A few years ago, I had an email exchange with a founder that I still think about.
He had a product with real potential, a growing sense that something was off, and a very specific idea of what he wanted help with. He didn’t want to “talk to people,” he said. He wanted “sales and marketing experiments.” He wanted execution. He wanted to move.
I couldn’t take the project. The fit wasn’t right, and to be honest, I was worried.
A year later he emailed back. He’d hired an agency. They ran click-testing experiments. At the end of it, he wrote: “Working with an agency turned out to be a nightmare. We spent a lot of money and time. I think the experiment was mis-specified.” The agency gave him a refund, and they put the product on the backburner.
This story plays out more often than it should. Not because execution-focused firms are bad at what they do, but because founders hire them when what they actually have is a strategy problem. The execution is fine. The foundation underneath it isn’t.
If your SaaS is stagnant right now, the most important question you can ask before hiring anyone isn’t “who has the best case studies?” It’s: “do I know why I’m stagnant, and do I know which type of help I actually need?”
This post is designed to help you answer both.
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What “stagnant” actually means (and what it doesn’t)
Before we get into consultants, let’s be honest about what stagnation looks like. It’s rarely just “growth slowed down.” More often it looks like one of these:
- MRR is flat or creeping upward, but it feels like you’re running on a treadmill
- Churn looks fine, but new customers aren’t sticking around long enough to offset what you’re losing
- Activation rates are weak and you can’t figure out why
- Net revenue retention at 12 months is under 80%, which means expansion isn’t covering losses
- You’ve tried a bunch of tactics: a new channel, a redesigned onboarding flow, a price increase — and nothing seems to move the needle meaningfully
Here’s the thing: not all of these are GTM problems. Some are product problems. Some are pricing problems. Some are operational problems. And some are genuinely GTM: the wrong ICP, weak positioning, a broken acquisition motion, a channel strategy that made sense two years ago and doesn’t anymore.
Hiring a go-to-market consultant before you know which category you’re in is expensive. And it’s the most common mistake I see.
The single most important distinction: strategic vs. execution
Before anything else, you need to understand the difference between strategic and execution-focused help.
Strategic help is about figuring out what to do and why. It diagnoses the problem, defines the direction, and builds the plan. It requires research: talking to customers, analyzing cohorts, understanding why people buy, why they churn, and what the market actually values. Strategic help is appropriate when you don’t yet know which lever to pull.
Execution-focused help is about doing the thing at scale. Running campaigns, building RevOps systems, managing paid channels, operating a content engine. It’s appropriate when you’ve already diagnosed the problem and need horsepower to execute the solution.
The founder in that story above needed strategic help. He needed someone to help him understand why things weren’t working before investing in making them go faster. Instead, he hired execution. And the result was a well-run experiment pointed in the wrong direction.
Most consultancies lean clearly toward one or the other. Some do both. The critical thing is knowing which one you need before you get on a discovery call.
One note on DemandMaven: we sit in both camps, but the strategic work always comes first. We’re not full-stack (we don’t do everything), but we are full-range. If we’re running execution work with a client, it’s because we’ve already done the strategic work to know exactly what we’re executing toward.
The five types of GTM help
Once you understand whether you need strategy or execution, the next question is: which of the five GTM lanes does your problem actually live in?
1. Positioning
What a positioning problem looks like: Deals are slow to close. Prospects say “I need to think about it” without a clear objection. You’re losing to newer competitors despite having a better or more mature product. The messaging on your website has been rewritten three times and still doesn’t feel right.
Positioning is about helping the market understand why you’re different, who you’re for, and why that matters. It’s strategic almost by definition: no amount of execution will fix a positioning problem.
At DemandMaven, positioning work is almost always part of a broader GTM engagement: we don’t do positioning in isolation, but because we run customer research as a foundation, we arrive at positioning insights as a byproduct of understanding who the best customer actually is and why they buy. If you need positioning work alongside market research, ICP definition, or pricing, that’s where we fit. If you need a dedicated positioning engagement on its own, the specialists below are the right call.
April Dunford is the best-known positioning expert in the SaaS and software space, and for good reason. Her positioning workshops are strategy-only: you come out with a positioning foundation you can actually use, not a deliverable that sits in a Google doc. She’s a friend, and I’ve had the chance to see her work up close. It’s excellent.
