Your coverage looks fine. You still cannot name who signs.
Back from 2 weeks off I worked 2 days and took 2 meetings. Every number I looked at was comfortable, and every one of them was hiding something.
The 90-second version
Coverage sat at multiples of the number and told me almost nothing. Access to the economic buyer told me everything.
I named tenure as the asset a team loses when people go. Days later I walked with someone who had already decided to leave.
The team that got you here is not automatically the team that gets you to the next increment.
The European read: on a lean team in a smaller market, one misread deal and one bad exit both dent the quarter.
The thread: the comfortable number is the one you stop interrogating, and it is always the one that breaks first.
Read time: ~6 min
The set-up
I came back from 2 weeks off, worked 2 days and took 2 meetings on purpose. The rest I spent in the room with people.
That constraint was the point. All I could look at were the numbers on the board and the faces in front of me, and both said something different from what I expected.
Hi, it is Koen Stam and welcome to GTMcraft OS: The European GTM Operator. This newsletter is built from 100,000+ GTM signals collected from 100+ operators and founders, combined with 13+ years of my own lessons and failures from the trenches. I write at the intersection of go-to-market practice and AI-powered systems for founders and GTM operators scaling their next 2M, 5M or 10M ARR.
100,000+ GTM relevant signals from LinkedIn, Newsletters and Podcasts indexed. Translated into 100+ GTM plays, skills and training for you to implement today.
13+ years over 3 GTM operator jobs across 3 GTM motions (SMB, MM, ENT). Scaling from 2-10M+ ARR multiple times. Same recipe. Different motions.
Now all part of the GTMcraft Operator System.
Lesson 1: Coverage is a comfort number. Access to the economic buyer is the real one.
Coverage sat at a multiple of the monthly number and it meant nothing, because the coverage gap always shows up too late to fix.
One question sorted the healthy deals from the sick ones. Do we have the economic buyer, or a fan. Several were carried at full value with no line to anyone who owns budget.
My take: my rule has been that if you cannot name the next step and the date, it is not pipeline. The harder half: if you cannot name who signs and when you last spoke, it is not a deal. Coverage feels good because it moves without you doing anything hard.
The European read: with a lower account count per market you cannot outrun a bad qualification call with volume.
Do first: open your top 10 open deals and add 2 fields. Who signs, and the date you last spoke live. If you run a commit, anything missing a field leaves it today. If you do not run a formal commit yet, that 2-field list is your forecast this month.
Do this week: make “who signs, and when did we last speak” the first question on every deal in your weekly pipeline conversation.
Do this month: make the signer a required field on your mid-stage. In HubSpot or Pipedrive that is one property on one stage, 10 minutes. With RevOps, a validation rule.
The rule: coverage tells you how much you have. Access tells you how much is real.
You know it worked when: forecast accuracy lands inside 10 percent 2 quarters running, because the committed number stopped moving after week 4.
The play: 5 steps to engage the economic buyer before the deal stalls. Fixes the deal that looks healthy and has never met anyone who can say yes.
Sources: Koen Stam, “We missed our pipeline number in Q1” (August 14) · Outbound Squad, “AdRoll VP of Revenue on pipegen” (August 10)
Lesson 2: When the energy is gone, stop selling the stay and start advising the exit.
Days earlier I wrote that tenure is the asset founders underestimate. Then I walked with someone from that same group and it was not a retention conversation. It was already done.
She saw the energy the new people brought and knew she could not bring it any more. So I stopped. No counter-offer. I helped her think about a good next step, including outside the company.
My take: I hold that offboarding matters more than onboarding, and this week tested it, because I had named her publicly as an asset 3 days before. Trying to save something already gone is not loyalty. It is delay, and when the number rides on 2 or 3 carrier reps it is delay you cannot afford.
The European read: the talent pool here is tight. Someone who leaves well becomes a referral source, someone who leaves badly becomes your next hire’s reference check.
Do first: score each person on 3 things you can watch, not sense. Do they bring ideas unprompted, do they push back in decisions, do they talk about next quarter in the first person. Two of three missing for a month is already gone.
Do this week: for anyone in that column, book the conversation, hold it walking, and open with what a good next step looks like.
