Frequently Asked Questions:
Go-To-Market Strategy

  • The most common reason is that the GTM strategy was built around your product's features and benefits rather than around what your buyers are actually trying to accomplish. A compelling narrative for your internal team is not the same as a message that resonates with a buyer who has a specific problem to solve and a dozen vendors claiming to solve it.

    The second most common reason is that the target market was defined using assumed personas rather than observed behaviour. Questionnaire-based research tends to confirm what you already believe. It rarely surfaces the friction, workarounds, or unmet needs that actually drive buying decisions.

    Moxie89 diagnoses GTM problems by working upstream — examining what customers are genuinely trying to achieve, where the current message breaks down, and what assumptions the strategy was built on that may no longer hold.

  • Most market entry failures share a common root: assuming that what worked in one geography, vertical, or customer segment will transfer automatically to another. Brand recognition, partner relationships, and sales infrastructure do not travel. They have to be rebuilt in context.

    Before investing in headcount and pipeline targets, the questions worth answering are: does our positioning mean anything to buyers in this market? Do our existing partner relationships have in-country credibility, or are they relationships held at a global level that don't translate locally? And critically — what is a realistic timeline for the first close, given how buyers in this market actually make decisions?

    Moxie89 works with organisations at the point of market entry to pressure-test these assumptions before quota and headcount decisions are made, not after.

  • Start by setting aside the personas entirely and going back to the conversations. Not surveys — conversations. The problem with persona-driven marketing is that personas are built from assumptions that calcify over time. They describe who you think your buyer is, not what they are actually trying to do or why they are struggling to do it.

    Jobs-To-Be-Done research asks a different question: what is the buyer trying to accomplish — functionally, socially, and emotionally — and what is getting in the way? The answers to those questions produce messaging that resonates because it reflects reality rather than internal assumptions.

    This is the starting point for every GTM engagement at Moxie89. The research comes first. The messaging follows from what we learn, not from what we already believe.

  • The challenge with genuinely new offerings is that buyers do not yet have language for what they need. They cannot tell you they want your solution because they have not imagined it. What they can tell you is what they are struggling with, what workarounds they are using, and what outcomes they are trying to reach.

    Effective GTM for new-to-market offerings starts with the struggle, not the solution. Your messaging needs to name the problem your buyer recognises — not the solution they have not yet encountered. The product earns its place in the conversation once the buyer feels understood.

    Moxie89 uses ethnographic research and Jobs-To-Be-Done methodology to surface the language buyers use to describe their own problems, which becomes the foundation for positioning and messaging that connects to real demand.

Frequently Asked Questions:
Sales Friction & Pipeline

  • When deals stall consistently at the same stage, it is almost always a signal problem rather than a sales execution problem. Something is happening at that point in the process that the buyer experiences as friction — unresolved risk, missing stakeholder alignment, a value proposition that hasn't connected to the decision-maker who matters at that stage.

    The diagnostic question is: what does the buyer need to feel confident enough to move, and is your current process giving them that? Most sales processes are designed from the seller's perspective — stages that make sense for CRM and forecasting — rather than from the buyer's perspective, where the decision to progress involves internal politics, risk appetite, and the question of who else needs to be on board.

    Moxie89 identifies stall points by interviewing buyers — including those who did not progress — to map what the decision actually looks like from their side of the table.

  • A strong product and a low win rate usually means the gap is in how the value is communicated, not in the value itself. The buyer either does not understand why your product is the right fit for their specific situation, does not trust that you understand their situation well enough, or is not hearing from the right person at the right time.

    The other common cause is that the buyer's evaluation criteria are different from what your sales process assumes. You may be optimising for technical capability when the real decision is being made on risk, implementation confidence, or supplier relationships.

    Understanding why you lose — specifically, from the buyer's perspective — is the most underused source of competitive intelligence available to most organisations.

  • Concentration risk in revenue is almost always a symptom of a GTM motion that was never properly built — the business grew through relationships and referrals rather than through a repeatable process for identifying and winning new accounts.

    Reducing that dependency requires understanding what made those key accounts buy in the first place — what job they were trying to do, what triggered the decision, and what made you the right choice — and then engineering a way to find and reach buyers who share those characteristics.

    It also requires honest assessment of whether the current sales infrastructure is capable of generating new business at scale, or whether it is set up primarily to service existing accounts.

  • Enterprise sales quota design is one of the most commonly mishandled elements of go-to-market planning. Quota logic designed for transactional sales — short cycles, high volume, fast feedback — is routinely applied to enterprise sales, where it creates impossible expectations and destroys the conditions for sustainable pipeline growth.

