Latest / GTM Made Simple / I Hit $1M in 9 Months Twice. These 8 Questions Are Why.

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I Hit $1M in 9 Months Twice. These 8 Questions Are Why. · GTM Made Simple

• 0:00
  Sangramhere. So in nine months, both the GTM partners and terminus, we went from 0 to $1
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  million in revenue. And we did it without a marketing team or a sales team. And I'm not trying
• 0:12
  to brag about it, but I was able to do that twice and it wasn't magic. And so every time somebody
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  asked me a question around that, I have to go through the process. I put it all together, and
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  I want to teach you exactly that process. Right now, most companies have too many questions, maybe
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  even too many systems, and they get inundated with all the different things they want to do, but they
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  don't ask the questions they need to ask. And I'm going to have these eight questions that
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  surrounded every single day around everything we did. And everybody in the company understood what
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  those questions were and how to answer those questions. That helped us build a 0 to 1 million
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  in revenue in nine months. Now, this is again not a magic trick. This is not something that I'm
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  sharing. And I'm saying, well, what it is. Well, two things that I want you to know. Number one,
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  terminus was built in 2014 2015. So that was an upmarket the times for good. And so during that time
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  we raised a little bit of money and we showed how to do account based marketing. That was
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  a new category that we built. So I'm sharing that because in 2014, zero two, 1,000,009 months, but a
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  little bit of investment and a little bit of money to drive the business was something most
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  companies were doing go to market. Partners, on the other hand, was in 2021. That was post-Covid. That
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  was not the time where people were investing a lot of money in, in companies. And yet we were
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  still able to do 0 to $1 million in nine months. So when I look at both times where one is funded,
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  one wasn't funded, one was an upmarket, one was in down market. I think about what were the
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  principles and the questions keeps coming up in all the CEO roundtables we do. So I'm going to
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  just walk you through those eight questions as to why this happened and how you should apply those
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  questions and the answers to those questions, because they're going to be different. The answers
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  are obviously going to be different. You might be a services business, you might be in healthcare,
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  you might be a tech company. You might be a course building company, like whatever it is. Those eight
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  questions remain the same, but the answers are going to be different. And it really matters how
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  you think about those eight questions. So I'm just going to walk you through those eight questions
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  and how I answered it for both of my companies. And you can just take a pen and paper, write it
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  down and see if you can try to answer these questions the best way you can. And here is the
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  punchline. I'm going to share that with you upfront. I might repeat it again towards the end.
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  The importance of answering these questions is not having certainty. It is about
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  having clarity. Let me say that again and just double click on that. Most folks try to have a
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  certain answers like, all right, this is gonna give us leads. This is gonna drive our business forward.
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  This is gonna do something different. This is gonna take away competitors off. That's not what
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  this is about. This is about you as the CEO and your team as an executive team. If you're on a go
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  to market executive team for you all to have clarity around it, because all the research we
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  have done, most businesses fail not because they don't have the perfect go to market strategy, not
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  because they don't have a clear goal. They fail because they do not have a system. And James Clear
• 3:19
  in his book Atomic Habits, said it really well. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You
• 3:25
  actually fall to the level of your systems. So this whole session that I'm about to do with you,
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  I'm here to help you have clarity around the questions that are going to be the most important
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  questions that you and your team need to have clarity on. So here we go. Question number one
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  where can you grow the most? Now that is a very important question. The most is the intentional
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  part of it. For us at terminus, we were going after demand gen marketers because they had the budget
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  to drive their business forward. So we were tapping into the demand gen first and saying, you
• 4:00
  can do more with account based marketing. And that's where we decided to grow. That was our
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  ideal customer profile. When you think about GTM partners, now, we look at, well, go to market is more
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  of an executive function. We believe that CEO should own go to market. So where can we grow the
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  most? We have to figure out how to focus on go to market executives and CEO. So we started
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  roundtables at the executive level. We started to bring roadshows to different cities where only
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  executives were brought in. So that's the idea. We were very clear that we want to grow and go to
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  market partners at the executive CEO, C-suite level. Whereas at terminus, we were trying to grow
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  at the demand gen level, the VP of marketing level. That level of clarity allowed us to have great
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  campaigns, great positioning and everything we did. Which really brings me to question number two
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  which products create the highest customer value. Now you think about that question as to which
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  products. Well, you can launch any number of products at terminus. We had account based
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  advertising as the first product because it was easy to implement, easy to launch, easy to get
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  people excited about. The ability to target accounts was phenomenal. So people wanted to do
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  that. As a result of that, we had a really quick close ratio, right? We had we literally would have
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  a few conversations or do an event called Flip My Funnel, and that drove 25 to 30 clients every
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  single time we did that. The reason was it was easy to buy, but then we ended up buying five
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  different companies because we identified that these people needed to grow their business. And in
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  order to grow their business, advertising was just one thing. They wanted to have analytics. So we
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  bought an analytics company. They wanted to have chat systems, we bought a chat company. Then they
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  wanted to have ability to send email signature and get first party, third party data. So we bought
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  that company. We ended up buying five companies because that's where the customers was getting
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  the highest value, so they can stay with us and grow with us. That's how we build terminus within
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  the first nine months. We focused on account based advertising because that was the fastest way for
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  us to grow and create the most customer value. On the flip side, you think about go to market
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  partners. Now have we got to a zero? 2 million was at that time people wanted to do research in 2020
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  when as we launched, they wanted to figure out how can they grow at the sea level as a CEO.
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  post-Covid, they want to figure out what is the new playbook, how do I go about it? So we invented
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  this thing called go to market operating system, and we started doing advisory around those eight
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  pillars of the operating system. So the highest value for a CEO was clarity and transformation
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  for their business. That was what we focused on. That really made most of the money for us in the
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  first nine months, helping us to get to $1 million. Which really brings me to question number three.
