GTM LITURGY: Tactics by Stage, Not by Team

In Chapter 1, we did the uncomfortable thing: we admitted we’ve been measuring the performance of our tools instead of designing for the customer’s journey. We also named the buyer’s journey in a way that doesn’t collapse into CRM stages: Discovery → Create Confidence → Commit.

This post is Part 2, and it’s where we get practical. Not “framework practical,” like I’m about to hand you a laminated funnel poster and a pack of matching sticky notes. I mean accountability practical: the set of tactics Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success can use to help a buyer complete the job of each stage.

Because D3C isn’t a process you install—it’s a lens you use. But once you’re looking through the lens, you can absolutely be held accountable for what you do with it.

Each stage has a job. Each job has an output. Your tactics exist to produce the output.

The three stage outputs

Before we go function-by-function, here are the mechanically precise “deliverables” of each stage—the thing that must exist in the buyer’s world when that stage is done.

• Discovery output: a Solution Thesis. A buyer can say, in plain language: “Here’s the business problem, here’s the approach we believe will solve it, here’s how we’ll measure success, and here are the constraints we have to respect.”
• Create Confidence output: a Defensible Decision. A buyer can walk into the hardest internal room—security, finance, exec staff, procurement, the committee of doom—and make the case without you there, while still feeling emotionally safe about the bet they’re placing.
• Commit output: Durable Outcomes. The buyer’s decision becomes operational reality. The solution survives real life. Value shows up. Confidence increases after the purchase instead of peaking before it.

Now let’s talk tactics. And I’m going to be explicit about something most orgs get wrong: Marketing, Sales, and Success have tactics in every stage. They’re not equal in intensity, but they’re all present. If you treat D3C as “Marketing owns Discovery, Sales owns Confidence, Success owns Commit,” you will recreate the silo problem with nicer labels.

---

The tactics matrix (for skimmers who still respect reality)

This is the fast, skimmable view. The rest of the post adds nuance, examples, and the “why” behind each move.

---

Stage 1: Discovery

The buyer’s job: Find a solution to an existing business problem

Discovery is not “awareness.” Discovery is not “they came to our website.” Discovery is the buyer trying to solve a real business problem—usually tied to increasing revenue, decreasing cost, or reducing risk—and assembling a credible path forward.

And here’s the part that should permanently change your GTM posture: Discovery is primarily word-of-mouth. It always has been. It’s just that “word-of-mouth” now means analysts, peer review sites, communities, Reddit, LinkedIn comment threads, conference hallway conversations, and the entire public chatterbox of the internet. Gartner has even quantified this directionally: buyers report valuing third‑party interactions more than digital supplier interactions, and those third‑party sources provide “value affirmation.”²

Also: you cannot ignore the “late-arriving website visitor” reality. There’s a widely quoted Gartner stat—commonly repeated in B2B circles—that 60% of first-time visitors to a B2B website have already decided to buy; they aren’t arriving to begin Discovery, they’re arriving to validate and triangulate what they’ve already concluded elsewhere.³

LLMs didn’t invent this. They automated it. Instead of a buyer manually assembling opinions across twenty tabs, they ask a model: “How do enterprises make AI workflows safe?” and get a synthesized answer shaped by what the internet believes.

So Discovery tactics are not primarily “drive traffic.” Discovery tactics are primarily: shape what gets said about you, where it gets said, and how easily it can be retrieved and trusted.

What breaks Discovery

• The buyer can’t translate their business problem into a credible solution approach.
• The market’s “word-of-mouth” about your category (or your company) is muddy, inconsistent, or hard to find.
• Your narrative is vendor-centric (features) instead of buyer-centric (outcomes, tradeoffs, constraints).
• The buyer is relying on third-party sources, but you’ve treated third-party sources as an afterthought or a PR chore.

Marketing tactics in Discovery

Your job: make the solution path easier to find than the confusion.

1. Own the problem framing before you ever try to own the product narrative. If you lead with product language before the buyer has a clear problem statement, you’re asking them to buy a tool before they’ve decided what they’re building. The highest-leverage Discovery content is not “why us.” It’s “what’s actually happening, what the tradeoffs are, and what must be true for this to work.”
2. Build “word-of-mouth infrastructure,” not just content. Word-of-mouth is not luck. It’s a system: analysts, review sites, community participation, customer stories that sound like reality, and public artifacts people actually reference when they’re trying to make a decision.
3. Treat your website like a validation environment, not the Discovery engine. If many first-time visitors arrive already leaning toward “yes,” your website should behave less like a billboard and more like a confirmation lab: clear use cases, clear constraints, clear proof, and clear answers to the things buyers are nervous to ask out loud.
4. Design for LLM retrieval without turning into an SEO parody. This isn’t “stuff keywords into headers.” It’s: publish clear, factual, well-structured explanations of the hard problems buyers are trying to solve, anchored in public, linkable artifacts that can be cited and repeated.
5. Make “who this is not for” visible. Defining constraints honestly reduces buyer confusion and increases trust. It also prevents the wrong buyers from becoming your loudest “word-of-mouth.”

