The First Five Moves Every New VP of GTM Should Make

You've landed the VP role. The title's on LinkedIn. The Slack channels are flooding your notifications. Everyone wants a piece of your calendar.

Now what?

Most new GTM leaders walk into their first 90 days with a predictable playbook: audit everything, build frameworks, launch initiatives, schedule offsites, and demonstrate strategic thinking through complexity.

It's the wrong approach. And it's why so many promising VP hires flame out before they ever gain real traction.

The companies that need you most—growth-stage, series B through D, founder-led—don't need your frameworks. They need clarity, reduction, and momentum. They need someone who can cut through noise, not add to it.

Here are the five moves that actually work.

1. Get Absolute Clarity on ICP and Use-Case Priority

Before you touch discovery playbooks, demand gen strategy, CRM workflows, or sales methodology—stop.

The single most important thing you can do in your first two weeks is understand who actually buys your product and why.

This sounds obvious. It isn't.

Most companies have a stated ICP that differs significantly from their real ICP. Marketing targets one persona. Sales closes another. Product builds for a third. The founder has a vision that maps to none of the above.

Your job is to cut through the noise and find ground truth.

The concrete actions:

• Meet with Product and Sales leadership together (not separately) and map the real buying centers
• Identify the one or two personas that actually drive enterprise deals—not the ones you wish drove deals
• Understand which use cases convert and which ones stall in pipeline forever
• Review the last 20 closed-won deals and the last 20 closed-lost deals—look for patterns
• Ask AEs what messaging actually moves deals forward versus what sounds good in decks

This is the move that unlocks everything else.

Without ICP clarity, you're building on sand. Every initiative you launch—demand gen, content, sales enablement, product marketing—will scatter in different directions. You'll feel busy. You'll look productive. But you'll generate no compounding momentum.

The trap to avoid: Don't let anyone hand you a 47-slide ICP deck from two years ago and tell you the work is done. ICPs drift. Markets shift. What worked in 2022 may be actively hurting you in 2025.

Get in the room. Listen to calls. Read lost-deal notes. Talk to customers who almost churned. The real ICP lives in the friction, not the frameworks.

2. Unify the Company Around a Simple Value Narrative

Here's what happens at most growth-stage companies: every team has their own version of "why we win."

Sales has their pitch. Marketing has their positioning. Product has their vision. The founders have the origin story. Customer success has the retention narrative.

None of them quite match.

This creates a subtle but devastating problem. Prospects hear different stories depending on who they talk to. Internal teams optimize for different outcomes. The company can't compound its message because there's no shared foundation to build on.

Your second move is to fix this—fast, and with surgical precision.

What you need to build:

• A central value story that everyone can internalize and repeat
• Three differentiators that are true, defensible, and meaningful to buyers
• A plain-English articulation of why your company matters—no jargon, no buzzwords
• A short, sharp pitch for the field that takes less than 15 seconds to deliver

Not features. Not methodologies. Not a comprehensive messaging framework with 40 personas and 12 use cases.

Just: "Here is why we win, in under 12 seconds."

The test: Can your newest SDR explain your value proposition to a stranger at a coffee shop? Can your CEO? Can your head of product? If you get three different answers, you have work to do.

This is the missing bone structure that holds everything together. Without it, every piece of content, every sales conversation, every product update floats disconnected from everything else.

The execution: This shouldn't take months. Take the founder's original insight, combine it with what you learned in your ICP deep-dive, and write the story. Run it by the exec team. Refine once. Ship it.

Three days of focused work. Massive downstream impact.

3. Fix Discovery in the Lightest, Fastest Way Possible

Discovery is where most deals die. But the solution isn't what most new VPs think it is.

The instinct is to build a comprehensive discovery methodology. Create a multi-modal framework. Run a 90-minute training workshop. Build certification programs. Design scorecards and call reviews.

Resist this instinct.

What your sales team actually needs is much simpler:

• One discovery email template that earns the right to ask questions
• Six core discovery questions that uncover real pain, timeline, and buying process
• A 10-minute structure for the discovery portion of calls
• Two examples of what good discovery actually sounds like

That's it.

No theatre. No overreach. No intellectual pageantry that makes you look smart but doesn't move pipeline.

Why minimal works better:

Sales teams are already overwhelmed. Every new process, every new framework, every new "initiative" adds cognitive load. When you hand someone a 30-page discovery playbook, they nod politely and continue doing exactly what they were doing before.

But give them a single email template that actually books meetings? They'll use it tomorrow.

Give them six questions that actually uncover budget authority? They'll memorize them by Friday.

The execution:

• Pull recordings of your best discovery calls (ask your top AE which ones to watch)
• Identify the 4-6 questions that consistently appear in deals that close
• Write them down in plain English
• Add a simple structure: opening, questions, bridge to demo
• Test it with two reps for one week
• Refine based on feedback
• Roll out to the team

Total time investment: one week. Impact: you've stopped the bleeding in pipeline and started generating real learning about what's working.