FletchPMM (Anthony Pierri and Rob Kaminski) are great for earlier-stage companies that need positioning work done without a big-firm budget. They specialize in translating positioning into homepage clarity, which is often exactly where positioning breaks down first. I know them well and they’re the right call for founders who know their positioning is off but can’t afford a full engagement elsewhere.
PitchKitchen runs 90-day messaging sprints focused on getting positioning off the whiteboard and into the sales team’s hands. Useful when the problem is a messaging crisis rather than a foundational positioning rebuild.
2. Market research and market strategy
What this problem looks like: You have multiple customer segments pulling you in different directions and no clear conviction about which to prioritize. Your ICP exists on paper but doesn’t guide real decisions. You’re not sure what your actual best customer values most, or why they bought in the first place. GTM feels directionless because the foundation of who you’re for hasn’t been properly established.
This is one of DemandMaven’s primary lanes. We run customer research (Jobs to Be Done interviews, customer discovery, competitive intelligence, win-loss analysis, MaxDiff surveys, price sensitivity analysis) to figure out who the best customer actually is, what they value, what they’re willing to pay for, and what’s keeping others from converting or staying. That research then informs everything: positioning, product roadmap, channel strategy, pricing.
Forget The Funnel (Claire Suellentrop and Gia Laudi) also lives here. They’re strong on customer-led growth strategy and product marketing: understanding what customers actually value and translating that into growth motions. Their focus is more B2B SaaS marketing strategy; ours is broader across the GTM picture.
3. Product strategy
What this problem looks like: You’re shipping features but retention isn’t improving. Customers activate and then drift. The jobs your product was designed to solve may have shifted as your customer base has evolved. Or you’ve accumulated a roadmap full of quality-of-life improvements and not enough of the features that actually keep people around.
I’ve written about the quality-of-life improvement trap before: it’s one of the most common ways SaaS product teams accidentally undermine their own retention. The fix usually starts with understanding what jobs customers are trying to complete, and whether the product is still solving the right ones.
This is squarely in DemandMaven’s wheelhouse. We run JTBD research specifically to uncover which jobs customers hired the product to do, which jobs have emerged since, and where the product is falling short of either. That work feeds directly into product roadmap prioritization and activation strategy. If you’re not sure whether you have a product problem or a GTM problem, that’s often the first thing we help founders sort out.
Sixteen Ventures (Lincoln Murphy) focuses on customer success, retention, and expansion. If stagnation is showing up in your NRR and you suspect the post-sale experience is the culprit, he’s worth a look.
Winning by Design goes deep on recurring revenue architecture — what they call the “Bowtie Funnel”: the idea that the post-sale customer journey is as important as pre-sale. They’re good when the problem spans product, customer success, and sales handoffs together.
4. Channel strategy and customer acquisition
What this problem looks like: Pipeline is inconsistent. CAC is rising. You’re getting traffic but it’s not converting. Your PLG motion isn’t moving people from free to paid. The channel that worked when you were smaller isn’t scaling. You’ve been running the same demand gen playbook for two years and it’s diminishing.
This is where most execution-focused firms specialize, and there’s real depth here.
DemandMaven can support channel strategy and acquisition, but we approach it differently than the agencies below. We typically work on channel strategy after (or alongside) the market research and ICP work: figuring out which channels are worth investing in based on who the best customer is and where they actually spend their time, before recommending any execution. If you’re not sure whether your channel problem is really a targeting or positioning problem in disguise, that’s a good place to start with us.
Refine Labs is built on the idea of demand creation vs. demand capture: shifting away from gated content and aggressive paid search toward building genuine category presence. They’re mid-market B2B SaaS specialists. I’ve worked alongside them on a mutual client engagement and was genuinely impressed with their process and rigor.
Kalungi runs a fractional CMO model: they pair you with a senior fractional CMO who scopes the work and leads a full-stack marketing execution team. It’s great for founders who need execution speed and senior marketing leadership at the same time. I’ve also worked alongside them and was impressed. The important caveat: Kalungi is most effective when you already know your ICP. If you don’t, the fractional CMO will spend the first few months figuring that out before they can execute well.
Directive Consulting is performance-oriented: paid acquisition, SEO, attribution, and RevOps integration. Best when the bottleneck is specifically inefficient paid spend or weak pipeline economics.
5. Pricing and monetization
What this problem looks like: You changed your pricing and churn went up. Net revenue retention is flat because there’s no meaningful expansion path. Your pricing hasn’t been revisited in years. You’ve been told to “raise your prices” but you don’t actually know how much, by how much, or what your customers would support.