Sales tactics in Discovery

Your job: sharpen the buyer’s Solution Thesis, not hijack it.

1. Diagnose the business problem at the right altitude. If the buyer says “we need governance,” your job is to ask “what breaks if you don’t solve it?” until the primary business outcome shows itself: revenue, cost, or risk.
2. Offer a “solution map,” not a pitch. Good Discovery selling sounds like: “Here are the approaches teams take. Here are the tradeoffs. Here’s where it goes wrong. Here’s what tends to work.” Bad Discovery selling sounds like: “Let me show you our platform.”
3. Bring third-party reality into the conversation. If buyers are relying on analysts, reviews, communities, and peers (and they are), you should be conversant in those sources—not in a manipulative way, but in a “we understand how buyers learn” way.
4. Avoid the sin of premature certainty. Hand-waving kills trust. If a buyer asks a hard question and you answer “no problem,” you may think you’re being reassuring. You’re not. You’re telling the buyer you don’t understand what they’re carrying.

Success tactics in Discovery

Your job: make outcome reality visible early, without turning it into a scare story.

1. Feed the market with operational truth. The best Discovery assets often come from Success: the real obstacles, the real time-to-value drivers, and the real governance patterns buyers have to live with.
2. Offer implementation reality without fear-mongering. There’s a way to be honest about difficulty that builds trust: “Here’s what we’ve seen work. Here’s what slows people down. Here’s how we’ll prevent it with you.”
3. Build a reference muscle that doesn’t feel like a hostage negotiation. References aren’t just for late-stage procurement. They’re Discovery accelerants. Buyers want to talk to people like them.

---

Stage 2: Create Confidence

The buyer’s job: decide whether proceeding feels responsible or reckless

Create Confidence is where the buyer decides whether you are a safe bet. Not safe as in “nothing will ever go wrong.” Safe as in: “When something goes wrong—and it will—I won’t be alone, embarrassed, or unprotected.”

This is where B2B buyers get intensely human. A failed B2B decision can cost reputation, political capital, and sometimes careers. That’s why “nobody got fired for buying IBM” was never really about product superiority. It was about institutional safety.

This is also why so many deals end in “no decision.” That phrase sounds neutral, but it’s not. It usually means the buyer decided that choosing anything felt riskier than choosing later. And if you want the Create Confidence tactic in one line, it’s this: Don’t say “easy” when the buyer lives in “hard.”

Gartner’s rep-free buying survey is an accidental handbook here: buyers prefer self-service for general learning, but they prefer sellers for contextual intelligence; buyers also actively avoid irrelevant outreach, and they report mistrust when information is inconsistent.¹ That’s Gartner politely telling B2B orgs: “Stop being noise, and stop contradicting yourselves.”

Marketing tactics in Create Confidence

Your job: make the buyer’s internal defense easier to build than their internal doubt.

1. Build a real Trust Layer (not a “trust page”). Create Confidence is where buyers obsess over governance, privacy, security, compliance, reliability, support, and accountability. If your trust materials feel like PR, you lose. This layer should read like operational reality: clear answers, clear ownership, clear constraints, clear “how it works.”
2. Create a “Champion Kit” that doesn’t feel like propaganda. Give buyers internal memo templates, stakeholder-specific one-pagers, risk + mitigation narratives, and implementation expectations. If you don’t provide this, they’ll create it themselves, and you may not enjoy the results.
3. Tell the truth about the hard parts. Acknowledging difficulty builds credibility and reduces anxiety. Denying difficulty creates the worst possible outcome: the buyer feels alone, because they know it’s hard and you’re pretending it’s not.
4. Synchronize messaging across the company. When Sales tells one story, the website tells another, and Success tells a third, the buyer experiences it as mistrust. Buyers report that inconsistencies between website info and sellers can put transactions at risk.¹

Sales tactics in Create Confidence

Your job: make the buyer feel protected, not pressured.

1. Replace hand-waving with adult conversation. When the buyer asks a hard question, don’t rush to reassure. Lean into the reality. “That’s hard” is often the most confidence-building phrase you can use—if it’s followed by a credible plan.
2. Run a pre-mortem, not a pitch. “Let’s assume this goes sideways. What would cause it? How do we prevent it?” This isn’t negativity. It’s emotional protection.
3. Make the “no decision” fear discussable. Ask: “What would make this too risky to do this quarter?” Not as a trap—as an invitation for the buyer to tell you the real blockers.
4. Co-create a Mutual Action Plan that includes risk, not just steps. Most action plans are project plans with optimism. A real confidence plan includes stakeholder alignment, security review steps, legal steps, implementation readiness, and explicit mitigation for what tends to go wrong.
5. Be there when the buyer isn’t there. The buyer’s hardest internal meetings often happen without you. Give them language, artifacts, and support. Confidence is created in rooms you never enter.

