Nearbound: A New GTM Model for Sustainable Growth | Jill Rowley, GTM Advisor at Independent

When Jill entered software, go-to-market largely meant sales. Companies built products, hired salespeople, and expected them to sell. Marketing focused on trade shows, badge scans, and top-of-funnel leads. Marketing automation, operations, and technology later expanded its influence across the buyer journey.

Subscription models also made customer success, service, and support integral to revenue. Companies had to retain customers and deliver recurring impact. Jill now sees go-to-market as an interconnected system spanning marketing, sales, and customer success. Revenue technology and operations support that system, though many organisations have yet to integrate these functions fully.

Customers use complex technology stacks, so products must work with other tools already in use. Jill argues that software companies should understand their place within each buyer’s wider ecosystem. Integration is only the starting point. Products, data, processes, workflows, and insights must form a connected solution.

Partnerships therefore matter throughout the customer lifecycle. Companies can market and sell together, deliver joint value, and use ecosystem knowledge to guide product roadmaps. To address a gap, businesses can build, acquire, or partner. The ecosystem becomes both a market route and a way to improve the customer’s overall solution.

Jill describes nearbound as a strategy based on customer proximity. Outbound interrupts prospective buyers through calls, emails, and LinkedIn activity. Inbound attracts them with useful content. Both channels have become crowded. Buyers often ignore outbound contact, while rising content volumes, including AI-produced material, weaken inbound’s ability to command attention.

Nearbound asks whom buyers already trust, learn from, and work with, plus which products they use. Companies then identify the people and organisations surrounding customers and assess joint value. The approach extends beyond formal partnerships. It means entering the customer’s market, developing ecosystem relationships, and getting closer to prospective and current customers.

Jill says Partner Ops starts with data that identifies shared customers, overlaps, and connections between companies. Historically, teams stored this information in spreadsheets and analysed it with pivot tables. Partner technology can collect and organise the data, then feed it into CRM, marketing automation, and ABM platforms.

Its value depends on how teams use those connections. Technology can reveal a company’s wider network instead of isolating each partnership. Teams can reshape campaigns, support co-selling, and change customer success practices. However, the tools need operational discipline across systems, processes, and insights. Without that discipline, data documents relationships instead of informing strategy.

Jill starts with the customer and the problem the company solves. Company size, industry, or geography can shape an ICP. However, it should reflect where the product creates value, not the supplier’s location. Buyer personas and channel choices follow from that definition. Teams should design go-to-market through the customer’s lens, including where buyers spend time and learn.

For early-stage companies, the ICP begins as a hypothesis. Jill recommends examining problems founders understand through experience, then listening closely to the market. Teams must identify who has the problem, how they solve it today, and where to find them. They must pivot when another solution works better or the original pairing proves wrong.

Earlier in Jill’s career, account executives handled the full sales cycle. Qualified inbound leads were scarce, while digital marketing, websites, and trackable email remained immature. As inbound volume grew, companies created SDR and BDR teams for repeated calls and emails. This change separated prospecting from senior sales work, while automation increased activity at lower apparent cost.

Jill says this model created excessive handoffs. It often asked inexperienced representatives with limited knowledge, networks, or business acumen to earn buyers’ attention. Companies also pushed buyers through internal sales processes instead of following their preferred journeys. Buyers reject repetitive call-email-LinkedIn sequences. The resulting correction reflects technology companies’ wider shift from growth at all costs toward efficiency.

Jill says functions have long pursued their own metrics, despite their interdependence. Alignment gets harder as companies add products, geographies, segments, and combinations of product-led and sales-led growth. Within marketing, brand and demand teams must understand their mutual effects. They must also account for customers and partners.

Weak alignment causes problems after deals close. Messaging can create expectations the product fails to meet, requiring new positioning or product improvements. Salespeople paid only for new revenue can close poor-fit customers without accountability for churn. Jill views customers as credible sellers because they recommend and advocate. That word of mouth still carries costs: it depends on the organisation’s product, brand, and customer experience.

A customer using a product unexpectedly can reveal a new buyer persona and use case. Jill warns against immediately rebuilding the positioning around it. The company should first examine its data and ability to serve that market. It needs enough capacity to create the offering, packaging, messaging, and demonstration environment. Customer success must also support the use case.

The choice also involves trade-offs because pursuing one opportunity delays or rejects another. Jill frames the test around profit and sustainable revenue. Partnerships can strengthen durability when products connect tightly with customers’ other tools. Replacement would then affect linked data, processes, workflows, and people. Leaders must still assess the market’s size and the organisation’s ability to execute.