Perspective Detectives

We solve go-to-market problems

About

Perspective Detectives is a consulting firm specialized in solving go-to-market problems for small and medium sized businesses.
It is founded and led by Daniel Foppen.

Why Perspective Detectives

We believe virtually all business problems are people problems and that people problems stem from confusion, which in turn comes from people not understanding different perspectives of people they work with.So in order to solve problems in business, one first need to start with the different worldviews - or perspectives - of the different stakeholders involved.This is what Perspective Detectives does; we hunt for a variety of perspectives that will help inform new insights, ideas and solutions to problems.We focus specifically on helping Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMB) with GTM problems.

About The Founder

Daniel Foppen is a seasoned B2B SaaS product and go-to-market executive with more than two decades of experience helping companies sharpen their market focus, build high-performing product organisations, and execute GTM strategies that drive measurable growth.Daniel currently serves as Vice President of Product & Product Marketing at Convoso, a leading outbound dialing platform. There, he rebuilt the product function, modernised the roadmap, and delivered innovations across analytics, compliance, AI-assisted workflows and revenue-generating features. His work helped the company evolve from a traditional dialer into a performance-driven platform adopted by some of the industry’s most sophisticated sales operations.Before joining Convoso, Daniel spent nearly a decade at Oracle, where he held global leadership roles across product management and product marketing functions. Working inside one of the largest enterprise software organisations in the world, he developed deep expertise in market segmentation, positioning, large-scale product launches, and aligning GTM motions across sales, product, engineering and partner ecosystems. His time at Oracle sharpened his ability to bring structure, clarity and repeatability to complex product portfolios.Earlier in his career, Daniel helped scale Artificial Solutions, an early high-growth European AI/NLP startup. There he played a critical role in shaping product direction, guiding the commercialisation of emerging conversational AI technologies, and supporting enterprise deployments across multiple industries. This experience grounded him in the realities of fast-paced startup execution, customer-driven innovation, and building GTM foundations from scratch.As the founder of Perspective Detectives, Daniel now brings this blend of enterprise discipline, growth-stage scrappiness, and product-led GTM expertise to small and medium-sized businesses that need senior-level guidance without the overhead of full-time leadership. He helps organizations clarify their ICPs, sharpen positioning, build scalable revenue motions, and deliver the GTM foundations required for meaningful, sustainable growth.

Work

Perspective Detectives solves go-to-market (GTM) problems, and we’re good at it. GTM is a collection of activities that together bring a product offering to market. Doing GTM well is hard. There are many nuances around things like:

  • launching products successfully,

  • defining a sensible sales strategy,

  • uncovering ICP (ideal customer profile) and key personas,

  • running early adopter programs,

  • developing positioning and competitive differentiation,

  • setting pricing strategy,

  • understanding and managing the funnel,

  • managing industry analyst relations,

  • putting a strong partnership strategy forward,

  • managing the product lifecycle,

  • enabling the sales team to be successful,

  • and building up a performing GTM team.

In the last two decades Daniel has worked in fast growing start-ups, medium sized companies and large enterprises tackling GTM challenges around all of these topics listed (and more) and through that journey built a unique range of skills to solve GTM problems.

Our services

Access to a robust GTM expertise is limited. Few companies have the luxury to be able to hire a full-time resource with deep experience solving these challenges. Perspective Detectives offers part-time consulting engagements with small and medium sized companies having GTM problems.Below you will find some examples of engagements.

GTM Strategy Development

For companies that need clear direction and a unified GTM plan. If your teams are working hard but in siloes (inconsistent messages, unclear priorities, different interpretations of what success looks like) you’re a fit for this service. Companies at this stage often have a strong product but lack a cohesive plan that ties Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success together. You know growth is possible, but the path isn’t obvious or agreed upon internally.
We will help:

  • Define a single, coherent GTM strategy across product, sales, marketing, and CS.

  • Establish the company narrative, value proposition, and core messaging pillars.

  • Identify misalignments in ICP, sales motion, pricing, and product priorities.

  • Create a GTM operating model that aligns teams around one plan.

  • Provide a 90-day actionable roadmap to execute the strategy.

Clarity on Ideal Customer Profile

For teams struggling with unclear customer focus or market fragmentation. If you’re selling into too many segments, hearing conflicting feedback, or seeing inconsistent win rates, this service is for you. Companies like this usually sense they’re spreading themselves too thin and need to narrow in on who actually buys, who buys repeatedly, and who succeeds with the product. You know focus will accelerate growth — but you’re unsure where to draw the line.We will help:

  • Lead an ICP definition process across product, sales, marketing and leadership.

  • Distill buying triggers, pain patterns, success conditions, and firmographic markers.

  • Create clear ICP descriptions in a language that everyone in the company can understand.