    For deals with 12 to 18 month cycles, quota should be calibrated to what is realistically closeable given the pipeline that exists on day one, the ramp time required in the specific market, and the sales infrastructure in place. In a greenfield market with no existing pipeline, year one targets should be weighted toward pipeline creation and progression milestones, not closed revenue.

    Moxie89 works with leadership teams to build quota frameworks that reflect deal velocity, market maturity, and the actual capacity of the sales infrastructure — not just the revenue number the business needs to hit.

Frequently Asked Questions:
Partner Ecosystem & Vendor Partnerships

  • Most technology partnerships underdeliver because they are structured around the vendor's priorities rather than around a shared understanding of what the customer is trying to accomplish. The partner relationship becomes a commercial arrangement — referral agreements, co-marketing commitments, tier status — rather than a genuine alignment around customer outcomes.

    The partnerships that generate consistent pipeline share a different characteristic: both parties understand the customer's problem well enough to identify together when the fit is right, and neither party is pushing deals that should not be pushed.

    Moxie89 helps organisations audit their partner relationships to identify where genuine alignment exists, where it is being assumed, and where the relationship is consuming resource without generating returns.

  • Global vendor relationships and local market credibility are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the most common sources of misaligned pipeline expectations. A relationship held at a global or regional level — with a partner manager based in another country, under agreements negotiated in a different market — does not automatically translate to referrals from the in-country team.

    In-country vendor teams have their own preferences, their own trusted partners, and their own ways of evaluating who to recommend. They need to see local delivery capability, local case studies, and local relationship investment before they will consistently refer business your way.

    The question to ask is not "do we have a relationship with this vendor?" but "does the team in this market know us, trust us, and believe we will make them look good?"

  • Partner selection is most effective when it starts with the customer's job rather than the vendor's product roadmap. The question is not "which platform has the best features?" but "which platform do our target customers tend to be using when they have the problem we are best placed to solve?"

    Beyond platform fit, the right partner relationship depends on: whether the vendor's sales team actively refers to partners like you, whether the partner ecosystem in your market is competitive or has room for a well-positioned entrant, and whether the commercial terms are sustainable given your typical deal size and cycle.

    Moxie89 helps consultancies map partner ecosystems to identify where genuine opportunity exists, rather than where the marketing materials suggest it does.

  • More than most organisations realise. When a client buys a service that involves a technology platform, implementation partner, or third-party provider, their experience of your organisation is shaped by the entire ecosystem — not just by your team. A slow vendor support response, a platform limitation, or a miscommunication between partners becomes your problem in the client's eyes.

    Understanding the impact of your partner network on client experience requires mapping the moments where the handoff between parties creates friction — and then deciding whether that friction is best solved by process, by contract, or by choosing different partners.

    This is an area where Jobs-To-Be-Done research is particularly valuable: clients will tell you where the ecosystem let

Frequently Asked Questions:
Jobs-To-Be-Done & Customer Understanding

  • Jobs-To-Be-Done is a framework for understanding why customers make the decisions they make — not in terms of demographics or personas, but in terms of the underlying progress they are trying to make in a specific situation. The insight is that people do not buy products or services; they hire them to accomplish something.

    For B2B technology companies, this matters because purchasing decisions are rarely made on features alone. A CIO evaluating a digital experience platform is not just buying technology — they are managing internal stakeholder expectations, de-risking a transformation programme, and trying to demonstrate progress to a board. Understanding those functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the decision produces messaging, positioning, and sales conversations that connect at a much deeper level than feature comparisons.

    Moxie89 uses Jobs-To-Be-Done methodology as the foundation for GTM strategy, research, and sales enablement — because understanding what the buyer is actually trying to accomplish changes everything downstream.

  • The most common sources of bias in customer research are the questions themselves. Survey questions that begin with your product, your category, or your assumed benefits tend to produce answers that confirm what you already believe. Customers tell you what they think you want to hear, or what seems like a reasonable answer, rather than what they actually experience.

    Unbiased insight comes from open-ended conversations structured around the customer's experience — what they were trying to do, what got in the way, what they tried before, and what good would actually look like. This requires trained interviewers who can follow threads without leading, and a willingness to hear answers that challenge your assumptions.

    At Moxie89, ethnographic interviewing and Jobs-To-Be-Done analysis have been applied across industries including financial services, legal, healthcare, and digital technology — consistently surfacing insights that internal research missed.

  • This is one of the most common and most costly misalignments in B2B organisations. When leadership has different views on the ideal customer, every function downstream — marketing, sales, product, delivery — operates on different assumptions. The result is fragmented positioning, inconsistent sales conversations, and a customer experience that feels incoherent.

    The resolution is not a workshop where the leadership team debates until someone wins. It is research that replaces opinion with evidence. When you have conducted structured interviews with customers who bought, customers who did not buy, and customers who left, the picture of who you are genuinely best placed to serve becomes much clearer — and much harder to argue with.

