them early and expect to keep running them; they come back the moment you stop.
What to do about it
Naming the mode is the start. The fix is hard work, and keeping it fixed requires attention, inspection, and regular course corrections. The fixes are real, they’re mostly decisions rather than hires, and they’re stage-dependent enough that a generic list would do more harm than good — what’s right at $5M is wrong at $30M.
So I’m doing that part live. CyberMarketingCon, Austin, November 15–18, CEO track. Seven modes, what to do about each, how to tell an alignment problem from a talent problem, and a room that can push back in real time. Come argue.
Don’t want to wait? Grab some time on my calendar, and let’s talk. I promise I won’t pitch you. www.schedulegold.com.
1. 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report.
2. Why “More at the Top of the Funnel” Is the Wrong Conversation, cyberg2m.com — model and copyable sheet linked there.
3. The NRR math is worked through in AI Moved Your Moat, cyberg2m.com.
Mode 6 has a long-form companion: “Founder-led is a feature. Founder-dependent is a bug.”