Differentiated Positioning + Messaging

For companies needing a sharper, more differentiated story. If your product is good but your messaging is vague, undifferentiated, or too technical, you’re a fit here. These companies often feel they’re losing deals not because they lack capability, but because they can’t clearly explain why they matter, why they are different. You want your team telling one cohesive, compelling story.We will help:

  • Define the core positioning statement and competitive narrative.

  • Build a messaging hierarchy from company → solution → product → feature.

  • Translate complex capabilities into crisp, buyer-centric language around value.

  • Create a clear messaging framework that can be used for content.

  • Train your team on consistent use of the messaging architecture.

New Product Introduction Strategy

For teams perceiving New Product Introduction (NPI) like “launch theater” without impact. If your NPIs don’t translate into adoption or revenue, you’re a match for this service. These companies often build good features but lack a structured way to bring them to market across marketing, sales and CS. You want launches that actually move numbers, not a series of disjointed checklist tasks.
We will help:

  • Assess the readiness of product, messaging, pricing, and sales enablement.

  • Define launch tiers (small, standard, major) and align scope accordingly.

  • Provide crisp demarcations for the stages of POC, Beta, Limited Availability and General Availability.

  • Build the launch plan template across product, sales, marketing and CS.

  • Provide the governance structure and tracking mechanisms for robust execution.

Product-Market Fit Diagnostics

For companies with early traction but unclear repeatability. If revenue is coming in but patterns aren’t obvious. When churn, slow adoption, or inconsistent value realization keep coming up this service is ideal. These companies often sense they are close to Product-Market Fit (PMF) but not fully locked in. You want clarity on what’s truly working versus what’s accidental.
We will help:

  • Interview customers across wins, losses, and churn to reveal real patterns.

  • Map feature usage and success conditions to ICP and value drivers.

  • Identify what’s working, what’s accidental, and what’s blocking scale.

  • Produce a PMF Heatmap that guides roadmap prioritization.

  • Turn qualitative learnings into a PMF improvement plan.

Fractional GTM Leadership (Product + Marketing + Strategy)

For SMBs that can’t hire a full-time executive for GTM. If your company is growing but you don’t yet need (or can’t justify) a full-time VP for GTM, this model fits. These companies usually have capable teams but lack senior guidance, cross-functional alignment, and disciplined execution. You want strategic leadership without the full-time overhead.
We will help:

  • Provide part-time leadership to guide product, product marketing, or GTM strategy.

  • Lead cross-functional check-ins, reviews, and alignment meetings.

  • Drive roadmap clarity, strategy, execution cadence, and cross-functional prioritization.

  • Coach existing team members to elevate capability and autonomy.

  • Help the company convert complexity into clarity and disciplined execution.

Let's talk!

Perspectives

A few perspectives on typical GTM challenges small and medium sized businesses face and how to tackle those problems.

Defining your ICP (Without the Confusion)

Most companies will tell you they know their ICP. Ask sales, marketing, product, and leadership to define it—and you’ll get four different answers. That’s the first sign the company does not have an ICP problem. It has a coherence problem. A perspective problem.
ICP is not a persona. It’s not a demographic profile. It’s not a set of avatars with stupid names like “Director Donna” or “Builder Bob.” And it’s definitely not a long list of attributes someone copied from some website (or ChatGPT for that matter).
ICP is the internal agreed upon description of who actually buys and uses your product. That’s it.
The confusion comes from treating ICP like a marketing artifact instead of a coordination tool. Different teams legitimately have different perspectives:

  • Sales sees messy, deal-level reality. They care about authority, urgency, budgets, and competitive traps.

  • Marketing sees segments and patterns. They care about audiences, channels, and messaging clusters.

  • Product sees user jobs and pains. They care about workflow, friction, and unmet needs.

  • Leadership sees opportunity and direction. They care about revenue concentration and long-term strategy.

When you ask each for “the ICP,” you get their slice of truth—just not a shared truth.
A good ICP definition unifies those perspectives. It gives each team a consistent reference point they can interpret through their own lens. The goal is not 100% accuracy. The goal is clarity for the team.
A practical ICP includes three components:

  • Firmographics, which is a fancy term for how much revenue they roughly make, and what industry and geography they’re in. The revenue range tells you what type of org you’ll see, industry informs what their business model is and geo tells whether you can even reach them. It narrows focus on a target.

  • Pains and Drivers: What challenges are so painful it forces them to act? What events drive this. This equips product to build and sales to sell.

  • Value: What must be true for them to get value? How much is it worth solving the problem? This aligns product, CS, and pricing.

