5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from a CMO-Turned-Founder

Most founders come from technical or product backgrounds, but marketing leaders might be better equipped for the founder journey than we think. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barbra Gago, founder of Pando and former CMO of Miro, shared insights that challenge conventional wisdom about go-to-market strategy and category creation in B2B tech.

Here are the key lessons from her journey:

1. Don’t Force Category Creation When Budget Lines Already Exist

The instinct to create a new category can be strong, especially when existing categories feel limiting. But Barbra’s experience at Greenhouse revealed a crucial insight: sometimes it’s better to elevate an existing category than create a new one.

“Creating a new category when they already had a budget for an existing category didn’t really make sense because then where’s the budget for that new category?” she explained. Instead of pursuing their original “recruiting optimization” category, they pivoted to making the ATS category more valuable – a strategy that proved far more effective.

2. Let Market Conditions Guide Your Positioning

Positioning isn’t static – it should evolve with market conditions. At Pando, Barbra demonstrated this flexibility: “Obviously, last year and the year before, everything is rallying. Everybody’s hiring, everybody’s spending ungodly amounts of money to recruit people. And it was an employee market.” During this period, they heavily emphasized career progression. But as market conditions changed, they adapted their positioning while maintaining their long-term vision.

3. Marketing Leaders Are Uniquely Equipped for the Founder Journey

While it’s uncommon for CMOs to become founders, Barbra argues they’re naturally suited for the role: “I feel like marketers would be set up to be very strong CEOs.” Why? Because good marketers are “deep in customer engagements, customer pain points, understanding, spending time with customers, understanding how to position and sell the product, hopefully holding themselves accountable to revenue generation directly.”

4. Know When to Abandon a Strategy

Perhaps the most valuable lesson is knowing when to let go of a strategy that isn’t working. “Don’t get too stuck on it,” Barbra advises. “If it doesn’t work, you have to be able to let it go if it’s not working.” She emphasizes watching for specific signals: “If people aren’t picking it up, if it’s not getting traction, if there aren’t competitors, if other people aren’t referring to that as a category or mentioning it.”

5. Distinguish Between Category Creation and Positioning

Many founders conflate category creation with positioning, but they’re distinct strategies. “I think that positioning is a constant evolution,” Barbra explains. “I think that a category is something that ends up in G2 Crowd or Software Advice or the obvious thing on the spreadsheet of budgets of every company.” This distinction helps inform whether you should invest in category creation or focus on positioning within an existing category.

These lessons challenge the common narrative that category creation is always the optimal strategy for B2B tech companies. Instead, success often comes from a more nuanced understanding of market dynamics, budget realities, and customer needs. The key is maintaining flexibility in your approach while staying true to your long-term vision.

For founders navigating their own go-to-market strategy, these insights offer a framework for thinking about category creation and positioning in a more practical way. Sometimes the path to market leadership isn’t about creating something entirely new – it’s about making something existing dramatically better.

As Barbra demonstrates through her journey from CMO to founder, the most successful strategies often emerge from a deep understanding of both market realities and customer needs, combined with the flexibility to adapt as conditions change.