TL;DR: Smaller B2B companies competing against bigger, better-funded firms can’t win by copying their spend. The Milwaukee Brewers opened this season with a payroll less than 40% of the Los Angeles Dodgers and still won more games than anyone in baseball. They got there by building a system over several years, not by buying one. Smaller companies need the same approach to go-to-market: get the fundamentals right first, make them repeatable second, and only then scale. Each stage earns the next.
My hometown Milwaukee Brewers are playing the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series right now. The winner goes to the World Series, somewhere Milwaukee hasn’t been since 1982. Heading into Game 4, the Brewers lead the series three games to none, one win away.
If you follow baseball, you know this matchup is about more than two teams. The Dodgers opened the 2026 season with a payroll of about $324 million, second highest in the game. The Brewers opened at about $126 million, which ranked 20th. Los Angeles has ten players earning $20 million or more a year. Milwaukee has one.
And the Brewers won more games. A franchise-record 103, the best record in baseball, on the way to their fourth straight division title.
I’ve been watching this series with one particular client in mind. They’re a B2B professional services firm competing against companies with far bigger marketing budgets than they’ll have anytime soon. Every conversation about their go-to-market strategy eventually lands on the same question: how do we compete with firms that can outspend us on everything?
The Brewers have a pretty good answer.
This Wasn’t Built in One Season
The easy version of the story is a scrappy small-market team getting hot in October. That’s not what happened here.
Milwaukee’s run has been years in the making. Four straight division titles. A young core that was given time to develop. And last October, a hard lesson: the Dodgers swept them in the NLCS and held Milwaukee to four runs in four games.
So here’s the thing. The Brewers didn’t respond by trying to become the Dodgers. They didn’t go on a spending spree to match LA star for star. They kept building the system they had and came back better at it, with six more wins than the year before and the best record in baseball again.
That’s the long game. It’s also the part most smaller companies skip.
The Trap: Playing the Bigger Company’s Game
When a smaller firm loses deals to a bigger competitor, the instinct is to match them. Their website looks slicker, so we redo ours. They’re running paid campaigns, so we should, too. They have a ten-person marketing team, so let’s hire a director and an agency and see what happens.
It feels logical. It’s also a game you can’t win. If your budget is a fraction of theirs, trying to show up everywhere they show up means showing up thinly everywhere. You end up with random acts of marketing, a frustrated sales team, and a CEO who quietly concludes that marketing just doesn’t work for a company like theirs.
It’s the business version of a lineup full of hitters swinging for the fences. Exciting when it connects. Most of the time, it doesn’t.
What “Getting on Base” Looks Like in GTM
The Brewers’ identity is built on fundamentals: deep pitching, strong defense, and an offense that grinds out at-bats, wears down the opposing pitcher, and keeps getting on base instead of waiting for the three-run homer. It isn’t flashy. Over a long season, it wins.
For a smaller B2B firm, the go-to-market equivalent looks like this:
- A narrow, honest ICP. Not every company that could buy from you. The specific companies where you consistently win, and where your size is an advantage instead of a liability.
- Positioning that’s sharper than the big firms. Larger competitors often sound generic because they’re trying to appeal to everyone. A smaller firm can say exactly who it’s for and why. That specificity costs nothing.
- Follow-up discipline. Most pipeline doesn’t die in a dramatic loss. It dies in silence, because nobody followed up a third time. Wearing down a pitcher is a patience game, and so is this.
- One shared definition of a good lead. Sales and marketing working from the same scorecard so effort goes to the accounts that actually close.
- A referral engine that’s built on purpose, instead of left to chance.
None of this requires a big budget. It requires focus and the willingness to do unglamorous work consistently.
Build the GTM in Stages
Here’s where my client’s situation gets interesting, and where a lot of GTM advice falls short. The right strategy for a company at its current size is not the right strategy for where it wants to be in three years. Trying to install the future version today burns budget the business doesn’t have and creates complexity the team can’t support yet.
So the plan we’re building is staged on purpose, and the first stage is deliberately unglamorous. Job one is nailing their positioning. They don’t love being called a boutique firm, but that’s how the market already describes them. Fighting the label would burn energy they don’t have. The better move is deciding what “boutique” should stand for, so it reads as an advantage instead of a size disclaimer.
Job two is getting the most return out of what they’ve already committed to through the end of the year, which is mostly events. No new channels yet. Just sharper targeting before each event and real follow-up after it, so the money already on the calendar actually turns into pipeline.
Stage one: Foundation. Get clear on who you serve and why you win. Tighten the message. Make sure sales and marketing agree on what a good opportunity looks like. Capture what’s working in your referral relationships so it becomes repeatable.
Stage two: Consistency. Turn what works into a rhythm. A sales process the whole team actually follows. Content and outreach that show up predictably, aimed at the accounts that matter. Enough data to see where deals stall.
Stage three: Amplification. Now you invest in reach: paid programs, more headcount, new markets. Spending at this stage multiplies something that already works, instead of hoping the spend will create it.
Each stage earns the next. Skip one, and the money you put into stage three leaks out through the gaps you never fixed in stage one. The question for a $20M firm competing with a $200M one isn’t “how do we look like them?” It’s “what do we need to be great at right now, and what comes next once we are?”
Depth Beats Stars
One more lesson from Milwaukee. In Game 1 of this series, the Brewers’ starting pitcher lasted just over four innings. Four relievers covered the rest without allowing a run, and the Brewers won 2-1. No single hero. A system that held.
A lot of smaller firms run on stars. Usually it’s the CEO, who is still the best salesperson in the building, the main source of referrals, and the person holding sales and marketing together. That works until it doesn’t. A staged GTM is, in part, a plan to build the bullpen, so growth stops depending on one person’s calendar.
Whatever Happens This Week
A short series can swing on a few pitches in a way a full season can’t, and the Dodgers are very, very good. But the lesson here doesn’t depend on who wins this week. Milwaukee’s season came from years of building the right way, on a budget that was never going to match LA’s.
That’s the honest takeaway for smaller companies too. There’s no shortcut, and no single campaign closes the gap overnight. But a GTM built in the right order, one stage at a time, compounds. A year from now you’re not hoping for a hot streak. You have a system: sales and marketing pulling in the same direction, a pipeline you can actually see, and growth that doesn’t depend on outspending anyone.
You can’t outspend the Dodgers. You can outbuild them.
Michelle Krier is the founder of Foxbridge Consulting. Foxbridge helps CEOs and Presidents of B2B professional services companies build predictable revenue engines by aligning sales and marketing. If this resonated, schedule a conversation.
