When the Buck Stops With You: How to Lead GTM Through Uncertainty

Markets are shifting. Budgets are tight. Here’s how to lead with clarity, urgency, and trust when the old playbook might not apply.

Budgets are tightening. Sales cycles are stretching. Buyer priorities are shifting with every new headline. And new data I read earlier this week confirmed what many of us already feel: GTM leaders are increasingly worried about hitting their numbers this year.

But the pressure to perform hasn’t gone away. And the tools to predict success are murkier than ever.

Leading a GTM team in this environment is a bit of a high-wire act. You’re expected to make big bets with partial information. To hit targets even as the ground underneath you moves. To keep your team focused and confident when, deep down, you’re navigating the same uncertainty they are.

But here’s the thing: You’ve led through chaos before. COVID shut the world down overnight, and you kept your team successfully moving forward. The entire GTM playbook was thrown out the window overnight. Literally. What worked yesterday wasn’t going to work today. But we did it. We adapted, aligned our teams, made quick decisions (with imperfect information), and kept moving forward. And honestly, this moment isn’t too different.

Leadership Requires Adaptability

When the future is uncertain, rigid plans become liabilities.

The best leaders don’t cling to the original script. They set a clear direction but stay flexible enough to adjust when reality demands it.

During COVID, the GTM leaders who survived—and even grew—weren’t the ones with the best annual plans. They weren’t even those that hit their numbers. They were the ones who reforecast every 30 days, reimagined events overnight, and pivoted messaging to meet buyers where they were emotionally and economically.

Today’s volatility demands the same mindset:

• Set shorter planning horizons. Build rolling 90-day plans with monthly checkpoints. Focus on what's right in front of you, and give yourself permission to update direction as new information comes in. Shorter cycles create momentum without locking you into outdated assumptions. You’ll also realize quick wins (or fast fails), learn, and keep moving.

• Test assumptions faster. Move from heavy, slow decision-making to lightweight testing. Launch pilots, run quick experiments, and validate messaging shifts. The faster you spot what’s resonating (or not), the faster you can adapt with confidence.

• Give your team permission to adapt without fear of “being wrong.” Create a culture where adjusting course isn’t seen as failure, it’s seen as leadership. Celebrate teams that call out early when something isn’t working, and empower them to recommend and make changes.

Adaptability isn’t weakness. It’s what keeps things moving in the right direction.

Leadership Requires Alignment

Adaptability matters. Decisiveness matters. But without alignment, even the best decisions can pull teams apart.

When markets shift and customer behavior changes, your entire GTM organization needs to move together, not marketing in one direction, sales in another, and product in yet another.

The best GTM leaders aren’t just making faster decisions. They’re leaning into their peers and alignment. They’re pulling their teams into tighter, faster alignment cycles around:

• What customers are signaling. Make sure every team—marketing, sales, product, CS—is feeding real customer data into decision-making. Patterns matter more than anecdotes.

• How priorities are shifting. Align cross-functionally on what’s still critical, what’s been downgraded, and what needs immediate focus. Shared priorities prevent drift and wasted energy.

• Where resources need to flex to meet the market. Real alignment shows up in how time, money, and people are allocated. Great leaders move resources to meet reality, not legacy plans.

During COVID, I was working in private equity on the ops team responsible for GTM optimization and growth across a portfolio of B2B tech and tech-enabled services companies. From that vantage point, I had a front row seat to how GTM leaders navigated extreme uncertainty across different industries, teams, and growth stages.

The companies that performed the best didn’t just pivot. They realigned across functions weekly. They overcommunicated priorities. They kept teams anchored to what mattered most, even as everything around them shifted.

Today, GTM leadership means having the discipline to stop, align, and then sprint. Because in uncertainty, speed without alignment doesn’t get you to the finish line faster. It gets you lost.

Leadership Requires Decisiveness

Indecision is the real killer in uncertain markets. Not mistakes. Not wrong turns. Waiting too long to move is what slows teams down and erodes trust. One of the hardest lessons I learned leading through COVID was that no decision is still a decision.

