Supply chain's GTM potential: Lessons from the SaaS sector

Go-to-market strategies are second nature in SaaS—but in the supply chain world, they’re often ignored, and that's a missed opportunity. GTM may be tough to get right—but when it is, it becomes a powerful competitive edge.

Kara Brown is the CEO of LeadCoverage, a GTM consultancy that works exclusively with supply chain companies. We sat down with her to discuss how the supply chain ecosystem can take inspiration from SaaS strategies to unlock new growth potential.

A SaaSy move: "Account-based marketing best practices have been percolating in SaaS environments for 10 or 15 years. But in supply chain it's new." According to Brown, COVID broke the sales motion; what worked in 2019 isn’t working in 2025. To turn the sales engine back on, Brown turned to SaaS GTM. "I sit at an interesting intersection between what the SaaS community is doing and supply chain," she explains. "I have this really cool opportunity to bring the best of SaaS into the supply chain ecosystem."

Define your market: Choosing a niche—by segment, size, commodity, region—isn’t limiting. It’s the foundation of targeting, messaging, and revenue. "You should pick a lane," advises Brown. "Riches are in the niches."

"There is an opportunity cost of trying to serve the whole market," says Brown. The first step in applying GTM strategy to supply chain is defining the target market. "Finding the right ideal customer profile impacts the nuances of how we take someone to market," she explains. "If they're marketing to the wrong people, they’re not going to get the results you want."

"What are you actually servicing?" is a key question, Brown says. "If you really identify your ideal customer profile, not your wish list customer profile, then you have a much smaller group of companies that you need to target."

Discover your differentiator: Brown says that every customer her company serves has a key differentiator inside their organization. The key lies in finding it—and it’s rarely the flashiest part of the business.

Brown pulls from a case study in her book, The Revenue Engine, to illustrate her point. She discusses a broker client who found their hook: they do drayage at all 26 major U.S. ports, which is unusual. "Drayage isn’t actually the revenue driver," says Brown, "it’s just a thing they know really well. They really want OTR because that’s where the money is."

By focusing on the differentiator—in this case, drayage—they've become the foundation of a branded index that gets picked up by major media and ultimately converts.

Data is gold: According to Brown, most supply chain companies are already sitting on valuable operational data. Their mistake is in neglecting to treat it as a GTM asset. 

She references a long-time customer as an example. "They were doing an internal cross-border index when we started working with them in 2020 and we said 'hey, why don’t you publish this?' And then because of the macroeconomic shifts in 2022 and 2023, it became a really big deal."

By consistently branding and publishing industry insights, this customer set themselves apart. "All of a sudden they became this cross-border expert, because they’d been talking about it for three years at that point," Brown explains. "There were other companies, bigger companies who probably had just as much expertise, but they weren’t publishing it."