The phrase is used at two levels. Large companies talk about their “motion” to describe how the whole business acquires customers: product-led, sales-led, partner-led, or a mix. For a founder still finding what sells, the more useful level is narrower: a motion is a single hypothesis you can test and measure.
A motion at that level has four parts:
- An offer, described the way the buyer would describe it.
- An audience: an ideal customer profile for the companies, and the persona inside them who feels the problem.
- A route to the buyer: the channels you use and the first meeting you are trying to get.
- A buying process: the stages a deal goes through, who is involved and how it closes.
Change any one of them and you have a different motion, with a different funnel. A consultant selling a part-time CISO service to scale-ups, and the same consultant selling a packaged product to SMEs, is running two motions even though the expertise is the same, because the buyers, the messages, the objections and the deal cycles all differ.
That is why it helps to name motions explicitly. If you keep them in one pipeline, the results average out and you cannot tell which hypothesis produced the meetings. If you keep them apart, each with its own playbook, list, sequence and stages, you can compare them side by side and put your time where the conversions are.
The guide Go-to-market motions: how to test several ways of selling at once covers how to set each one up, run them in parallel and decide what to keep.