    Moxie89 facilitates this process by running the research, synthesising the findings, and then working with leadership teams to build shared understanding around what the evidence actually shows.

  • AI is genuinely useful for processing, pattern recognition, and synthesis at scale. It is not a substitute for the kind of insight that comes from sitting with a customer and letting them describe their experience in their own words, following an unexpected thread, and recognising the significance of something they almost did not say.

    The risk in AI-assisted GTM is not that the tools are bad — it is that they optimise for what has already been said, not for what has not yet been articulated. Innovation and differentiation tend to live in the gaps: the workarounds, the frustrations, the things customers do not have language for yet.

    At Moxie89, AI supports the research process — helping to analyse patterns across interviews, identify themes, and accelerate synthesis — but the primary research itself remains human. You cannot systematise the kind of empathy that surfaces genuinely new insight.

  • The most common cause of transformation that does not transform is that the problem being solved was defined before the actual problem was understood. A technology implementation, a restructure, or a new process cannot create value if it is solving the wrong thing — or solving the right thing in the wrong sequence.

    The second most common cause is that the people closest to the problem — frontline teams, customers, partners — were not meaningfully involved in diagnosing it. Transformation designed at the top and implemented downward tends to optimise for internal logic rather than for the outcomes that actually matter to the people it is supposed to serve.

    Moxie89 is brought in at exactly this point: when investment has been made and results are not following. The work is to go upstream, identify what was assumed versus what is true, and reframe what actually needs to change.

Frequently Asked Questions:
For Sitecore Customers

  • Where Moxie89 facilitates an introduction that leads to an engagement, we may receive a fee from the partner. We disclose this upfront — always. What protects the integrity of the recommendation is this: we only refer partners we genuinely believe are the right fit for that customer's specific needs. A bad match helps no one, and our reputation depends on getting it right, not on volume of referrals.

  • Often yes — for a different reason than you might expect. Internal teams know the organisation. They don't always know the partner landscape, how to evaluate proposals objectively, or what questions reveal the difference between a partner who can technically do the work and one who will actually deliver well for your specific context. That's where an outside perspective adds disproportionate value.

  • Our role is to help you gain clarity on what you need and why — before the product conversations begin. That upstream work means that when you do engage with Sitecore, you're having a more focused, productive conversation about platform fit rather than still figuring out your requirements in real time. Ideally we work with you before Sitecore discussions start — but you can bring us in at any point in the process.

  • Not necessarily. Bringing in an independent perspective mid-process can still add value — particularly if proposals have come back and you're struggling to evaluate them objectively, or if something about the process feels off and you can't quite articulate why. Start with a conversation.

  • It depends on where you are in the process. Some engagements start at the very beginning — helping define what you need before a single requirement is written. Others begin at the evaluation stage. The scope, duration, and structure are agreed upfront. Fees vary by engagement. Get in touch and we'll figure out what makes sense.

Frequently Asked Questions:
For Sitecore Partners

  • No. Confidentiality is foundational to how Moxie89 operates. Conversations with partners stay with partners. The independence that makes this advisory valuable depends entirely on both sides being able to speak openly.

  • By helping you win better — the right deals, with the right customers, where your strengths are genuinely aligned with what's needed. That produces better outcomes, stronger references, and more sustainable growth than chasing every opportunity regardless of fit. Also we will bring customers to partners through having strategy and planning engagements.

  • Particularly so. Smaller partners often face the hardest challenge — limited capacity means that taking the wrong deal has a disproportionate cost. Understanding what a customer actually needs, being honest about fit, and knowing when to collaborate with another partner rather than try to cover everything alone are decisions where an outside perspective is genuinely useful.

  • It varies. Sometimes it's a misalignment between what the partner is proposing and what the customer actually needs. Sometimes there's an internal stakeholder issue on the customer side that hasn't surfaced. Sometimes the trust hasn't been established yet. An independent conversation — with the customer, the partner, or both — often surfaces what's actually blocking progress faster than continuing to push through the usual channels.

  • Engagement structures vary depending on the nature and scope of the work. The best starting point is a conversation about what you're trying to achieve. Get in touch and we'll work out what makes sense.

  • otentially — it depends on the nature of the engagement and whether any conflicts exist. For example, if Moxie89 is already working with another partner on the same opportunity, that creates a complexity that needs to be navigated carefully and transparently.

    In some cases the right structure is actually for the customer to engage Moxie89 independently — as the connective tissue between partners, making sure the overall engagement is delivering the right outcome rather than each partner optimising for their own piece. That model works particularly well in multi-partner scenarios where someone needs to hold the broader picture together.

    The best starting point is an honest conversation about what you're trying to achieve and what the landscape looks like.

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