4. Clean Up the Website With Surgical Precision

This is the highest-yield, lowest-effort GTM move available to any new VP. And almost everyone walks past it.

Your website is doing work 24/7. It's the first thing prospects see after they hear your name. It's what AEs send when they don't have a better asset. It's what analysts review when they're building a competitive landscape.

And at most growth-stage companies, the website is a mess.

Not a total disaster—it's probably professionally designed and reasonably functional. But it's almost certainly missing the basic building blocks that convert traffic into pipeline.

The surgical fixes:

• Persona pages: "For [Title]" pages that speak directly to your top 2-3 buyer personas with their language, their problems, and their outcomes
• Use-case pages: Specific pages for your top 3-5 use cases that show how the product solves a concrete problem
• Proof points: Three pieces of concrete evidence that you deliver results—not logos, but actual outcomes with numbers
• Enterprise value page: A single page that addresses the specific concerns of enterprise buyers: security, scale, integration, support

What this doesn't mean:

This is not a website redesign. Not a brand refresh. Not a multi-quarter content initiative. Not a new demand gen hire.

This is adding four to eight pages that your sales team desperately needs and your buyers are looking for. It's copywriting, not architecture.

The execution:

A skilled PMM or content person can ship this in a week. If you have to do it yourself, two weeks. The impact on sales alignment and founder confidence is immediate and massive.

When AEs can send prospects to a page that actually speaks to their persona and use case, deals move faster. When founders see their value proposition articulated clearly on the website, they trust that marketing understands the business.

This is the kind of quick win that builds political capital for everything else you want to do.

5. Build Trust and Flow With Product and Sales

The final move isn't an initiative. It's a posture.

Most new VPs come in with a mandate to "fix" something. They've been hired because something isn't working. They feel pressure to demonstrate value quickly. This creates a temptation to over-talk, over-structure, and over-initiative.

Resist this too.

What actually builds trust in your first 90 days:

• Spend 10 hours listening before you spend 10 minutes prescribing. Sit in on sales calls. Attend product sprint reviews. Shadow customer success. Absorb before you output.

• Take the lead from people who understand the product and market. If your head of product has been there for three years, they know things you don't. If your founder has been selling since day one, they have pattern recognition you lack. Learn from them before you try to teach them.

• Match the tempo of the organization. Some companies move fast and scrappy. Others are methodical and deliberate. Don't impose your natural rhythm on a team that operates differently.

• Translate concerns into action. When a founder expresses worry about something, don't give them a framework. Give them a one-page plan and a timeline. When an AE complains about a lack of content, don't schedule a workshop. Ship them something useful by end of week.

• Deliver three quick wins. Before you launch any major initiative, prove you can execute on small things. Fix the broken case study. Rewrite the discovery email. Update the battlecard. Show that you're an operator, not just a strategist.

What founders actually want:

They don't care about your methodology. They don't care about your frameworks. They don't care about your previous experience at impressive companies.

They care about momentum.

They hired you because they're stuck. Revenue isn't scaling. Pipeline isn't predictable. Something is broken in the GTM motion and they need it fixed.

Prove you can create forward motion. The trust will follow.

The Pattern to Avoid

There's a predictable failure mode for new GTM VPs, especially those coming from larger, more structured organizations:

• Default to complexity when simplicity is needed
• Build scaffolding when the house needs furniture
• Focus on visibility instead of outcomes
• Launch "big initiatives" instead of solving immediate problems
• Demonstrate intelligence instead of generating results

This pattern feels productive. It looks strategic. It produces impressive-looking artifacts—decks, frameworks, methodologies, multi-phase plans.

But it fails because it doesn't match what growth-stage companies actually need.

What works:

• Clarity over complexity
• Reduction over expansion
• Sequencing over simultaneity
• Value narrative over feature messaging
• Simple pipeline motion over sophisticated demand systems

If you can internalize this shift—from "impress" to "fix"—you'll succeed where many talented people fail.

Not Ready for a Full-Time VP?

If you're not ready for a full-time VP hire—or you need someone to execute these moves while you search—a fractional GTM leader can build the same foundation without the overhead. Same playbook, same urgency, flexible commitment.

The Compound Effect

These five moves aren't random. They're sequenced intentionally.

ICP clarity gives you the foundation for your value narrative. The value narrative gives you the core message for discovery and the website. Quick wins on discovery and website build trust with Product and Sales. That trust gives you permission to tackle bigger challenges later.

Each move enables the next. Momentum compounds.

And that's the real difference between VPs who succeed and VPs who fail. It's not intelligence. It's not experience. It's not strategic thinking.

It's the ability to build momentum through sequenced action.

Start with ICP. Build the narrative. Fix discovery. Ship the pages. Earn the trust.

Then you can do the bigger stuff.