Restoring Value: A GTM Guide for Private Equity Portfolios

There's a certain kind of car that shows up in every barn-find story. Faded paint, flat tires, a layer of dust thick enough to write your name in. But the frame is straight, the bones are good, and somebody who knew what to look for saw the value everyone else drove past.

That's usually the pitch on the B2B company you just bought.

It grew for years on relationships, referrals, a couple of strong salespeople, and a reputation nobody had to work too hard to maintain. It never needed a sophisticated sales and marketing function, so it never built one. Good bones. Real upside. That's the whole reason you wrote the check.

Then you bought it, and the real work started.

If you were the company's first institutional owner, the change probably hit hard. New leadership. New expectations. New reporting cadences. Some longtime employees got nervous. A rainmaker or two walked. A few customers loyal to the old owner quietly drifted away.

So you started professionalizing growth: new hires, more accountability, cleaner sales processes, new tools, less dependence on any one person's rolodex.

It's still not running the way you hoped.

Pipeline is soft. New salespeople aren't replacing what the old ones brought in. Marketing is busy but the revenue impact is fuzzy. The CEO is feeling the pressure, the operating team wants to help, and nobody's quite sure where to start.

This is usually the point where funds start looking for a GTM advisor, a new operating partner, or a bigger advisory bench. Before you make that call, it's worth getting specific about what kind of help the portfolio company actually needs.

Growth isn't one problem, it's three

"GTM" gets treated like a single bucket, but there are really three separate systems at work, and they solve different problems:

Customer experience: whether people who buy from you stay happy, stay loyal, and tell others
Demand: whether the market knows you exist and has a reason to be interested
Sales: whether that interest actually turns into revenue

They overlap, but confusing them is expensive.

Customer experience comes first. You can't sustainably sell something people don't want, keep customers who are unhappy, or generate referrals from people who already left disappointed. That means product quality, delivery, responsiveness, support, and the overall experience of doing business with you. If those aren't reasonably solid, pouring more prospects into the top of the funnel just means more people leaking out the bottom.

Demand is next. People call this "marketing," but it's bigger than that. Demand just means the market knows you exist and has some level of interest. That can come from referrals, direct outreach, reputation, RFPs, channel partners, events, thought leadership, distributors, or one salesperson's personal network. Some companies built enough reputation over decades that they barely have to try. Others need to go create it on purpose. Either way, demand exists before anyone picks up the phone to sell.

Sales converts that interest into revenue. Think of an Apple Store. Sales didn't create the line out front, brand and reputation did. Sales didn't create the in-store experience either, that's customer experience. Sales is the part where someone helps you decide, upsizes the order, and gets the card swiped.

Here's the line worth remembering:

A demand problem is rarely fixed by hiring better closers. A customer experience problem is rarely fixed by generating more leads.

Obvious when you say it out loud. Still one of the biggest sources of wasted GTM spend in the lower middle market.

Before you build a capability, study the portfolio

Don't start by building a big commercial excellence function. Start by figuring out where the same problem keeps showing up across different companies.

If six portfolio companies are all wrestling with some version of the same growth issue, that tells you exactly where a shared capability would create real leverage. Over time, that becomes a repeatable playbook, and eventually it can even shape your underwriting.

A few things worth sorting first:

Advisor vs. operator. In the lower middle market, most portfolio companies don't just need someone to diagnose the problem, they need help fixing it. The best GTM resources sit somewhere between strategist and operator: they can name the priorities and then roll up their sleeves.
B2B vs. B2C. The mechanics are genuinely different. B2B means longer cycles, bigger purchases, multiple stakeholders, and messy attribution because a customer might engage for months before deciding anything. B2C runs more on emotion, convenience, and impulse. Different channels, different data, different creative skill sets.

The rest of this is focused on B2B, since that's where most lower and middle-market PE lives anyway.

The three types of GTM expertise your portfolio probably needs

Once you know where things are breaking, the fix usually falls into one of three buckets.

1. Sales operations

Best fit when: customers are happy and demand is healthy, but the team can't convert interest consistently.

This is the person who understands how a sales org captures and uses data, runs its motions, manages the pipeline, improves close rates, forecasts revenue, and figures out which reps are actually good and why. The goal is making the sales process less dependent on individual gut instinct.

Questions worth asking:

Why are deals stalling?
Where are prospects falling out of the funnel?
Which opportunities deserve real attention?
How accurate is the forecast, honestly?
What does the ideal sales motion look like here?

2. Marketing leadership

Best fit when: retention and reputation are fine, but growth has plateaued because the old network is tapped out.

Maybe the founder personally knew everyone in the market. Maybe three reps carried the whole business on their personal relationships. That was enough to build a $20 million company. It's often not enough to get to $40 million.

