How the lack of a real go-to-market strategy is turning your revolutionary technology into forgettable noise
VC analysts review around 3,000 pitch decks annually, yet they invest in only 9 of them. If you’re a fintech founder, your revolutionary payments platform, your AI-powered lending algorithm, or your blockchain-based settlement system is competing for attention in a market where global fintech funding dropped 20% year-over-year to $33.7 billion in 2024, marking a seven-year low.
But here’s what most founders miss: the problem isn’t the market correction. The problem is that when an investor finally opens your deck (which took you three months and $50,000 to create) they can’t tell you apart from the other 2,991 pitches sitting in their inbox.
Same promises. Same language. Same slides.
And more often than not, the same fundamental problem: no coherent go-to-market strategy.
The $50M mistake: when technology becomes a commodity
Walk the floor at any fintech conference (AWS Summit, Money20/20, Sibos) and you’ll see a pattern. Stunning booths showcasing groundbreaking technology. Founders who can articulate complex technical architecture in minute detail. Product demos that genuinely impress.
But scratch beneath the surface, and a common theme emerges: brilliant engineers who can’t explain why anyone should buy what they’ve built. Marketing teams producing flashy content that doesn’t connect to customer pain points. Sales teams that can’t articulate differentiation beyond “we use AI” or “we’re blockchain-based.”
As I wrote in my recent analysis of the AWS Summit ecosystem, many companies are “building exciting features that sales teams can’t explain.” Product teams operate in one reality. Marketing speaks a different language. Sales tells yet another story. And meanwhile, the customer (or the investor) sits there confused about what problem you actually solve and for whom.
This fragmentation isn’t just inefficient. It’s fatal.
Two scenarios, same problem
Let’s look at where this plays out most painfully:
Scenario 1: the investor pitch
You’ve secured a meeting with a Series A firm. You have 45 minutes. Your deck is polished. You’re confident.
You launch into your pitch. Slide 3 covers your revolutionary technology. Slide 5 shows a massive TAM—$800 billion market opportunity! Slide 7 has beautiful UI screenshots. Slide 9 talks about your “AI-powered, blockchain-enabled, cloud-native platform.”
The partner across the table is looking at their phone.
Why? Because they’ve seen this pitch six times this week. Different founders. Different technologies. Identical structure. And crucially, the same missing pieces:
Who is your customer, specifically? “Financial institutions” isn’t an answer. Is it community banks struggling with legacy core systems? Is it challenger banks needing better fraud detection? Is it payment processors seeking faster settlement? Each of these has different buying processes, different pain points, different success metrics.
What is the actual problem you solve? “We make payments faster” isn’t differentiation when 47 other companies in the investor’s pipeline make the same claim. What specific pain—measured in dollars, time, or risk—do you eliminate? For whom? In what context?
How do you actually go to market? Your deck says “sales-led with strategic partnerships.” That’s not a strategy. That’s three words that could mean anything. Do you have a defined ICP? Do you know your customer acquisition cost? Your sales cycle length? Your close rate?
What’s your competitive position? Pretending you have no competition destroys credibility. But more importantly, if you can’t articulate why customers choose you over alternatives, you don’t understand your own value proposition.
The median fintech deal size increased to $4 million in 2024, up 33% year-over-year. But this isn’t good news for everyone—it means investors are concentrating capital on fewer, higher-quality opportunities. They’re demanding proof that you understand not just your technology, but your market. As industry analysts note, companies must prove they can differentiate themselves in a crowded market, with founders demonstrating clear strategy, vision, and credibility to execute, even at early stages considering paths to profitability.
Scenario 2: the customer sales cycle
Now let’s look at the other side: selling to actual customers.
Your BDR books a discovery call with a Director of Payments at a regional bank. Great. Opportunity in the pipeline. The AE takes the call.
The conversation goes like this:
AE: “We’ve built an innovative platform that transforms payment operations through advanced technology.”
Prospect: “Interesting. What specifically do you do?”
AE: “We leverage machine learning and real-time data processing to optimise transaction flows across multiple payment rails.”
Prospect: “Okay, but what problem does that solve for us?”
AE: (pivots to demo) “Let me show you our dashboard…”
This call is going nowhere. Here’s why: the AE is selling features, not outcomes. They’re describing technology, not solving problems. And critically, they’re doing it because there’s no GTM playbook telling them what this bank actually needs.
