Why the Hardest Markets Make the Strongest Moats

Roughly 24% of go-to-market spend traces back to no commercial outcome at all. That figure comes from the 2026 State of B2B Go-to-Market report, which surveyed 511 B2B professionals across the U.S. and the U.K., and it anchors a blunt argument now circulating among founders: the standard advice to chase easy markets is backwards.

The essay, published by Entrepreneur, was written by a healthcare operator with twenty years in the sector who previously ran the Healthcast commercial business at Medtronic. His core claim: the markets everyone avoids end up protecting the companies willing to learn them.

"The moat prizes residents and drowns tourists, and both walk in through the same gate," he writes. The difference between companies protected by complexity and companies killed by it, he argues, has little to do with product quality and nearly everything to do with whether anyone studied the market's structure before deploying capital.

Why does speed cut both ways?

An easy market gives founders validation fast, with revenue settling the argument before the next board meeting. What rarely gets priced is the other side of the ledger. Every condition that makes a market easy for one entrant makes it equally easy for whoever comes next. Competitors arrive quickly, features converge faster, and price becomes the only argument left.

"The speed of validation and the speed of commoditization are the same speed," the author writes.

The inverse holds in healthcare, government contracting, financial services and defense. All share long procurement cycles, buying committees, and regulators with opinions. They are miserable to enter. Once a company earns its place, few competitors can take it away.

What does a hospital purchase actually look like?

Healthcare makes the case in its most extreme form. The doctor or nurse using a product usually is not the one paying for it, and one person almost never signs off alone. HIMSS finds that nearly 60% of organizations involve five or more people in technology purchases, including 23% with buying teams of ten or more. Budgets get set by the quarter. Regulation touches nearly everything.

AI in radiology shows what happens when founders ignore this. The algorithms read scans better than the baseline, hospitals saw real-time savings, and adoption still stalled.

Sunny Kumar, a partner at GSR Ventures, discussed the pattern on the Outcomes Rocket podcast. His view: strong technology without go-to-market discipline tends not to "never take off." With radiology AI, nobody figured out what each person in the deal needed — the physician wanted one thing, the finance lead another, and the payer and the patient each had their own priorities.

How expensive is a misread buying committee?

The author's own numbers: a Medtronic deal with FDA clearance secured, clinicians enthusiastic and a committed champion inside a large health system still sat for nine months in front of a value analysis committee nobody had budgeted for. The plan had prepared one argument when the sale required three — reimbursement for the payer, institutional return for the hospital and workflow fit for the clinician. The product was never the problem, he writes; repositioning across stakeholders eventually unlocked the win.

The survey data frames the competitive opening. Only 37% of the 511 professionals treat go-to-market as one integrated revenue framework, and 21% have no defined owner for it. If competitors look like that survey, roughly a quarter of the money deployed against you is being spent by teams borrowing plays from easier industries.

What separates residents from tourists?

The author prescribes three practices:

• Write the strategy down. A written plan covering personas, ICPs, every buyer in the deal, decision cycles and product fit beats a brilliant one sitting in one executive's head. Keep it in use after the person who wrote it leaves — sales cycles often run longer than people stay in their jobs.
• Map every yes. Every approver goes on paper; if there are fewer than five names, someone is usually missing. For each person, answer two questions: what would get them promoted, and what would get them blamed.
• Put the gates in the timeline. Evaluation periods, compliance reviews and committee approvals each get an owner, an evidence package and success criteria before the sale begins.

Peter Senge, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and co-founder of the Center for Systems Awareness, wrote: "Today's problems come from yesterday's solutions." The author's closing choice for founders: keep running the easier-market playbook and wonder why it does not convert, or learn how the market actually buys and build around it.