Marketing leadership means getting deliberate about who you're trying to reach, what they actually care about, and how you consistently get in front of them. For a lower middle-market company, that rarely means turning on a big ad budget right away. More often it looks like:

Targeted, account-based outreach
Thought leadership and customer proof
Referral channel development
Testing new markets in small, cheap ways
Meaningfully better digital presence

3. Customer experience and customer success

Best fit when: churn, retention, or reputation are the real obstacle, not lead volume.

Funds usually already have operating partners who understand how the business does its work: manufacturing, supply chain, service delivery, whatever the operational engine is. Customer experience asks a different question entirely: what is it actually like to be this company's customer?

Someone needs to talk to customers directly. Why do they stay? Why do they leave? What do they value that leadership might be missing? Where is a competitor quietly changing what "good" looks like? In more serious cases, this needs to be treated almost like a mini turnaround, because there's little point accelerating demand into a leaky bucket.

How a good GTM advisor actually operates

The best GTM advisors work a lot like the operating partners and functional specialists you already trust. They:

Observe before they diagnose
Ask a lot of questions
Review the data that already exists
Spend real time with sales and with customers
Come back with a short list of priorities, not a 60-slide strategy deck

The goal isn't a giant framework. It's finding where the commercial system is actually breaking and what to do about it first.

This matters especially in organic growth work because the causes are rarely clean. Culture, comp plans, positioning, reputation, pricing, product quality, market shifts, sales process, and marketing can all be tangled up in the same revenue problem. That's why buying Salesforce, hiring an SDR team, rolling out HubSpot, or building a new dashboard rarely fixes anything on its own, if nobody figured out what was actually broken first.

Two problems that show up constantly

Problem #1: Net-new pipeline is thinning out

The old engine (relationships, repeat business, referrals, a couple of star reps) worked for years. Now it's not restocking the pipeline the way it used to.

The instinct is to lean on sales harder or go hire more reps. Better first move: figure out why it's thinning.

Start with customer health. Has product quality slipped? Is delivery less consistent? Has competition gotten sharper? Pull retention, churn, repeat purchase, and referral data, if customers are leaving more and referring less at the same time, that's your answer, and it needs fixing before you spend a dollar on lead gen.

If customer health looks fine, the problem is usually demand, and it's usually one of two things:

Stale positioning. The company is still explaining itself the way it did a decade ago, even though the market, the competition, and the buyer have all changed.
Sales carrying too much weight. Reps and SDRs are being asked to both create demand and convert it. Those are two different jobs, and expecting one person to do both is a setup for underperformance, not a talent problem.

If it's a customer issue: talk to customers directly, ideally through someone outside the company so management bias doesn't creep in. Find the real complaints.

If it's a demand issue: start narrow. Pick specific accounts and audiences, figure out what actually matters to them, and build outreach and proof points around it. These programs are relatively cheap, double as market tests, and often surface new referral channels you didn't know existed.

Problem #2: The company runs on instinct, not insight

This isn't automatically a bad thing. That instinct is probably part of why the business was successful enough for you to buy it. The sales leader knows the market cold. The CEO knows every important customer by name. A couple of veteran reps can predict which deals close just by feel.

The problem is that all of that knowledge lives in people's heads instead of in the business.

Symptoms usually look like this:

CRM data is only as good as whatever a rep felt like typing in
Forecasts are really just opinions dressed up as numbers
Customer knowledge is scattered across inboxes and notebooks
Marketing sees one slice of the funnel, sales sees another, leadership sees revenue after it's already happened

The fix isn't necessarily a new CRM (in fact, ripping one out usually just buys you another year of disruption without solving anything). Instead:

Start with the systems already in place
Agree on a small set of commercial metrics everyone actually looks at
Connect marketing activity to sales activity wherever you can
Use automation to cut down manual data entry and surface what reps would otherwise miss

The point isn't more dashboards. It's getting leadership, marketing, and sales looking at the same problem and pulling the same levers.

Don't build the playbook too early

There's a real temptation to move fast: hire an expert, build a commercial excellence framework, roll a standard scorecard across every portfolio company.

Resist it, at least at first.

Organic growth is stubbornly specific to context. A manufacturer with a retention problem needs something completely different from a consulting firm with strong retention and no reliable way to generate demand. A company drowning in opportunities it can't close needs a different intervention than one whose market has simply stopped paying attention.

Start by learning:

Spend real time across the portfolio
Watch for the same symptoms showing up in different companies
Trace each one back to customer experience, demand, sales, or some mix of the three
Find the common threads and go after those first

Do that consistently, and you'll start to understand the specific kinds of growth problems your fund is genuinely good at solving. That becomes real institutional knowledge, the kind that eventually shapes who you hire, what playbooks you build, and even which companies you feel confident acquiring in the first place.

That's the point where GTM value creation stops being a collection of sales and marketing initiatives, and starts being an actual capability.