The marketing team positioned the company as “transforming payments.” The product team built features for enterprise banks. The sales team is targeting mid-market regional banks. Nobody can agree on the primary use case. The pricing model was built for one segment but is being used for another. The implementation team expects a 6-month onboarding process, but sales promised 6 weeks.
This isn’t coordination failure. This is the predictable outcome of launching without GTM fundamentals.
The eight missing pieces
Let’s be specific about what’s absent. These aren’t nice-to-have elements. They’re the infrastructure that separates funded companies from unfunded ones, and successful GTM from stalled pipelines.
1. Lack of a clear ICP
“Financial services companies” is not an ICP. Neither is “banks and credit unions.” An ICP defines:
- Company size (by revenue, employee count, transaction volume)
- Technology environment (legacy core banking systems vs. modern stack)
- Regulatory context (Fed member banks vs. state-chartered vs. fintech charters)
- Pain severity (processing 10,000 transactions daily with 2% failure rate vs. 100,000 with 0.1%)
- Buying process (technical evaluation followed by exec approval vs. consortium buying)
- Success metrics (cost reduction vs. revenue enablement vs. risk reduction)
Without this specificity, your entire GTM becomes a guessing game. Marketing creates content for enterprises, sales pursues mid-market, product builds for startups. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. Nobody closes deals.
2. No real value proposition
Your value proposition isn’t “faster payments” or “better security” or “lower costs.” Those are table stakes. Your value proposition is the specific, measurable outcome you drive for your specific ICP.
For example:
- “We reduce failed ACH transactions by 60% for regional banks processing 50,000+ monthly transactions, recovering an average of $2.4M in annual revenue whilst reducing operational costs by $800K.”
Notice what’s different: specific customer, specific problem, specific outcome, specific value. This isn’t marketing copy. This is a business case. And more importantly, it’s the foundation of every conversation your sales team has.
As I’ve written previously about cautious B2B buyers, they’re not looking to be convinced—they’re looking to feel safe. When buying cycles lengthen, every interaction becomes a signal. Every inconsistency raises a question. Your value proposition must reduce risk, not amplify claims.
3. Product-market fit (or lack thereof)
Here’s the brutal question: are you building what the market wants, or what you think the market should want?
Product-market fit in fintech isn’t “customers like our product.” It’s:
- Customers seek you out without outbound effort
- Sales cycles shorten because buyers already understand the value
- Competition becomes irrelevant because you own a specific use case
- Pricing conversations focus on terms, not justification
- Reference customers actively promote you
Most fintech founders confuse early traction with PMF. You’ve got 15 paying customers. Great. But they all required custom implementations. They’re all using different features. None of them match your target profile. And your expansion revenue is flat.
That’s not product-market fit. That’s survival mode disguised as growth.
4. A clear price
Fintech pricing is notoriously complex because it tries to be everything to everyone. Basis points on transaction volume! Per-user licensing! Platform fees! Transaction fees! Implementation fees!
This complexity masks a fundamental problem: you don’t know what you’re selling.
The best pricing models are almost boring in their simplicity:
- Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction
- Plaid: Tiered monthly based on connections
- Ramp: Free (monetises on interchange)
Each of these companies understands their economic model intimately. They know their CAC. They know their LTV. They know their unit economics. They know how pricing connects to value delivery.
Your pricing should be a strategic tool, not an afterthought. It signals positioning. It qualifies buyers. It enables forecasting. When your pricing is “let’s jump on a call to discuss,” you’re announcing to the market that you don’t understand your own economics.
5. A clear offer
What exactly are customers buying? Is it software? Is it a service? Is it transformation consulting with software enabling it?
This matters enormously. A software sale has a 3-month sales cycle and a $50K ACV. A transformation project has an 18-month cycle and a $2M price tag. Your org structure, your sales comp, your customer success motion—all of it hinges on what you’re actually selling.
Most fintech companies muddy this by trying to sell both. The enterprise customer wants transformation consulting. The mid-market customer wants self-serve software. You built something in between and satisfy neither.
Pick one. Build the GTM motion for that one. Scale it. Then (maybe) expand to the second motion with a different product line, different team, different economics.
