Latest / GTM Made Simple / 10 Years of Go-To-Market Lessons in 10 Minutes
Transcript
- I'm going to teach you 10 years of go to market experience in less than 10 minutes that led me to have a hundred million dollar plus exit. This is number 10. Revenue lies to you. When we crossed a million dollar, I thought I made it. When I crossed five million dollar or 10 million dollar, we thought this is amazing. But you know what happened? Everything started to fail. We had to figure out how are we going to do payroll, get new departments, new tools, hire new people, and we're running out of money every time. So, the big lesson for me was that revenue is not the way you look at success. What you look at success is by having growth margin. So, as soon as I understood how to look at business the right way, I started looking at profit and gross margin as the way to grow my business. Number nine, hiring a CMO doesn't fix a strategy problem. We hired three different CMOs and then fired all of them. Not because they were bad or they didn't know what to do, but because we didn't know what we were doing. We hired them because we thought they're going to take us from 1 million to 5 million or 5 to 15. The problem was that our business wasn't ready to do that. We didn't have the right process, we didn't have the right strategy, we didn't even have the right ICP to go after. So, the lesson we learned that was until we are about 10 million dollars, we should not be hiring executives, we needed doers. We needed people to go and execute. So, if you're under 10 million right now, don't hire executives, hire doers. Number eight, TAM tells you who exist, TRM tells you who's ready. TAM is total addressable market, which means that's what you tell to everybody else that how big the market is. But it's TRM is total relevant market, which means how many people are ready to buy. There's a famous stat out there that says that 95% of the people that are on your list that you're trying to sell are not going to buy. There's only 5% that are ready to buy. Stop obsessing about the TAM and really obsess about the 5% who are going to buy from us, and those are the ones for which we need to create all campaigns, all marketing, all sales, everything focused on that 5%. Number seven, acquisitions fail on integration, not on logic. While building this zero to $100 million plus exit company, we did five acquisition, three of them worked out, two didn't. And the biggest difference wasn't really the technology behind it, it was the people. We were looking for the right technology to fix all the problems we had, but really what we found out, it wasn't really the tech that was solving the problem, it were the people in those companies that were able to solve very specific problems, and the culture fit that we had to have between the two companies, that made all the difference. Remember, when you do five, six, seven different acquisitions, some are going to work and some are not going to work. Figuring out what's not working quickly and killing it and saying, "You know what? That was a bad deal, didn't work." And moving on was one of the hardest lesson to learn. Number six, ICP is not a marketing job. Have you ever noticed everybody in the company is always telling marketing what to do. And what happens is you will tell the marketing team to go and create some ICP, try to go and create some campaign and run their business for us. But what happened was we were focused on the wrong ICP in the first six months of our $5 million plus dollar business. And we were trying to figure out why do we have a churn problem? We figured out that we were working on the wrong ICP. Marketing was creating that ICP and campaign in isolation. We had to stop that and bring everybody together, the CEO, the entire executive team in a room, and then we aligned and agreed upon which ICP we should be focused on. The next quarter was our record quarter that we had in years. So, focus on the ICP, but don't do that in isolation, it's not a marketing job, it's go-to-market, and go-to-market is the business. So, do that as one executive team. Number five is you can fix all eight go-to-market pillars at once. Businesses fail because they try to solve all problems at the same time. What you need to do is figure out what are your top one or two problems you're going to solve and then really focus the entire business on it. So, for example, if your number one problem right now is growth, then get everybody focused on growth. Somebody told me long time ago that you can have everything in your life, but not all at the same time. The same principle exists true in business. Start with one question at a time, one problem at a time, and solve it as a team. Number four, you can't grow faster without creating forcing functions. I learned that lesson when my company Pardot got acquired by Salesforce and I realized that Marc Benioff, who's the CEO of Salesforce, used Dreamforce as a forcing function. He would say that, "Hey, look, we're going to have this big event where we're going to have 150,000 people come together in Moscone West in San Francisco to talk about our big idea, our big launch." And that forced every single department in the company to be aligned on a singular message, launching singular products that's driving business outcomes, build relationship with partners, getting your customers enabled on