The core question behind this episode is simple and uncomfortable.
Why do so many GTM changes fail even when teams execute harder?
Pipelines look healthy. Activity is up. New tools are deployed.
And yet revenue quietly stops compounding.
Welcome to GTM Vault, trusted by 25,000+ founders and operators building durable revenue systems.
This week’s guest is Roee Hartuv, Senior Pricing Advisor and Head of GTM Expertise at Willingness to Pay.
Roee has led 150+ pricing and GTM transformations across SaaS companies ranging from $1M to $1B+ ARR. Before that, he built revenue architecture at Winning by Design, trained thousands of GTM leaders, and spent two decades across sales, customer success, and enterprise GTM roles.
That background matters because this episode is not about pricing theory. It is about where pricing decisions quietly break GTM execution.
Inside this episode
This conversation breaks down how pricing and packaging decisions quietly shape every downstream GTM outcome. Sales velocity, customer quality, margin durability, and even which ICPs a company can afford to pursue are all determined long before revenue shows up in a dashboard.
We discuss
1:38 Why GTM transformations fail when teams change parts instead of systems
3:44 Fixing symptoms vs redesigning the GTM engine
5:12 Leading vs lagging indicators of GTM health
6:00 Why pricing cannot live in spreadsheets
7:59 Why pricing mistakes compound year over year
10:24 Why GTM engineers became a system-critical role
14:38 Why packaging matters more than price
18:20 How pricing expands who you can afford to sell to
19:37 Why AI breaks traditional SaaS gross margin logic
20:43 What good AI monetization design looks like
23:36 The first GTM decision founders should fix
24:19 The single system decision that unlocks alignment
Highlights
GTM transformations fail at the seams
In practice, this is what teams experience: marketing optimizes for volume, sales discounts to close, customer success absorbs misfit customers, and finance wonders why margins keep slipping.
Most companies do not have a GTM system.
They have marketing, sales, and customer success operating in parallel.
The moment one team optimizes locally without understanding downstream impact, the system breaks. More leads overwhelm sales. Misaligned ICPs leak into CS. Outcomes stall while activity rises.
Nothing fails loudly.
It just stops compounding and no one notices until growth stalls.
Pricing is the highest-leverage GTM decision
Pricing is not a finance task.
It is the foundation of monetization, sales motion, value communication, and growth velocity.
When pricing is disconnected from sales and customer feedback, friction shows up everywhere. Sales cycles slow, win rates drop, and growth stalls. When pricing is wrong, the damage does not show up once. It compounds every year.
Packaging beats price
Boards obsess over price points.
Operators should obsess over packaging.
Feature-based good, better, best plans look logical but often sabotage value selling. Buyers do not buy features. They buy outcomes.
Value-based packaging improves sales conversations, increases LTV, expands acquisition capacity, and reduces downstream friction. When the structure is right, the exact number matters far less.
GTM engineers are system owners, not tool admins
GTM engineers emerged because someone needs end-to-end visibility.
They are the only role that sees awareness, acquisition, conversion, and expansion as one system.
When treated tactically, they become a crutch. When empowered strategically, they become a multiplier.
Serving one department breaks the system. Serving the whole system fixes it.
AI changes everything about monetization
Traditional SaaS assumed near-zero marginal cost.
AI does not.
Usage-based costs force a new pricing reality. Guardrails matter. Usage-based or credit-based models win when pricing is designed intentionally. Poor assumptions scale teams directly into margin problems.
Growth without pricing design is how companies quietly lose money while scaling.
Frameworks and playbooks from the episode
1. The GTM root cause rule
If performance stalls, do not fix execution first.
Audit:
ICP
Packaging
Pricing metrics
Buyer motion
Symptoms are downstream. Causes are upstream.
2. The pricing compounding test
Ask one question: If this pricing decision is wrong, how much damage compounds over three years?
If the answer is significant, treat it as a system redesign, not a spreadsheet update.
3. The GTM engineer multiplier rule
GTM engineers must:
Serve the entire customer journey
Align incentives across teams
Design systems, not dashboards
Anything less is wasted leverage.
4. The ICP alignment rule
One decision creates more GTM clarity than any other.
ICP alignment across marketing, sales, pricing, and customer success.
Misaligned ICPs create every downstream GTM problem teams recognize later.
What you should do this week
Identify where pricing is compensating for broken GTM design
Review whether packaging reflects buyer value or internal feature logic
Audit which GTM metrics drive behavior versus noise
Check whether GTM engineers serve the system or a single function
Remove one metric that looks good but drives the wrong behavior
Why this matters
This decade does not reward brute-force growth.
It rewards design.
Most companies are not losing because they cannot sell.
They are losing because pricing decisions are patching broken GTM systems.
Enterprise-scale revenue does not forgive design flaws.
Build systems, not chaos.
This is GTM Vault.
If this episode changed how you think about pricing, GTM, or revenue design, forward it to one operator responsible for growth this quarter.
Connect
Follow Roee Hartuv: LinkedIn | Willingness To Pay
Follow Rick Koleta: LinkedIn | GTM Vault
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