6. Lack of a sales plan
“Sales-led with partnerships” isn’t a sales plan. A sales plan defines:
- Sales stages with clear entry and exit criteria
- Required sales roles and when to hire them
- Lead sources and expected conversion rates by source
- Average sales cycle length by customer segment
- Typical deal size by segment and use case
- Win/loss patterns and competitive dynamics
- Revenue targets by quarter with assumptions documented
Most fintech companies skip this and jump straight to hiring AEs. Six months later, the AEs haven’t closed anything, and the CEO is confused about why “sales isn’t working.”
Sales works when there’s a repeatable motion built on clear GTM strategy. Sales fails when founders expect AEs to figure out product-market fit through trial and error.
7. Weak marketing and positioning
I see this constantly: fintech companies with impressive technology and terrible positioning. Their website says they “empower businesses with innovative solutions.” Their deck mentions “AI-driven insights.” Their sales collateral lists 47 features.
None of this positions the company.
Positioning answers: For [specific customer], who [has this specific problem], our [category] delivers [specific outcome] unlike [alternative approach].
Example: “For mid-market payment processors handling cross-border transactions, who lose 3-5% of revenue to failed payments and compliance issues, our intelligent payment routing platform reduces failure rates below 0.5% whilst automating regulatory compliance—unlike legacy processors that treat routing as a static rules engine.”
That’s positioning. It’s specific. It’s defensible. It creates a category. And importantly, it gives your entire GTM organisation a consistent story to tell.
Yet marketing teams produce content about “digital transformation” and “innovation” because the executive team never defined positioning. So marketing does what marketing does: create activity without strategy.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, when go-to-market clarity breaks down, growth stops being an operational problem and becomes a political one. Without clear positioning, every function tells a different story about why growth is stalling—each backed by data, each plausible, each pointing to a different solution. This is the moment GTM stops being a system and starts becoming a negotiation.
8. Lack of brand positioning and framing
Here’s what most fintech founders miss: your brand isn’t your logo or your colour scheme. Your brand is the mental shortcut customers use to understand what you do and whether you’re relevant to them.
When someone says “Stripe,” you think: “Payments infrastructure for internet businesses.” When someone says “Plaid,” you think: “Financial data connectivity.” When someone says “Ramp,” you think: “Corporate cards with built-in spend management.”
What do people think when they hear your name? If the answer is “I’m not sure” or “innovative fintech solution,” you don’t have brand positioning.
Brand positioning defines:
- Category: What box do you fit in? (Don’t say “we’re creating a new category” unless you have $50M to spend on market education)
- Frame of reference: What do you replace or improve upon?
- Point of difference: What’s your defensible unique position?
- Permission to play: Why should anyone take you seriously?
Without this, every piece of marketing content pulls in different directions. Your website says one thing. Your sales team says another. Your product demonstrates something else entirely. Customers experience this as friction. Investors experience it as risk. Both walk away.
The compounding effect: how weak GTM destroys value
These eight gaps don’t exist in isolation. They compound.
Without a clear ICP, you can’t develop a strong value proposition. Without a value proposition, pricing becomes arbitrary. Without clear pricing, your offer becomes muddled. Without a clear offer, sales can’t build a repeatable process. Without a sales process, marketing creates content in a vacuum. Without aligned marketing, brand positioning fragments. Without brand positioning, customers can’t understand what you do.
This is why brilliant fintech companies with genuinely innovative technology end up in the “startup cemetery.” The technology works. The market exists. But the GTM never cohered into a system.
And make no mistake: investors see this immediately. Experienced VCs spend approximately three minutes reading pitch decks before deciding whether to progress further. In those three minutes, they’re not evaluating your technology. They’re evaluating whether you understand how to bring that technology to market.
The presence or absence of GTM fundamentals is visible in seconds:
- Do you have a defensible ICP or are you “targeting financial services”?
- Can you articulate value in customer outcomes or are you listing features?
- Is your pricing a strategic choice or a placeholder?
- Does your competitive positioning reveal market understanding or naivety?
The market reality: why this matters more now
The fintech funding environment has fundamentally shifted. One in twelve VC dollars went to fintech companies in 2024, down from one in five in 2021. Deal volume is down. The most active 100 US fintech investors closed less than one deal per month in 2024, compared to more than two per month in 2021.
This isn’t temporary. This is the new baseline.
Investors are favouring robust and sustainable business models over growth-at-all-costs plays. They want to see PMF before scale. They want unit economics before expansion. They want GTM clarity before market blitzing.
