Go-To-Market Intelligence

Somebody selling to your buyer has already spent money answering the question you are about to spend money answering.

Our job is to find those people and get them on a call with you. Former VPs of Marketing, CMOs, Heads of Growth and demand-generation leads at competitors and comparable companies. These are people who held the budget, watched a channel fail, and had to explain it to a board. Alongside them we interview buyers directly, including the ones who chose a competitor and the ones who chose nobody, on where they actually were when they decided to buy.

What comes back is a ranked read on which channels reach your buyer and which cannot, with the reasoning attached to each one. That includes the channel your board is enthusiastic about, if the operators say it will not work. Nine of these engagements are written up in full on this site, so you can see the shape of the output before committing to anything.

03.1Search demand is the whole question for Google

Across the nine, paid search won outright twice, lost outright four times, and produced a thin secondary stream in the other three. Both wins came from categories buyers already searched for by name: storage software, a specific skill to learn. Every loss came from a category that did not yet exist in the buyer's head. Budget and creative did not change that in a single case.

03.2Paid social splits on whether the buyer is at work

It carried the consumer engagements, where discovery happens by scrolling. It lost every considered B2B purchase we tested it on: back-office software, enterprise hardware, high-value payments. Fleet safety managers do not buy a wearable device from an Instagram ad.

03.3Outbound is the default answer for a nameable buyer

Where the buyer set was small enough to list, outbound won or shared the win. That covers seven of the nine, including the retail and partner side of two consumer businesses whose customer-facing channel was something else entirely. It is unfashionable and it keeps working, because a defined list is the one asset paid channels cannot replicate.

03.4The second channel usually makes the first one affordable

Referral and partnerships rarely won on their own. They repeatedly turned a working but expensive channel into a cheap one, which is a different and less celebrated kind of win.

03.5The bar you measure against decides the answer

Every study measured to something the client could not fake: a published guide, an activated trial, a launched campaign, a booked pilot, a completed transaction. Sign-ups and clicks would have ranked the channels differently, and wrongly, in most of them.

• +Former VPs of Marketing and CMOs at direct competitors, past the six-month cooling-off window
• +Heads of Growth at comparable companies selling to the same buyer at a similar price point
• +Demand-generation and performance leads who personally held the channel budget
• +Buyers in your target segment, including the ones who chose a competitor and the ones who chose nobody
• +Agency and fractional operators holding comparable data across several accounts

Employment history is verified before an operator is proposed to you, and you approve every profile before a call is scheduled. Experts are at least six months removed from any company they are asked to discuss, no material non-public information may be requested or shared, calls are monitored, and the audit trail is kept for seven years under the FieldSignal compliance framework. What you get is pattern recognition from people who ran the motion, never a sitting insider handing over a live plan.

01Who exactly do you interview?

Former VPs of Marketing, CMOs, Heads of Growth, demand-generation leads and first marketing hires at companies competing with you or selling to the same buyer at a similar price point. We also interview buyers directly, including the ones who bought from a competitor, and agency operators who hold comparable data across several accounts.

02Are these people currently working at my competitors?

No. Every expert must be at least six months removed from any company they are asked to discuss, measured from their last day of employment, board service or active advisory work. You get pattern recognition from operators who ran the motion, not a sitting insider handing over a live plan. The rule costs less than it sounds: acquisition economics and channel dynamics move far more slowly than quarterly plans do.

03Is it legal to ask a competitor's former growth lead how they grew?

Yes, inside the same framework that governs every FieldSignal call. Experts are six months or more removed from the companies they discuss, no material non-public information may be requested or shared, calls are monitored, and the audit trail is retained for seven years. Out of scope: any current confidential plan, unannounced launch or unreleased figure. If a call drifts toward one, we end it.

04How is this different from hiring a growth agency?

An agency is paid to run a channel, which makes it a poor source of advice on whether that channel should be run at all. We do not sell media, take commission or manage spend. The deliverable is research, and it regularly includes the finding that a channel you were about to fund will not work.

05How is it different from a benchmark report I could buy?

Published benchmarks average across companies that share nothing but a category label, so everyone reading one assumes they sit on the good side of the median. Our numbers come from a screened set of operators matched on buyer, price point and motion, and we publish the sample size next to every range, including when it is twelve rather than fifty.

06What if the research says none of our channels will work?

We deliver it. In practice that result usually means the buyer definition or the positioning is wrong rather than the channels, and the honest next step is the ICP work rather than a second round of the same tests.

07How fast does this move?

First operator calls are typically scheduled within three to five business days of the brief. A single channel teardown runs two to four weeks. A full channel discovery programme has run five to eight weeks across the studies we have published.

08Do we have to be a certain size?

No. The smallest engagement here is a handful of operator calls, and there is no annual minimum, no retainer and no platform fee. FieldSignal exists because the traditional expert networks price this kind of research out of reach for anyone below a certain size.