The GTM Strategy and Execution Masterclass

The GTM Strategy and Execution Masterclass is a one-hour session on the part of go to market that gets a B2B founder meetings: the ICP, the message and offer, the list, partner mapping, and the campaign hub that holds it together. Alper Yurder of Forte Growth delivered it on 26 August 2026 as the GTM kick-off for the Swiss EP GFP 2.0 Western Balkans cohort.

It is for founders taking a product into a market that does not know them yet. The problem it solves: outbound gets treated as the whole go to market, and the other eleven parts of the system never get built.

What you leave with

Three answers, written down. The cohort finished them in the session and a one to one afterwards.

1. A value proposition for market access. One sentence, said out loud to a stranger, without a slide.
2. One priority target. Investors, corporate customers or ecosystem partners. One, not three. Three is how you come home with nothing.
3. Three numbers you are going to hit. Ten pipeline meetings, one investor conversation, one pilot customer. Pick your own and write them down.

Outbound is one box out of twelve

The GTM snapshot has twelve boxes: a written ICP, a one-sentence positioning line, an offer with a price, a founder profile you post to weekly, a website that says who it is for, a content calendar, fifty named prospects, an outbound tool actually sending, a sales process with stages, a CRM someone updates, a record of every campaign tested, and a person whose job this is. Outbound is one of the twelve, and fixing only that box polishes the tip while the rest sits under the water.

Outbound sends messages. It does not build trust. AI makes what already works bigger and does not fix what is broken. When every channel is asked to do lead generation, nothing compounds. Each channel has one job it does well, and they feed each other when they run in parallel.

Leads come from three layers working together:

• The meeting engine. The right message to the right ICP, angles tested, an inbox managed so you book fast.
• The echo chamber. A LinkedIn profile that works as a landing page, active posting, proof and events, so prospects who check you out find someone real.
• The learning loop. Call recordings feed content, objections feed messaging, and trust feeds reply rates.

The deck maps twelve touches between a first email and a booking: a profile view, a connection, posts they see, a follow-up, a comment, a useful DM, a mention from a peer, a website that says who it is for, a meeting at an event. One channel cannot deliver that. The system is the strategy.

Diagnose before you fix

Follow the no's down and you land on the thing to fix, which is almost never the sentence.

• Sending, no replies. An ICP problem: wrong audience, wrong stage, targeting built on demographics.
• Replies, no meetings. A CTA problem: nothing in the ask makes today the day.
• Meetings, no pipeline. A positioning problem: features instead of the problem they feel.
• Pipeline, no closes. A sales process problem, and a different fix entirely.

Founders ask for the campaign hub, which is everything involved in getting a meeting. What is usually broken sits in the GTM hub around it: positioning, content, founder brand, partners, sales process and ownership.

ICP, message and offer

Six things decide your reply rate before you type:

1. Listen to 20 or more sales calls, so your messaging uses the customer's words, not yours.
2. Research keywords in Reddit, competitor reviews and support tickets. Stop guessing what they call the problem.
3. Build a behavioural ICP, and write down the anti-ICP: three characteristics that disqualify a prospect.
4. Build the list with care. The list is the strategy.
5. Make a real offer. "Book a demo" is not an offer, it is a tax on the prospect.
6. Match the awareness stage. There are five stages of awareness, and a demo request assumes the last one. Write for where the prospect actually is.

Two tests check the ICP. Can you name twenty real companies in your segment without research? If not, you have a description, not a target. And are you sending the same sentence to a 20-person and an 80-person company? They are different buyers.

Genifea shows how much sits in one sentence. "We put AI into customer comms" was vendor language. After listening to real customer calls it became "How many calls did your office miss last week?" The product and the list stayed the same. Only the sentence changed.

On the offer, write messages per awareness level with a low-friction front end instead of a meeting request: a teardown, a checklist, a fifteen-minute diagnostic. Something a prospect can accept without making a decision.

OMMA shows the other diagnosis. The offer was rebuilt per awareness stage with a low-friction front end, and once it converted, nothing more needed fixing. The prospect list was doubled and cold email ran alongside LinkedIn on the same angle, with metrics reviewed weekly and a CRM built in Notion before anyone paid for one. OMMA went from no demos to fifteen a month in eight weeks, and built £500K of pipeline in four months. Sometimes the diagnosis is: stop optimising, scale what works.

