In startup land, we like to talk about moats.
Product moats. Network moats. Brand moats. Distribution moats. Intellectual property moats.
But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud:
None of those matter if you’re too slow to learn.
The Real Reason GTM Fails
It’s rarely a bad idea. It’s always a slow loop.
At one of the companies I worked at, I had the right insight.
We saw the future of intent-based selling.
We believed in a smarter GTM motion--something that could react to buyer signals in real time and trigger plays that felt personal and contextual.
We had the right thesis.
We even had the tools.
But we were slow.
Hiring the Demand Gen leader took too long.
The budget for 6Sense got stuck in review purgatory.
By the time we launched the campaign, no one trusted the lead scores.
Sales didn’t know why a certain account was prioritized.
Marketing didn’t know what sales needed.
Everything broke down at the point of feedback.
ICPs aren’t found--they’re refined.But you only get refinement if your system lets you loop.
That’s where most GTM orgs die. Not in the planning, but in the iteration stall.
The OODA Loop Was Built for Survival. Now It’s for GTM.
Military strategist John Boyd coined the OODA loop for fighter pilots.
Observe. Orient. Decide. Act.
Whoever could cycle through that loop faster--without hesitation or confusion--would win.
Because speed compounds. And hesitation kills.
Traditional GTM systems observe quarterly.
They orient with slow RevOps reporting.
They decide through executive approvals.
And they act with bloated cross-functional coordination.
By the time you’ve launched, the signal has shifted.
Here’s what it looks like in today’s environment:
Phase | Legacy GTM | Agentic GTM |
Observe | Monthly dashboards | Real-time model inference |
Orient | CRM segmentation | Memory-based agent context |
Decide | Exec approval chains | Human-in-the-loop agent decisioning |
Act | Campaign rollouts | Prompt-triggered tool execution |
Traditional GTM is a waterfall.Agentic GTM is OODA--on loop, not linear.
Feedback Loops > Funnels
Funnels are brittle. Feedback loops evolve.
An agentic GTM system doesn’t just push messages into the market.
It listens. It adapts. It remembers.
You launch a message.
Agents watch model inference shift.
You tweak the copy.
Agents recall what moved the needle.
You re-score accounts.
You iterate again.
Fast.
This is how velocity becomes a moat.
Not because you’re moving faster blindly--
but because your system learns faster and acts on that learning immediately.
The Moat Has Shifted
When anyone can spin up a GPT-powered landing page…
- Brand is fragile
- Distribution is temporary
- IP is a prompt away
But if your system can observe, orient, decide, and act faster than anyone else?
You win.
Velocity is no longer a nice-to-have.
It’s the only real moat left.
What’s Next
On Wednesday, I’ll share what it looked like when I failed to ship intent-based GTM inside a high-growth org.
And how I later I took another insight and brought it into production--in 48 hours--using agentic workflows.
Until then, you can test how visible your company is across OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity:
👉 lio.inflect-ai.com
Because if the models don’t see you, neither will your market.