Do this month: check in with everyone back from summer with one question first. Do you have the energy for the year-end sprint. Ask it before you ask about pipeline.
The rule: if the energy is gone you can fix the package, the scope and the manager, and none of it holds.
You know it worked when: the exit is planned early enough that their pipeline is reassigned before it ages, and team pipeline coverage does not dip the quarter after.
The play: 5 steps to turn every GTM exit into a culture asset. Builds on July’s offboarding edition, which covered the exit itself.
Sources: Koen Stam, “Nobody cheered when someone else hit their number” (LinkedIn) · Matt Green, “The exit interview asks the great questions too late” (August 12)
Lesson 3: The team that got you here is not automatically the team that gets you to the next increment.
The comfortable version is “retention matters, but you need balance.” True and useless.
Going 3 to 5, or 5 to 10, or 10 to 20, you cannot do it the way you got here. The process changes, or the product line, or the territory. Your team is on that list too.
My take: headcount is not capacity and tenure is not capability. What I watch is whether the experience in the room is used to go faster or to explain why something will not work. The second one is how the number ends up riding on 2 or 3 carrier reps while everyone else sells differently. If you cannot carry a 150 to 250k leadership hire on your runway, the bar-raiser is not a VP. It is the next IC, held to the standard of the leg you are going to.
The European read: adding a country or moving upmarket is a new motion, and a new motion is where the team’s pattern-matching stops helping.
Do first: write your next 12-month target next to your team list, and mark who has run that leg before. Not who is good. Who has done it.
Do this week: name the 1 capability gap that shows up in more than half your stalled deals, and decide if it is coaching or hiring.
Do this month: hold your next hire to the leg you are going to, not the leg you are on.
The rule: keep the context, raise the bar, and never let tenure become the argument.
You know it worked when: your next hire ramps to quota inside your ramp target, and the percent of reps at quota goes up while your top 2 carry less.
The play: 5 steps to hire GTM bar-raisers on a real work sample. Fixes the hire who interviews well and cannot run the motion you are moving to.
Sources: Koen Stam, “I stopped recommending founders hire a Head of Sales” (LinkedIn) · SaaStr, “Gamma scaled to 100M ARR without a sales team” (July 29)
Save this. 3 things from my week as a European GTM operator, back from 2 weeks off, turned into moves you can run today.
Send it to 1 founder or GTM operator scaling toward 10M in Europe who reads everything and ships none of it.
This week’s play: audit the hour before you add a seat
Before you decide you need more capacity, check whether the hours you have point at revenue.
Play: 5 steps to audit the hour before you add a seat
Fixes: the capacity gap you are about to close with headcount, when the real problem is where the hours go.
Best for: 2-5M and 5-10M, any motion. It bites hardest when you are opening a second market.
The 5 steps:
Export next week’s calendar for everyone carrying a number, you included.
Tag every block revenue-generating or not. A meeting with a buyer counts. A meeting about buyers does not.
Total the revenue-generating share per person and for the team.
Cut or merge the 3 largest non-revenue blocks, and defend the gap.
Re-measure in 2 weeks, then decide if the gap is capacity or allocation.
Paste this into your AI:
Here is my team’s calendar for next week. Tag every block revenue-generating (in front of a buyer, or producing pipeline) or not. Return a per-person table with total hours, RGA hours, RGA percentage and the 3 largest non-RGA blocks, then which 3 to cut first and what I lose.
One question for the room
Look at your top 10 open deals. On how many can you name who signs and the date you last spoke to them?
Reply or send me a DM.
Go deeper with GTMcraft OS
Scale on plays and skills, not prompts.
You do not need another newsletter, podcast or LinkedIn post.
You need the system under it.
Read the plays. Every single play is free and live in GTMcraft OS on Notion. Click through from any edition.
Build your own. GTMcraft OS members connect the full libraries, 100+ plays plus 100,000+ LinkedIn, newsletter and podcast signals, straight into their own AI or Claude context, so their team builds on the whole corpus instead of one-off prompts.
The single plays are free to read. Wiring the whole corpus into your own operating system, and keeping it current, is what the membership gives you.
Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,
Koen
Your (human) GTM Coach
—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5; edited & approved by Koen
The Future GTM Operator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.