Meanwhile, on the customer side, buying behaviour has shifted. As I’ve analysed in my recent work on trust-based GTM, cautious buyers behave differently even when they believe in the solution. They involve more stakeholders. They scrutinise claims more closely. They look for evidence over enthusiasm. Most importantly, they look for coherence.
When buyers notice misalignment—gaps between what marketing promised and what sales delivers, disconnects between the product narrative and lived experience—hesitation creeps in. This isn’t indecision. It’s due diligence. And in this environment, misaligned GTM isn’t just an internal efficiency problem. It’s an external trust problem.
The practical reality: what happens next
So you’re reading this and recognising your company. What now?
First, understand that fixing GTM isn’t a marketing project. It’s not a sales enablement initiative. It’s a strategic business decision that requires executive ownership.
As I’ve written before, when your leadership team can’t agree on how growth actually happens, GTM becomes political. Different functions tell different stories about why growth is stalling. Sales blames pipeline conversion. Marketing blames sales follow-up. Product blames competitive positioning. Each story is plausible. Each is supported by data. Each points to a different solution.
This is the moment GTM stops being a system and starts becoming a negotiation. Alignment meetings become survival exercises. Leaders begin second-guessing motives rather than assumptions. Trust erodes.
The fix starts with a single question: What do we actually believe about how growth happens here?
Not what you report. Not what you hope. Not what each function needs to protect its budget. What you genuinely believe, based on evidence, about:
- Who buys from us and why
- What problem we solve and for whom
- How buyers make decisions in our market
- What differentiates us defensibly
- How we capture and communicate value
Until leadership alignment exists on these fundamentals, no amount of sales training, marketing spend, or product development will fix the underlying issue.
The engineering approach: treating GTM as a system
At Digital Clarity, we approach this systematically—because that’s what engineering requires. We call ourselves “GTM engineers” rather than consultants because GTM needs to be built and optimised the same way you’d approach any complex system.
Our diagnostic process begins with brutal honesty about current state:
- Can your executives articulate the same ICP without looking at a deck?
- Does sales describe value the same way marketing does?
- Can product teams explain customer problems in customer language?
- Do your numbers tell a coherent story about PMF?
Most companies fail 3 out of 4 of these tests. That’s not a people problem. That’s a systems problem.
From there, we work backward from commercial reality:
- Who has the most acute pain for what you’ve built?
- What’s the economic value of solving that pain?
- How do those buyers make decisions?
- What proof do they need at each decision stage?
- What does your business model require to work?
This isn’t abstract strategy work. It’s practical, operational, and measurable. We’re developing frameworks that companies can execute themselves—including our Digital Clarity Intelligence Engine (DCIE), which is designed to help B2B tech companies build GTM strategies grounded in data rather than assumptions.
The companies that get this right don’t just close funding rounds. They build predictable revenue engines. They shorten sales cycles. They expand efficiently. They defend margin. They become strategic rather than tactical.
The companies that don’t get it right keep iterating on pitch decks, wondering why investors aren’t responding. They keep hiring salespeople, wondering why quota attainment is low. They keep producing marketing content, wondering why pipeline isn’t growing.
The bottom line
Your fintech technology might be genuinely revolutionary. Your team might be exceptionally talented. Your market opportunity might be massive.
None of that matters if you can’t articulate who you serve, what problem you solve, how you’re different, and why anyone should care.
This isn’t about having perfect answers. It’s about having coherent answers that your entire organisation can execute against consistently.
Because here’s what investors understand and founders often miss: technology is abundant. Markets are crowded. Capital is scarce. The companies that win aren’t the ones with the best technology. They’re the ones with the clearest path from innovation to revenue.
That path is called go-to-market strategy. And if you don’t have one, you don’t have a business—you have an expensive science project with a great pitch deck that nobody reads past slide 3.
Want to fix this? Start by answering one question honestly: Can your leadership team articulate the same strategy without looking at a deck? If not, you don’t have a GTM problem—you have an alignment problem. And that’s where the real work begins.
Digital Clarity works with B2B tech companies and fintechs to build go-to-market strategies that actually work—not consultant presentations that sit in a drawer, but operational systems that drive predictable growth. If you’re tired of investor meetings that go nowhere and sales cycles that never close, let’s talk about what coherent GTM actually looks like.
