The Modern GTM Flywheel

by Monika @ ColdIQ

Funnels are dead, playbooks are too

Cold email is dead. Cold calling is dead. SEO is dead.

Business is dead.

These claims miss the point. It's not the channels that are failing - it's the outdated, disconnected strategies behind them.

The old GTM approach was built on scale-first, context-later strategies: mass blasting emails, dumping budget into ads, and hoping something sticks.

In 2025, this results in bloated, fragmented go-to-market (GTM) systems with poor yield. The future belongs to connected, AI-powered systems that reduce friction, personalize every touchpoint, and compound momentum across marketing, sales, and customer success.

This guide helps you reach this goal.

1. The GTM mindset shift: from funnels to flywheels

Old GTM systems were linear: awareness to consideration to conversion. Then you handed off the customer and started over. The flywheel flips this: customer experience fuels the next cycle. Momentum builds through feedback loops, not funnels.

Key pillars of the GTM flywheel:

Customer-obsessed: Happy customers aren't the end - they're the engine.
Cross-functional: Marketing, sales, success, and ops run as one team.
Data-driven: Strategy starts with insight, not intuition.
AI-augmented: Every GTM motion is accelerated and connected by intelligent workflows.

In short: It's not more activity. It's better coordination.

What breaks traditional funnels:

1. Hand-offs: Each stage introduces friction.
2. Delayed feedback: Learning happens too late to course correct.
3. Siloed tools: Insights and execution don’t flow together.
4. Misaligned metrics: Each team optimizes for different outcomes.

By replacing hand-offs with loops, delayed insights with real-time learning, and disconnected tooling with unified workflows, flywheels create lasting momentum.

2. Why most outbound fails

Outbound isn't dead. It's just done wrong.

Here's why most teams struggle to make it work:

- Spray&pray mentality

Sales teams still send thousands of low-quality, unpersonalized emails and expect engagement. That worked in 2012. In 2025, it's just noise.

- Disconnected data

Account research lives in someone’s Notes app. Value props are copied from old pitch decks or generated by ChatGPT with no context. Nobody connects the dots between what the buyer cares about and what the product can solve.

- Outdated messaging

Most messaging is product-first. Buyers want outcomes, relevance, and proof, not a spec sheet.

- Manual, isolated workflows

Even when reps create detailed account plans, they rarely live beyond a slide deck or Google Doc. They're not reused, scaled, or connected to execution.

- GTM bloat

Too many tools. Too many teams. Too many "strategies". None of them integrated. AI offers a way to unify them all and eliminate inefficiencies.

👉🏻 What works:

Dynamic value props matched to a segmented list
Personalized outreach based on real-time research
Unified messaging across outbound, inbound, and success
AI-powered workflows that tie research directly to execution

3. Building the flywheel: 4 interconnected levers

Flywheels come together through focused actions in four important GTM areas.

1. List building: Precision over volume

Modern list building is powered by enriched, dynamic datasets. Instead of buying static lists, leverage AI to:

Identify accounts with live intent signals
Enrich contacts based on job changes, buying group roles, and tech stacks
Segment targets based on shared strategic priorities

Your list is your strategy. Get it right, and everything else improves.

2. Offers: Solve, don’t sell

Stop leading with features. Instead, tailor offers that map to your ICP’s biggest bets.

Research-led templates that speak to live initiatives
Personalized assets (e.g., audit, landing page, short video) per segment
Multi-threaded touches for complex buying groups

3. Messaging: Context is king

AI doesn’t just generate content. It generates context. Use it to:

Match strategic initiatives to your solutions
Pull data from 10+ sources in seconds (with tools like Clay)
Craft messages that feel hand-written and hyper-relevant

Messaging isn’t a copywriting challenge anymore. It’s a context delivery system.

4. Systems: Operationalize everything

Account insights shouldn’t live in isolation. Build systems where:

Account plans sync with your CRM
ABM content is generated from the same data
Call transcripts update messaging and strategy in real time

Execution becomes a living loop. The flywheel spins faster with every turn.

4. The AI-powered flywheel in action

A modern GTM flywheel doesn’t just run on AI - it runs on orchestration, feedback, and learning. Here’s how high-performing teams operate today:

Phase 1: Strategic account research

Use a mix of AI, tools, and human insight to gather:

Tech stack: Are they using competing or complementary tools? A company using HubSpot + Gong likely has a mature sales/marketing motion.
New joiners: Did a new VP of Marketing just join? That’s a high-propensity trigger for change.
Hiring trends: Are they hiring for product marketing or RevOps? Signals budget, growth stage, and pain points.
Recent events: Acquisitions, rebrands, layoffs, or IPO filings shape the timing and tone of outreach.
Industry shifts: Regulatory changes, economic headwinds, or category consolidation.
Investor insights: Are they VC-backed or PE-backed? What are the board's expectations? Recent funding rounds signal pressure to grow.