I’ve written about why “raise your prices” is incomplete advice before. Pricing is one of the highest-leverage growth levers available, and it’s also one of the most mishandled. Getting it right requires research: price sensitivity surveys (we use Van Westendorp), willingness-to-pay analysis, customer interviews, and a structured experimentation process.
Pricing is another of DemandMaven’s core lanes. But there are also specialists worth knowing about.
Pace Pricing (Bill Wilson) focuses on SaaS pricing strategy with a research-first approach: understanding what value customers actually perceive and pricing to match. Good for founders who want to go deep on the methodology.
Pricing I/O (Marcos Rivera) takes a similar research-grounded approach, with experience across both B2B SaaS pricing structure and packaging. Marcos has been a resource in the SaaS pricing conversation for a while and knows his stuff.
Monevate is worth mentioning for VC-backed companies that need pricing work tied directly to monetization strategy and investor expectations.
Simon-Kucher is the enterprise-grade option here: serious depth, serious process, serious cost. Relevant for companies at $50M+ ARR where pricing complexity has grown significantly. Probably overkill for most founders reading this.
How to diagnose which lane you’re actually in
Before you book a discovery call with anyone, run through these questions:
Do I know who my best customer is? If you can’t describe them with specificity (industry, company size, role, the job they hired your product to do), you likely have a market research problem before you have anything else. Start there.
Do I know why customers churn? If the answer is “not really,” you’re missing foundational insight that every other type of GTM work depends on. Positioning work without this is guesswork. Channel work without this is expensive guesswork.
Has my positioning been validated with real buyers in the last 12 months? Not hypothetically. With actual customers, in actual interviews, testing whether your differentiation is landing. If not, positioning is suspect.
What does my revenue cohort retention look like at 12 months? If it’s under 60%, the leaky bucket is the primary problem. No amount of acquisition or channel work fixes a leaky bucket. Product strategy and pricing need attention first.
Has your pricing changed in the last two years? If not, it’s worth investigating whether you’re leaving money on the table or whether your current structure creates churn by misaligning price with the value customers actually receive.
The answers to these questions will tell you which lane your stagnation lives in, which type of consultant you need, and whether you need strategic help before you need execution help.
Red flags when evaluating consultants
A few things to watch out for when you’re talking to potential partners:
Execution-first proposals before any diagnosis. If someone jumps straight to “here’s our process for running campaigns / building your RevOps stack / managing your paid channels” before asking what’s actually broken, that’s a flag. Any good strategic consultant will want to understand the problem before proposing a solution.
Generic “increase pipeline” framing. Pipeline is an output, not a lever. If a consultant can’t get specific about which part of the funnel is broken and why, they’re probably going to sell you a process rather than solve your problem.
No mention of research or customer data. If the proposal doesn’t include any form of customer research (interviews, surveys, cohort analysis), be skeptical. You cannot build a sound GTM strategy without understanding why customers buy, stay, and leave.
Promises of outcomes without understanding your situation. Guaranteed results before anyone has looked at your metrics, talked to your customers, or understood your product are a red flag regardless of how impressive the case studies look.
All of this to say
The go-to-market consultant landscape is crowded, and most of the names that show up when you search for help are good at what they do. The problem isn’t quality: it’s fit.
The founder I mentioned at the beginning of this post didn’t fail because he hired a bad agency. He failed because he hired the wrong type of help at the wrong time. He needed someone to help him understand the problem. He hired someone to help him scale the solution.
The five lanes above, and the strategic vs. execution distinction, are the diagnostic framework I’d give any founder before they start evaluating consultants. Figure out which lane your stagnation lives in first. Then find the specialist who lives there too.
If you’re not sure which lane you’re in, that’s actually useful information: it probably means you need strategic help before anything else.
Need help figuring out what’s actually stagnating your SaaS growth? That’s exactly what we do at DemandMaven. In a single discovery call, we can help you identify which of the five growth levers is most likely holding you back and what type of consultant (or what type of research) would actually move the needle. Book a discovery call and let’s take a look together.
Happy growing! ✨
¹ For a deeper look at revenue cohort retention and how to interpret it, see Revenue cohort retention: the sneakiest chart if you’re not careful, DemandMaven.
² For the full case for why pricing strategy requires research rather than guesswork, see Why raising your prices isn’t the actual strategy, DemandMaven.
³ On the quality-of-life improvement trap in product development, see The “quality of life improvement” trap and how to avoid it, DemandMaven.