Success tactics in Create Confidence

Your job: prove you’ll still exist after the contract, and that you know how the movie ends.

1. Join pre-sale for high-risk, high-complexity deals. Not as a “handoff intro,” but as a confidence signal. Buyers need to see that outcome ownership is present before money changes hands.
2. Show the first 90 days with brutal clarity. A simple, credible plan: responsibilities, milestones, governance requirements, and what “good” looks like. Buyers are terrified of vague onboarding promises. Replace vague with specific.
3. Tell a war story—then explain how you survived it. Buyers don’t need you to pretend nothing ever breaks. They need you to prove you know what to do when something breaks.

---

Stage 3: Commit

The buyer’s job: turn the decision into durable outcomes and sustained trust

Commit is where everyone pretends the story is over because the contract is signed and the dashboard looks happy. Commit is where the story actually begins.

This is where the customer discovers whether your company is a coherent system or three departments sharing a logo. It’s also where confidence either deepens (“we chose well”) or collapses (“oh no, we chose wrong”). Commit tactics are about making the purchase decision remain correct over time.

What breaks Commit

• The handoff feels like abandonment.
• Implementation reality doesn’t match pre-sale promises.
• Success metrics aren’t defined or measured, so nobody can prove value.
• The customer experience fractures across teams and tools.

Marketing tactics in Commit

Your job: reinforce confidence after purchase, not just before purchase.

1. Build “post-sale belief.” Customers need reinforcement that they made a smart decision. Give them education, community, examples, and narratives that help them sustain momentum internally.
2. Create adoption storytelling that doesn’t insult adults. “Getting started” content shouldn’t read like a toaster manual. It should read like a field guide: what good teams do, what goes wrong, and how to avoid traps.
3. Make customer proof operational, not just promotional. Case studies that only sell are forgettable. Case studies that teach are reused.

Sales tactics in Commit

Your job: don’t vanish; protect the champion; sustain executive air cover.

1. Stay involved through the messy part. You don’t have to run onboarding. You do have to be present enough that your champion knows they’re not alone when friction appears.
2. Protect the champion politically. Commit often fails not because the product fails, but because the champion runs out of air cover. Keep relationships warm at the exec layer and help the champion tell the progress story.
3. Treat expansion as earned, not hunted. The best expansion motion is: “We achieved the outcome we promised; here’s what’s next.” The worst is: “Congrats on buying; would you like to buy more?”

Success tactics in Commit

Your job: make outcomes show up, make confidence deepen, and make the solution survivable.

1. Operationalize the solution into the customer’s world. This includes governance, training, change management, adoption loops, escalation paths, and the boring-but-critical work of making the solution live inside their constraints.
2. Instrument value early. Most churn begins with a sentence nobody says out loud: “I’m not sure this is working.” Kill that sentence with proof. Define success metrics early, measure them, and report progress in a rhythm the customer trusts.
3. Create resilience, not just onboarding. Commit isn’t “we got it live.” Commit is “it stays live when reality punches it.” Build playbooks for failures, edge cases, stakeholder shifts, and policy changes.

---

The cross-functional rule

The customer experience is your seams

If you want one unifying tactic across D3C, it’s this: design the seams. Most customer experiences don’t break in the middle of a stage. They break at the handoffs: Marketing → Sales, Sales → Success, Success → Renewal, Renewal → Expansion.

And those seams are hardest to manage when Sales, Marketing, and Success each have their own overlapping systems. If the internal “truth” about the customer exists in three places, the customer will feel it as three realities.

AI may eventually help stitch those truths together, but don’t wait for magic. You can do the human version now:

• Agree on a shared narrative: problem → approach → success → constraints.
• Agree on a shared definition of confidence: what it is, how it forms, how it leaks.
• Agree on shared accountability: who produces which outputs, and who is on the hook when the buyer stalls.

---

The cheat sheet you can hand to the org

---

Sources

1. Gartner press release (June 25, 2025): “Gartner Sales Survey Finds 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience.” (Includes 61% rep-free preference, 73% avoiding irrelevant outreach, and 69% reporting inconsistencies between website info and sellers.)
   View source.
   ↩
2. Gartner press release (June 8, 2023): “Gartner Marketing Survey Finds B2B Buyers Value Third-Party Interactions More Than Digital Supplier Interactions.” (Includes “value affirmation” and the 1.4x statement.)
   View source.
   ↩
3. Sprinklr post quoting a Gartner-attributed stat: “What is Google’s Zero Moment of Truth.” (Includes the “60% of first-time visitors… already decided to buy” line.)
   View source.
   ↩