Phase 2: Value prop alignment

Take that intelligence and connect it to your capabilities:

Match problems to outcomes
Prioritize use cases per persona
Align offers to budget cycles or strategic initiatives

Phase 3: Asset creation and activation

Build a toolkit based on the research:

Account summary in CRM
High-context outbound messaging
Personalized landing page with use-case copy
ABM campaign assets (custom ads, email nurture, webinar invite, one-pager, social media content)

Phase 4: Coordinated execution

Now, unify marketing, SDRs, and sales:

Shared playbooks
Synced cadences
Consistent value props across channels

Each touch amplifies the others. The buying group hears the same message, everywhere

Phase 5: Insight loop

Every interaction creates more intelligence:

Call recordings reveal hidden pain points
New stakeholders emerge during demos
Unopened emails signal poor fit or wrong persona

You feed this back into

Retargeting efforts
Updated sequences
New positioning tests

This loop is how great GTM systems learn and compound. Human insight and AI work together. Strategy becomes scalable. And momentum becomes unstoppable.

5. Beyond strategy: metrics that prove you are doing it right

Traditional metrics:

Emails sent
Calls made
Impressions

Flywheel metrics:

Pipeline per rep: How much quality pipeline is one rep producing?
Win rate by strategic fit: Are we resonating with the right buyers?
Time to opportunity: How quickly are new accounts engaging?
Multi-threading depth: Are we engaging the full buying group?
Revenue velocity: How fast are deals closing from first touch?

These metrics don’t just show performance - they show momentum.

👉🏻 build once & let it spin

What worked in 2020 is obsolete in 2025.

You don’t need more activity. You need alignment.

You don’t need more tools. You need interoperability.

You don’t need more budget. You need compounding efficiency.

The GTM flywheel is the answer. It turns insight into action, action into feedback, and feedback into growth.

Author your own playbook. Infuse it with AI.

Make it dynamic. Make it scalable. And most importantly, make it unified.

Because when your GTM engine runs in sync, growth becomes inevitable.

🤑 bonus: the full GTM flywheel we use to generate pipeline at ColdIQ

What we’ve built at ColdIQ is a complete GTM flywheel, where cold outreach, warm content, and sales enablement work as one connected system.

Here’s the strategy that’s helped us scale past $400k in MRR and keep growing consistently:

Instead of sending a pitch, we start with value.

Every email offers something worth consuming: a tactical guide, a strategic breakdown, or a relevant video. We use outreach not to ask for a meeting - but to create curiosity and drive traffic to high-intent zones:

Website landing pages
LinkedIn company page
Personal LinkedIn profiles
Interactive lead magnets or demo pages

This shifts the cold outreach goal from “book a call” to “generate qualified traffic.”

From there, our tech stack takes over:

Website visits trigger enrichment and routing flows.
Clay + HubSpot handle segmentation, scoring, and prioritization.
Personal LinkedWarm leads are moved into sell-by-chat or outbound cadences depending on behavior.In profiles

In short: we use email outreach to fuel our flywheel - not as a stand-alone motion.

Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

Step 1: value-led cold outreach

We send high-relevance outbound using:

Instantly, lemlist, HeyReach for cold email
Smartlead.ai for deliverability protection and inbox diversification

Our CTAs don’t ask for time - they offer:

A short, personalized video
An industry-specific value doc
A downloadable Notion template
A teardown of a strategy or funnel

The only goal is to move the prospect from “who are you?” to “this is interesting.”

Step 2: channel retargeting

Once they engage - click, reply, or visit - we begin warming them across other channels:

LinkedIn profile viewers → captured via Sales Nav, PhantomBuster, Bardeen
Post engagers → tracked with Common Room, Trigify, Teamfluence
Website visitors → enriched via RB2B (US), Snitcher, Albacross (EU)

Each touchpoint routes leads via Clay for scoring and assignment.

Step 3: multi-path conversion

Depending on where the buyer shows up, we activate one of three systems:

Sell-by-chat (email, DM, WhatsApp) for higher-intent leads
Automated sequences (email, LinkedIn) for marketing-qualified leads
Ad retargeting + marketing nurture using HubSpot, Customer.io, LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads

Everything syncs into a shared CRM view (HubSpot), so reps always know which leads are active and how.

It’s not that cold email is dead. It’s just no longer the full strategy - it’s a trigger for the real GTM engine behind the scenes.

If you're serious about scaling your business. Inside the ColdIQ Accelerator, we walk you through the exact systems, automations, and tools we used to become the fastest-growing AI Sales Agency.

We’re doing this every single day with over $450K/month in revenue and +120 agencies in 10+ countries running our systems.

CLICK HERE

👉 Click the link now and see how to build an agency that runs lean, closes 10 new clients, and scales without chaos in the next 90 days.