When you lead GTM, you’ll often have to make calls with 70% of the information you wish you had. That’s not reckless. That’s reality.

Strong leaders:

• Make the best call they can with what they know today. Gather enough insights, make the best call, and clearly communicate the “why” behind it. Your team craves direction more than perfect accuracy.

• Set clear checkpoints to assess and adjust. Every major move should have a natural check-in point—30, 60, 90 days—to evaluate results objectively and pivot if needed.

• Model forward momentum, not perfect clarity. Your team needs to see you moving forward confidently, even when the full picture isn’t available. Momentum breeds trust.

When to Pivot Immediately vs. Wait for a Checkpoint

Making smart bets doesn’t mean stubbornly riding them into the ground. That would be a mistake and a failure of leadership.

There are two kinds of feedback:

• Expected turbulence: Normal bumps that come with trying something new. These deserve a checkpoint. Give them time to stabilize before adjusting course.

• Clear signal something’s broken: Major buyer resistance, operational bottlenecks, messaging that flat-out doesn’t land. When you see these signs, act immediately.

If you feel the difference between “it’s early” and “this fundamentally isn’t working,” trust it. And train your team to surface critical signals early, so you can move when the market demands it.

Leadership Requires Resilience

The leaders your team remembers aren’t the ones who had the best pitch decks. They’re the ones who kept their heads when everything felt like it was falling apart.

Leading GTM through uncertainty means you will get punched in the mouth at some point. A deal will fall through. A campaign will flop. A competitor will surprise you.

Real leadership is about what happens after that:

• Keeping the team focused on what they can control. Help them zoom in on customer conversations, deals they can influence, and immediate next steps. Action reduces fear.

• Managing energy, not just output.
  Burnout kills momentum. Protect your team’s ability to sustain effort over time. Encourage collaboration and short-term sprints, not constant hustle.

• Normalizing small failures as part of the path forward.
  Treat mistakes as data. Debrief quickly, extract the learning, and reset without drama.

• Celebrate the wins. Even if they are incredibly small. Celebrate the positive movement, signals, all all the goodness coming from your team.

What Your Team Needs From You Right Now

When the world outside feels unpredictable, your team looks inward for stability, for direction, for trust.

They need more than just a tactical plan or a weekly update. They need:

• A steady voice. Calm, consistent communication that reassures them, even when outcomes aren't guaranteed.

• An unwavering commitment to the mission. If you believe in the path forward—even if it's rocky—they will too.

• Understanding. Space for empathy without lowering the bar for excellence.

• Trust. Not micromanagement. Not fear. Trust your team to adapt, solve problems, and surface insights that help you lead better.

• Be the leader they need you to be. Know the difference between wearing rose-colored glasses and being brutally honest. Your team needs you to be the voice of reason, keep them engaged, and feeling like what they are doing is making a difference.

In times like these, leadership is emotional before it’s strategic. The way you show up matters as much as what you decide. Set the tone your team can rally behind—and they’ll carry the mission with you, even when the road gets harder.

Lead the Way You Want Others to Follow

You don’t need to have all the answers.

You do need to:

• Stay flexible.

• Align your team early and often.

• Make smart, timely decisions.

• Model the resilience you want your team to embody.

• Communicate with clarity and empathy.

Because when the buck stops with you, leadership isn’t about having perfect answers. It’s about giving your team the clarity, confidence, and trust to keep moving forward, especially when the path ahead is anything but clear.

Before your next leadership meeting, take five minutes to pressure-test your alignment:

• Is your team anchored to the same customer signals and market shifts you’re seeing?

• Is everyone clear on what matters most this quarter, this month, this week?

• Where could small misalignments today create big problems tomorrow?

Great teams don’t outrun uncertainty. They stay aligned through it. That’s what separates good leaders from great ones.

What’s been the hardest leadership call you’ve had to make recently? I’d love to hear. And as always, if you need a sounding board as you navigate uncertainty, you know where to find me.

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