Latest / GTM Made Simple / These Are The 6 GTM Motions (Don't Try To Be Great At All Of Them)
Transcript
- Do you know which marketing channels are the best to help your company grow the fastest? The reason this is important is because I didn't know how to answer that question when we were building my last company, Terminus. We grew it to a million to five to 15 in three years, and then had a private equity company buy us out. And in that process, I talked to a lot of private equity people and leaders who were trying to buy us out, and one of them asked this question that stumped me. They asked like, "How fast are you growing?" They asked me a subsequent question saying, "How fast can you grow?" And I didn't know how to answer those questions, and that literally pushed me back to how our company is growing, and it made me think about, "Well, if I can't answer that question, how am I going to sell my company? How are we going to tell everybody in the company how they can grow, where to focus?" So, this question [music] of what channels to use to drive your business forward, especially to make sure that you know which channel to use to drive your revenue faster, is a really important question that every CEO must learn to answer. I'm going to literally show you how to do that in this video. So, first, as we think about scale, we have to understand the way businesses grow are actually using the go-to-market motions. Go-to-market motions is are nothing but the way you can go to market. For example, there are six go-to-market motions: inbound, outbound, event-led, community-led, product-led, and partner-led. Those are the six go-to-market motions. Now, all these go-to-market motions and the research that over the last number of years points to the fact that most companies have maybe one or two go-to-market motions that they're really good at. Because let's face it, you cannot be good and great at every single one of them, and you don't want to be because when you start trying to do that, you dilute your messaging, your positioning, and your team doesn't really know what to focus on. So, you really have to help them figure out, "What are the channels? What are the go-to-market motions that's going to drive your business forward?" So, let me just walk through some of it and and I'll use examples for each one of them. For inbound, think about like HubSpot is a great example. They were an investor in my last company, Terminus, and I remember talking to Brian and Dharmesh, the co-founders of that company, and they said, "Look, we created this inbound channel where people are going to actually come and and buy from us because we wanted to build an incredible engine where we don't have to go and sell to people. We want people to come to us." So, they started an inbound. They wrote ton of content. So, if you want if you feel like your business is such where you can drive traffic and conversations through inbound where people come to you because you create so much content, well, inbound engine is the way to go. Another one is outbound. When I was at Salesforce, my last company, Pardot, we got acquired by Salesforce, I saw them have floors of sales people right there. And those all those floors had many people making outbound calls every single day. That was an outbound motion. So, if you are in a business where you need lots of people talking to individuals day in and day out, that's an outbound motion. You can have lots of businesses can be very successful in it. It's one of the hardest thing to do. The margins could be low, but if that's what you need, then you need to focus on that and be the best at it. The third one, [music] which is something that I love. This is how we built GTM Partners now, is through events. Events is a amazing go-to-market motion because in that you're face-to-face with your customers and future customers. And when you spend time with people face-to-face, two things happen. Number one, they become loyal fans of yours because they get to know you as an individual. And number two, you can charge a lot of money a lot more money than what you would in a transactional where you're on a phone or they're filling up a form and just trying to buy a software. So, if you are in a position where you can do events and you have that that bone in your body where you want to do multiple different events, it will be phenomenal. We did 20 different road shows in 20 different cities in 1 year. Every single road show had over 100 people and every time we had a road show we will close about 10 to 20 deals. So, you can do the math. That's how we grew our business from a from nothing to over 10 million in revenue. So, that's events. Number four is community. Without a community, you're simply a commodity. That's something I've said for many years. Let me repeat that. Without a community, you're simply a commodity. Everything else, your loyalty from a customer perspective can be bought, but the [music] only scenario in which the loyalty cannot be bought is when you're part of a tribe. When you're part of a community and therefore you will see the most successful companies in the world have a tribe. One of my friend is is a big Disney fan. You know, they have back channel way of how do you get in the line? That she will literally travel on her suitcase have tags that are only available for very special people that are part of the Disney world. All those things happen because they're part of a tribe and only she gets the discounts and the people in the tribe know that she's getting. So, if you can build a community, maybe it's online through Slack or Discord or in person, that community is a great way to create loyalty. That is one thing that you get from building a community and that again requires a very specific type of bump. So, we've gone through inbound, you've gone through outbound, you've gone through events, you've gone through community. The fourth one is product-led growth. This go-to-market motion requires that your product should almost be self-serve. So, if your product is something where people can go online and sign up and upgrade to it, it'd be amazing. My son who's 15 right now is building websites and he was able to go to Base 44 which is one of the website creation or where he was looking at Lovable as well and he was able to create a website for one of my friend who is a truck who has a trucking business. So, the trucking business CEO gave him a bunch of pictures and just he just interviewed him and [music] without any time he was able to build a website. Now, that base 44, which is and there are hundreds of websites builders now where you can talk to it and the website is created. They didn't need sales rate, they didn't need inbound, they didn't need outbound, they didn't need community, they didn't need any of it. What they needed was a product-led growth model. And and it has this they signed up. Oh, you want to connect a domain? You pay more. Oh, you want to do XYZ? You need to pay more. So, that is a product-led growth engine. This brings me to the sixth and the really the most important of all the go-to-market motions that will likely help you grow the fastest and it's called partner-led growth. Think about companies that we all know. Let just use HubSpot as an example again. The reason I want to use that is because they do have an inbound go-to-market motion, but they have a bigger partner motion. 60% of their revenue, even today, comes from partners who sell or resell their software. So, as a result of that, they don't need to have sales people in their company as many as the partnerships that they've built. There are companies today that are white-labeled under other companies where they say, "You know what? I don't need to be a logo on a building. I just need to sell my services underneath your services." So, it's a partner-led growth motion. Great for companies that give sell data where you don't want to be known for your data, but you can be known and and get attached to another company that provides maybe a bigger user interface and their customers are buying, but they need data underneath it. So, these six go-to-market motions are how companies grow. The big idea over here is you can't do all six. The best companies in the world pick one, maybe two go-to-market motions, go all in on that, and when they're successful in it, they start experimenting with others. So, if you [music] are a company right now and you're trying to figure out what to do and you're doing a little bit of inbound, a little bit of outbound, a little bit of partner, a little bit of sales, a little bit of product, that's why your business is dying. If you want your business to grow and grow fast like the very question that private equity executive asked me [music] 10 years ago that is still ringing through my ears is the same thing. You know where can you grow and most importantly the revenue, what is the fastest way to get your revenue? If you want to figure out the fastest way to get your revenue, you have to figure out [music] which go-to-market motion can scale you the fastest. As a result of this, we have literally built a whole assessment around called the [music] runongtmos.com. You can go to that website, lots of research on it. Specifically, if you go to runongtmos.com/move, you can fill out your information and you will be able to figure out which of these six go-to-market motions can help your business grow fast. So, if you're ready, let's get moving.