it. Every single thing in that company really pulled it all together to this one thing, one big forcing event called Dreamforce by Salesforce. I took that lesson back to Terminus. We did Flip My Funnel events. We did four to five events and every time we did an event, it forced everybody in the organization to come together and do whatever it takes to deliver a new product, a new process, or a new sales thing, or a new partnership. As a result of that, we grew to a million in the first year, five in the second year, and 15 in the third year. I don't think that could have happened without creating forcing functions that matter. Here's number three, which is all about the lie that we hear in the marketplace, which is that companies go up into the right. Well, there is a dip between product market fit and platform market fit that nobody talks about. I call it the muddy middle. Why? Because if you look at any company chart today and look at how fast they've grown, it will go up into the right. And everybody thinks that wow, that company really never had a problem. If you actually peel back the onion, you will see that every company during weeks, days, months, years, they had certain dips. That's when they're transitioning from one stage of the business to another, from a problem market fit to a product market fit to a platform market fit. And at every stage, there is this dip that happens. You have to learn to navigate it. That's the muddy middle, where most companies plateau and they don't know why they're not moving anymore. That's the dip, and you should be aware that that dip is going to happen at a $5 or a $10 or $15. It's going to happen. And when that happens, you have to go back and look at what stopped. What go-to-market problem is not working anymore? Who do I need to bring to solve that problem? Maybe at this point, for us, it was the partner-led. We had to get partners to grow our business again because we were doing crazy on outbound, crazy on inbound, but in order to get to 15 to 50, we needed partner-led growth. So, you may have to define a new go-to-market motion that you never thought about. And that will change your trajectory. And this is exactly why we built the go-to-market operating system, because those eight questions in the go-to-market operating system is constantly evolving, it's constantly building itself. And every business that grows from any scale to a new scale, you have to go back to the fundamentals. You have to ask questions like, "Where can we grow the most now that we are a $10 company? Now that we have acquired this company? Now that we are a $100 company?" you have to keep asking the same questions, but the answers are going to be different. At a million dollar, maybe inbound was the way to grow. In order to get to five, you probably need to add outbound or ads. If you want to scale to a hundred, you probably need partner led growth and event growth and community as part of it. If you want to go to a billion dollar, you got to build a great brand. All those things lead to the same questions, but a different answer because the stage of the business you're in is different. This brings me to number two, which is that your gut got you here. Sure hard work really got you here. The pattern recognition, all that stuff got you here, but it won't scale past here. Every founder has an instinct of what actually makes the company work. You're in every sales call, in every marketing call, in every campaign. You're part of everything and that that moment happens in every founder's life when you're like, "Oh my god, I need to transition this now and create a system." Here's what happens for founders. At a million or five million, you are the system. You are the problem solver. You come up with new pricing, new packaging, new positioning, and you think that, "Man, nobody else can do my job because I'm so smart." That's what stops you from scaling. What you need now is really a scalable process, which means you need a second layer of leadership that is going to take all those things and all those learnings from you and are able to grow. Here's the big lesson number one, and before I share that, I want to let you know that I learned this the hard way. I've have so many battle scars to show you, and all of those are lessons that are making the kind of business that we're building right now. The biggest lesson of the ten years this. Every one of the previous nine lessons is a symptom of the same root cause. The operating without an integrated system connecting strategy and execution. Most of us are all either working on all day strategy and pontificating and saying, "Here's where we need to go. Here's where the new product you can launch. Here's the new motion you need to do." Or you live in the other world, which is execution, and you're saying, "You know what? I'm just going to run ads. I'm going to run events. I'm going to build products. I'm going to go do that." The real world, the real magic happens when your strategy and execution connects. That's why GTM OS exists. You don't need 10 years to learn lesson number one the hard way like I did. You can go to runongtm.com/move and find out for yourself how it can take you to the next level in your business and find out which of these nine is actually the constraint you're facing right now and how to get unstuck. So, if you're ready, let's get moving.