Meeting the Buyer Where They Are: Why GTM Starts With the Persona, Not the Channel

Does your buyer even sit at a desk?

That's the question Dave Gerhardt of Exit Five asked Clare Corriveau, VP of Marketing at Tekmetric. Her answer reshaped how she built GTM at the company. Tekmetric's ICP is auto shop owners, and auto shop owners aren't on LinkedIn, rarely check email, and will never download a whitepaper. So Clare's team built around physical touch points instead: shop visits, partner-manager ride-alongs with parts distributors, a lightly-moderated Facebook group instead of a branded community platform.

Most GTM playbooks assume the opposite. Someone behind a laptop, checking email, scrolling LinkedIn on a break. That assumption isn't wrong for a lot of B2B SaaS. It's just not universal, and treating it as universal is where a lot of GTM strategy quietly breaks before it ever gets tested.

The Pattern Shows Up Everywhere Once You Look For It

At Ativion, the buyers weren't behind desks either. They were school administrators walking hallways, in classrooms, handling whatever came up in the building that day. A campaign built for someone checking an inbox between meetings doesn't reach someone whose day looks nothing like that.

Health tech has the same problem in a different shape. Clinicians are moving room to room, focused on patients, not signing up for demos between appointments. A nurture sequence timed for a typical office worker's day is timed for a day that buyer doesn't have.

None of these are edge cases. They're the norm in more industries than the standard GTM playbook accounts for.

Why Persona Work Has to Come Before Channel Selection

The standard order most GTM teams follow is backwards. Pick the channels that worked at the last company, build the campaign, then wonder why performance is soft. Persona and ICP work gets treated as a formality, a slide with a stock photo and three bullet points, instead of the thing that actually determines whether the channel plan can work at all.

Flip the order and the channel question answers itself. If the buyer doesn't sit at a desk, paid social isn't going to reach them, no matter how good the creative is. If the buyer is a clinician between patients, a webinar invite competes with an empty five-minute window that's about to get interrupted. The channel isn't underperforming. It was never going to reach that person in the first place.

Getting this right means actually understanding a buyer's day, not just their job title. Where are they physically. What are they doing with their attention when they're not actively looking for a solution. What would have to interrupt their actual routine for a message to land. That's a different exercise than building a firmographic profile, and it's the one that actually predicts which channels will work.

Meet the Buyer Where They Are

Paid ads aren't going to work on someone who isn't there to see them. That's obvious once it's stated plainly, and it's exactly the assumption most GTM strategy quietly makes without ever stating it.

Persona and ICP work isn't the boring part that happens before the real strategy starts. It is the strategy. Everything downstream, channel mix, messaging, cadence, only works if it's built for where the buyer actually is, not where a standard playbook assumes they'll be.