If your ICP doesn’t help a sales rep qualify a deal, or a marketer choose a campaign, or a PM prioritize a roadmap item, it’s not an ICP.
The worst mistake companies make is going too wide. An ICP is not a list of “everyone who might buy.” It’s the subset of buyers where you win repeatedly and predictably. Narrowing ICP is not limiting revenue—it’s unlocking it by reducing friction across the entire GTM system.
Here’s the fastest diagnostic:
Can your entire company answer: Who do we build for? Who do we sell to? Whats the value we deliver? using the same 3–5 sentences?
If not, you don’t have an ICP—you have aspirations.
ICP is not an academic exercise. It’s the foundation of everything that follows: positioning, pricing, messaging, route-to-market, product strategy. Get ICP tight, and the business tightens with it. Get ICP wrong, and everything downstream becomes noise.

Why GTM Is Singular, Not Plural

One of the most common signs a company is struggling with GTM is hearing someone say, “Our GTM strategy for product launch ABC is kinda different from our GTM strategy for this other product launch XYZ.”No, you can’t have multiple go-to-market strategies.GTM—go-to-market—is singular because a company has one coherent way of selling, marketing, delivering, and supporting its value. It is the operating system of the business. You can launch dozens of products, but you can only have one GTM strategy.
Smaller companies confuse product launches with go-to-market. A launch is a moment in time. GTM is the system. Launches plug into GTM—not the other way around.
Treating each launch as its own GTM creates chaos:

  • Different ICPs.

  • Different messaging frameworks.

  • Different qualification criteria.

  • Different pricing logic.

  • Different motions and incentives.

The result is predictable: sales doesn’t know what to chase, marketing doesn’t know what to prioritize, product doesn’t know what “good” means, and leadership can’t see a signal through the noise.
A real GTM strategy answers five questions:

  • Who do we serve? (ICP)

  • What problem do we solve? (Positioning)

  • How do we sell? (Sales motion)

  • How do we create demand? (Marketing motion)

  • How do customers succeed? (Customer Success motion)

Everything else is execution.Only in rare cases—usually large enterprises with multiple business units—does it make sense to maintain multiple GTM strategies. But 99.9% of businesses do not face that complexity. What they have is a lack of strategic coherence. When a company tries to run multiple GTM strategies, they’re not choosing optionality—they’re choosing fragmentation.Here’s the litmus test: If you removed every product from your portfolio except one, would your GTM still make sense? If the answer is no, you never had a GTM strategy. You had a collection of projects.GTM must be singular because clarity must be singular. A unified GTM gives you focus, consistency, and a shared narrative. A fragmented GTM gives you friction.You don’t need many GTMs. You need one and you need a good one.

TAM/SAM/SOM Without the Analysis Paralysis

There’s a recurring scene in companies preparing for boards, investors, or strategy offsites: a 40-slide TAM deck filled with questionable assumptions and false precision. It looks impressive. It is not useful.TAM/SAM/SOM was designed to shape thinking in a direction, not to create the illusion that you can forecast your way into certainty. But somewhere along the way, founders and teams started treating market sizing as a scientific pursuit instead of a strategic one.Let’s define them first:

  • TAM: The total universe of spend in your general market. (Total Addressable Market)

  • SAM: The portion of TAM where you can plausibly compete. (Servicable Addressable Market)

  • SOM: The part of SAM you can realistically win in the near term. (Serviceable Obtainable Market)

This isn’t a math exercise. It’s a filtering exercise.The purpose of TAM/SAM/SOM is simple. It's to answer: Should we pursue this market, or not?
That’s it. It is not about calculating that the opportunity is worth $564,493,000. Nobody believes those numbers anyway.The real value lies in two things:1. Directional Clarity
Is the market big enough to matter? Too small to bother? Fragmented or concentrated? Growing or declining?
If building the output of the TAM/SAM/SOM exercise materially changes your strategy, then it’s valuable. If it doesn’t, stop analyzing.2. Prioritization
Which of the possible markets gives us the greatest shot at sustainable growth? That’s what you’re actually answering.There are only two useful methods:Top-down: Fast, dirty, and perfectly acceptable for non-Fortune500 companies.
Bottom-up: More accurate, grounded in actual buyer behavior and pricing. But only useful if you have access to real data.Teams get stuck because they try to bottom-up model a market they haven’t validated or don’t have much data about. What’s especially dangerous is not accepting that good enough is good enough. That’s how months get wasted building instantly forgotten spreadsheets.A practical rule of thumb: If building your TAM/SAM/SOM model takes longer than a week, you’re doing it wrong.For SMBs, TAM/SAM/SOM is a coarse tool. It tells you whether you’re talking about a neighborhood, a city, or a continent. You don’t need a detailed map to know whether you should expand your search radius.When TAM/SAM/SOM is used well, it protects you from chasing shiny objects. When it’s misused, it becomes a distraction disguised as diligence.

Contact

Schedule a 30 minute conversation to see whether Perspective Detectives can help you solve your GTM problems.