The five-step list build

Starting at step five of five is the mistake. The order is:

1. Warmest first. Anyone you have ever spoken to.
2. Lurkers. Profile viewers and post engagers.
3. Competitor followers. They already care about the category.
4. Signal-based. Fundraises, hires, role changes and job postings.
5. Cold ICP. Last, once the first four are exhausted.

Targets to hold yourself to: a connect rate of 30% or more, a reply rate of 6% or more, and 15% or more of replies becoming meetings. Start at step five and none of them will hold.

Demographics tell you who someone is. Past risk-taking, life transitions, buying patterns and public intent tell you how they buy. "Founders who took risks" beats "£500K+ earners" on the same list size.

For Wealt, the message was not broken, the list was. Rebuilt around behaviour, keeping only firms with a risk function, it produced £750K of pipeline from 200 named prospects rather than 2,000 strangers. For Wyzr, six months of cold ICP lists had produced nothing. Going up the ladder instead, into the NatWest Accelerator cohort, a room the founders already belonged to, produced 17 calls and 53 interested leads in under 30 days.

Two angles and one database

The framework has sixteen message angles. You do not need all sixteen, you need two that fit your buyer. The deck starts with two. The trigger: something just changed at their company, so you are relevant this week. The peer proof: someone they respect already did it, so you borrow that judgement instead of asking for trust you have not earned. Test your two against each other and write the result down.

SolvaPay had a complex product and three plausible theories about who it was for. All three ran in parallel, each with its own persona and message, logged in one campaign database and reviewed weekly. "Did we ever try that persona?" became a row in a table, not a shrug, and the founder is no longer the only channel. If a campaign is not in the database, it did not happen.

Partner mapping in a market that does not know you

In a market that does not know you, borrowed trust moves faster than earned trust. A partner is someone with an audience of your ICP, not someone who buys from you. The session maps five kinds: corporate and bank innovation arms, accelerators and programmes, local integrators already inside your buyer's projects, communities where your buyer talks, and data and infrastructure players touching the same workflow. For each, note what audience they own and roughly how many.

Then name the thing. "We should collaborate" goes nowhere. The template:

I would run [a specific free thing] for [number] of your [founders, clients, members] in [month], no obligation on them or on you.

Founder brand is the other half of borrowed trust. People buy you before they buy your product. Flowla, which Alper co-founded, reached £1M ARR with £0 on paid ads. Ujji built a founder brand on LinkedIn and a podcast, and closed a $100K first deal through the podcast with zero cold outbound.

Trust does not travel. Witco, where Alper was CRO, grew in France through relationships and PR, and the same approach did not convert in the UK. The rebuild targeted 1,000 key buyers instead of 10,000 strangers and tested message, channel and ICP every two weeks. Witco went from £0 to £1M in UK revenue.

The campaign hub

Everything above, in one working surface the founder opens every Monday:

• The foundations. ICP and anti-ICP, positioning in one sentence, an offer ladder by awareness stage, and a named prospect list with its source.
• The engine. Sequences by channel, LinkedIn and email infrastructure, inbox management, a content calendar, events and partner asks.
• The loop. Every test logged, weekly numbers in one tracker, and a record of what gets killed and what gets scaled.

In a working hub, every prospect has a source next to it: warm, lurker, competitor, signal or cold. That column predicts the reply rate better than the copy does.

Your number, worked backwards

Worked backwards at those targets, ten meetings needs thousands of cold contacts, more than one founder can reach in a six-week window. The warm route aims for ten to twenty meetings from two hundred named people you have a real reason to reach: 50 named contacts a week for four weeks, tracking three numbers, contacted, replied and meeting.

Any event your buyers attend is a channel, not a day out. Before it, rank twenty attendees against your ICP and message the top ten to ask for fifteen minutes there, not a demo. In the room, open with their problem, because nobody buys standing up. Leave with a time in the diary, an introduction to a named person or permission to send one specific thing, and log it all the same week.

Questions founders ask

Who is the masterclass for?

B2B founders entering a market that does not know them, who need meetings with customers, investors or partners within weeks. It was built for an accelerator cohort, and the frameworks work outside that programme too.

Why not just send more outbound?

Because outbound is one box out of twelve. Where the list comes from and what you offer decide the reply rate before the copy does. Start at the warmest step of the list build.

What if replies are not turning into meetings?

That is a CTA problem. Replace the demo request with a low-friction offer matched to the awareness stage. If you cannot tell which symptom you have, the GTM diagnostic shows where the motion breaks.