One GTM plan, worked through

ExampleCo has built a workspace for B2B software vendors answering enterprise customers' security questionnaires. Sales teams assemble answers from old documents; a security owner checks the evidence before anything leaves the company. ExampleCo's product keeps approved answers, their source documents and the review trail together.

The GTM decision is specific: can ExampleCo sell this workflow to a repeatable set of buyers at a price that covers acquisition, implementation and ongoing delivery? Signing a few customers answers only part of that question.

Job: get an accurate, approved response back to a prospective enterprise customer without repeatedly hunting for evidence. The current alternative is a mix of spreadsheets, shared documents and messages to the security team.

Initial ICP: a B2B software vendor with roughly 100–500 employees, at least 120 security reviews a year, an identifiable security approver and a sales team that encounters these reviews repeatedly. A company with only occasional reviews, no maintained evidence or a required certification ExampleCo cannot provide is outside this first segment.

The assumed champion is a sales engineer; the security lead approves answers; a revenue executive owns the budget. Procurement or legal may also have a say. ExampleCo must learn who actually holds these roles in each account instead of treating the user as the buyer and payer.

ExampleCo positions itself against the buyer's existing spreadsheet-and-document workflow: approved security answers with traceable evidence, ready for the next review. It does not claim to be the fastest answer generator. Its proof is a pilot in which the security owner can inspect the source, correct the answer and approve the final response.

The initial offer is a $24,000 annual subscription. ExampleCo proposes a two-week pilot using three recent questionnaires and limits its own pilot support to four hours per account. The cap protects service capacity, but may deter buyers who need a longer implementation; those lost opportunities belong in the learning record.

ExampleCo starts with sales-assisted outreach to named accounts. A sales engineer shows the workflow, the security owner tests answer quality, and the budget owner sees the price and capacity case. This is a testable motion choice for this segment, not a rule that every security product needs sales assistance.

For one fictional quarter, the path is 100 eligible accounts contacted → 20 discovery calls → 10 pilots → 5 signed annual contracts. These counts describe this imagined cohort; they are not forecast conversion rates. ExampleCo keeps the original 100-account denominator, records nonbuyers and failed pilots, and checks which buyer or approval step blocked each deal.

Ten pilots at four ExampleCo staff hours each use 40 hours. Five onboardings at eight hours each use another 40. With 100 staff hours available for both tasks that quarter, the plan has 20 hours of headroom. If pilot support doubles to eight hours per pilot, demand rises to 120 hours and the motion fails its capacity constraint even before its costs are recalculated.

ExampleCo defines activation as the first evidence-linked answer that the buyer's security owner approves and the sales team can use. A login or a draft answer does not count. The pilot records time and staff effort to that accepted outcome, corrections, and any answer that cannot be approved. Every external answer still requires the buyer's authorized review.

After purchase, ExampleCo measures repeat approved use at 30, 60 and 90 days, review delays, support hours and whether the account keeps sending new questionnaires through the workspace. Renewal and retained contribution come later. Five new contracts and early use cannot prove annual retention or product-market fit.

Assume the quarter's fully loaded acquisition work, including outreach, demos and pilot support, costs $48,000. Matched to its five new customers, CAC is $9,600 per customer. Each annual contract is $24,000; direct delivery costs $6,000 in year one; onboarding costs another $1,200 per customer. Onboarding is shown separately so it is not silently counted twice in CAC.

The five-customer cohort contributes 5 × $7,200 = $36,000 in year one before company-wide fixed overhead. Under an illustrative assumption that the $18,000 annual revenue left after direct delivery arrives as $1,500 of contribution each month, recovering $9,600 of CAC plus $1,200 of onboarding takes $10,800 ÷ $1,500 = 7.2 months of contribution payback. Actual cash payback depends on invoice and collection timing; renewal value is still unknown.

The second row tests a 20% price cut; the third adds higher acquisition cost. Both hold annual direct delivery at $6,000 and onboarding at $1,200. A discount might improve conversion, but the example has no comparison that identifies that effect. The combined downside loses $3,000 before fixed overhead in the first contract year, so ExampleCo does not apply a blanket discount on this evidence.

Days 1–30: Interview 12 eligible buyers and nonbuyers, verify questionnaire volume, approval roles, current staff time and alternatives. Days 31–90: Run the bounded named-account test, record every eligible account and pilot outcome, and reconcile costs with the finance ledger. At day 90, review the decision above; watch retained use and eventual renewals before treating growth as repeatable.

Its arithmetic shows how a proposed segment, offer and motion interact under stated assumptions. A real team would need complete buyer and nonbuyer records, verified costs, accepted outcomes, payment timing and mature cohorts to decide whether the plan travels beyond the first quarter. The GTM World Model sets out those evidence and decision limits in detail.