Every company’s go-to-market is a fishing trip. You’re either casting a net or throwing a spear—and a worrying number of you are standing in the river holding both, soaked to the waist, catching nothing, telling your board it’s a “hybrid strategy.”
It’s not a strategy. It’s a wet guy with two tools and a deadline.
Let me explain the difference before you burn another quarter pretending you have a plan.
Net Fishing
Net fishing is volume. You cast wide, you reach everyone you can, and you accept that most of what comes up in the net gets thrown back. SEO, paid social, content, webinars, the newsletter nobody admits they skim—this is the net. You’re not trying to land one perfect buyer. You’re trying to make the funnel fat enough at the top that the math works out at the bottom.
Net fishing wins when you have a big market, a short sales cycle, a lower price point, and a product that more or less explains itself. If you can sell to thousands of people who buy in days, and your cost to catch each one is small, cast the net. Self-serve SaaS, e-commerce, anything transactional—net all day.
The failure mode is romantic delusion. You see the net come up heaving and you feel productive. Look at all these leads. Then you check the quality and three of them are competitors, four are students writing papers, and one is a guy named Doug who downloads everything and buys nothing. Doug is in every database in America. Doug owes us all an apology.
Spear Fishing
Spear fishing is precision. You pick the fish—a specific named account, a specific decision-maker—and you go after that one, on purpose, with a personalized, patient, slightly obsessive campaign. This is account-based marketing, enterprise sales, the long relationship play. You’re not filling a funnel. You’re stalking a whale.
Spear fishing wins when the opposite economics apply: big deals, small market, long and complex sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, six or seven figures on the line. When there are only 200 companies on earth who can write the check, you don’t buy a billboard. You learn the name of the CFO’s golden retriever.
The failure mode here is also romantic, just lonelier. You spend four months, eleventy thousand dollars, and most of your founder-energy chasing one trophy account—and when it falls through because their budget froze in March, you have nothing else in the water. You’ve been so busy aiming that you forgot to actually feed the company.
Hybrid
Here’s where I have to be honest with you, because that’s the gig.
“Hybrid” is real and it’s also the most abused word in your go-to-market deck. A true hybrid uses the net to generate awareness and demand across the market, then spears the high-value accounts that surface from it. Net at the top, spear at the bottom. Or net for your SMB segment and spear for enterprise—two motions, two teams, two playbooks, run deliberately.
That’s a hybrid.
What most of you mean by “hybrid” is we tried both, neither worked, and we’re emotionally unwilling to admit it. That’s not a hybrid. That’s a hostage situation where the hostage is your CAC.
So. Three questions.
1. Which Are You, Really?
Not which one is on the strategy slide. Which one is your money actually doing.
Pull the last four quarters. Where did closed-won revenue actually come from—inbound volume, or named outbound effort? Where did the spend go? If 80% of your budget is net activity but 80% of your revenue closed from a handful of relationships your VP personally drove, congratulations: you’ve been spear fishing with a net budget and calling the gap “brand.”
Founders, brace yourselves: you usually pick the motion that matches your personality, not your market. The technical founder nets everything because cold outreach makes them want to fake their own death. The sales-animal founder spears everything because the funnel feels like homework. The market does not care about your comfort zone. The market has never once cared about your comfort zone.
2. Are You Positioned Right?
This is an economics question, not a vibes question. The right motion is dictated by four numbers, and you already have all four:
Deal size. Small deals can’t afford spear fishing—the cost of the chase eats the catch. Big deals can’t survive on net fishing alone—nobody signs a $400K contract because they liked your retargeting ad.
Addressable buyers. Millions of potential customers? Net. A few hundred named accounts who could plausibly buy? Spear. If you can list your entire real market in a spreadsheet, stop advertising to strangers.
Sales cycle. Days and self-serve push you toward net. Months, committees, and procurement push you toward spear.
What you can afford to spend to land one. You can lavish real money on landing a whale and still come out ahead. You cannot spend whale money to land a minnow and stay solvent. This is where most mismatches quietly kill companies—spearfishing an $8K product with a $40K sales process, or netfishing a quarter-million-dollar enterprise deal and wondering why the leads never close.
Lay your actual motion next to those four numbers. If they disagree, the numbers win. They always win. They’re just slower to gloat than I am.
3. How Do You Figure Out What to Do—and Actually Change It?
Start from the math, not the metaphor. Map your real buyer first: who they are, how many exist, how they actually buy, and what one of them is worth over their lifetime versus what it costs to catch them. That ratio tells you the motion before any consultant does. Including this one.
Then build the muscle you’re missing—because it’s almost always the one that scares you. If you’ve been netting and the economics scream spear, you don’t need more content; you need someone who can run a disciplined named-account play and isn’t afraid of a phone. If you’ve been spearing and the economics scream net, you need a demand engine that works while you sleep, so the company stops living or dying on your personal calendar.
And run the change as an experiment, not a religion. Pick the motion the math demands, fund it for one honest quarter, and set a kill criterion before you start—the number that tells you it’s working or it isn’t. The goal is to know by a date certain. The enemy isn’t the wrong motion. The enemy is the year you spend half-committed to two, soaking wet, productive-feeling, and broke.
You don’t have to be the best fisherman on the river. You just have to stop standing in it holding gear that doesn’t match the fish.
Now go check your funnel. And somebody please, finally, block Doug.