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  How will you engage your customers with a differentiated point of view at terminus. This was
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  very easy. This was one of the best things that we ended up doing. We launched this this movement
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  called flip my funnel. If you go online, you will take a look at it. There's 100,000 people were
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  part of this movement. We did events and we literally created a flipped funnel, meaning we
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  said, well, for for a number of years, if you're in sales and marketing, everybody knows the top down
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  funnel. Well, you like literally it's a bucket where you put a lot of leads at the top and you
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  get 1% of the leads at the bottom. We said, what if? What if you can flip it? And we created this idea
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  of flip my funnel, where you could start with the best accounts that you want to target, and then
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  from there engage them and target them and turn them into advocates. That idea, not the software.
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  That idea became our differentiated point of view. People wanted to be on that journey with us. We
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  started a podcast on it. We did so many things on it, but that was our differentiated point of view.
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  Flipped my funnel on the go to market side. We figured out like the way CEOs want to run their
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  business. They want clarity on transformation. So we created this operating system that was not
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  about how marketing works, how sales works, how CS works, but rather then go to market team works.
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  Think about it. Every CEO, what do they want? They want clarity. They want transformation in their
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  business. They don't want bickering. They don't want people running after each other saying I'm
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  better or my job is more important, or here are my numbers. What they want is for everybody to work
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  together as a high performing team. So as a result of that, our differentiated point of view started
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  becoming about go to market operating system. You should run your business on GTM OS, because that's
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  like running on an operating system that is constantly getting upgraded to have a high
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  performing business that's stuck. So that's how our brand and demand, that's how we were created, a
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  differentiated point of view. Which brings me to question number four, which go to market motions
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  get you and your revenue faster. So most people think if I want to go faster, I'm
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  going to start doing inbound. I'm going to start doing outbound calls. I'm going to start doing
• 9:00
  sending more emails out. All of those things are good ideas. But the question is which go to market?
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  Motion will get you your revenue goal faster to get to your revenue. Go faster. At terminus, we saw
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  well, nobody was at that time. This is 2014, 2015. Nobody was running executive oriented
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  events for Dimension People. So we started running flip flop events. Remember, that's our
• 9:24
  differentiated point of view. So why not run a differentiated point of view event. So we invited
• 9:31
  not only our customers but our competitors to the same event. As a result of which what
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  happened was industry leaders started to come to that event. As a result of this, analysts started
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  to come to that event. And every time we will do an event called flatMap funnel, because it wasn't
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  a terminus event. It was a flip map for an industry event. It became the most important event
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  that people started to do. Other events around it. And all of a sudden, we were the most important
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  event that was happening. Not once, not twice, but almost four times a year. As a result of that, we
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  drove every single time we did an event. We would create 25 to 30 new customers. That was our
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  fastest way to grow our revenue. When I think about GTM partners, the way we went in the first
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  year was we had a book called move, just like had IBM's B2B book at the terminus to build that
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  thought leadership at the event. We wrote a book called move that became a Wall Street Journal
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  bestseller. So we wrote that, and then we did events around for executives because we
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  understood events is one of the best ways to to build that relationship, especially if you're
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  building a new brand where they don't know about you. And if you run ads to people who don't know
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  about it, they might see your ad and you need to send 10,000 ads. Or I think there are stats that
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  says you have to have 10,000 emails or some sort of content they have to see in order for you to
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  for them to trust you and potentially buy from you. That is worth 10,000, 50,000 or 100,000 words.
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  So if we are doing advisory, that is typically a $100,000 advisory. We wanted to have trust. And the
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  way you build trust for CEOs is by spending time with them and teaching the go to market operating
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  system. So we did an executive sessions, roundtables, not 1000 people that we didn't flip
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  our funnel because that was after marketing directors and at that level. So you could get
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  thousands of people for that event. This one was 30, 40 people. Executive roundtables were
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  peers. The CEOs wanted to learn from each other. Executives wanted to learn from each other. They
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  didn't want it to be recorded. They wanted it to be vulnerable. They want to talk about the biggest
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  stakes that their business have and the bets that they are taking. And that's why we were able to
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  grow really fast, because they were able to see trust in the result of that operating system that
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  helped us create more pipeline and drive more revenue. Which brings me to question number five.
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  How do your customers experience ROI? This is very important. A lot of times
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  companies think that will the ROI of my in my business is the product and the features that we
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  have. And therefore you are probably always talking about how good your product is. That's not
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  how it works in our customers mind at terminus. The ROI for them was, for the very first time, they
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  could do advertising to accounts. For the very first time, they could say, hey, if you spend $100
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  on these five accounts, we would see the results and we will see how many impressions are there on
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  those accounts, because B2B was all about accounts. So for the very first time, the ROI for them was
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  how easily they can spin up an account based advertising thing. That was the ROI. So we talked
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  about that all the time at the at GTM partners. What we figured out the ROI for them was going
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  back to clarity and transformation. What CEOs wanted more than anything wasn't a playbook,
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  wasn't a roadmap as much as everybody wants to sell about it. They wanted to say, what do I need
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  to do now? Where should I go? How do I create a differentiated point of view which go to market?
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  And all these eight questions are the same eight questions they were facing. And we gave them
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  frameworks to answer those questions. So the ROI in their mind was pure clarity, because even one
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  idea for a CEO, if they get it and they're able to implement, could drive their business so much more
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  forward. So we had to understand what was the ROI in their mind. Which brings me to the next
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  question, which is what else can you observe them with? Right. What else can you buy? Because
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  ultimately the way businesses grow is not by selling the same product over and over. That is
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  great. That is fine. But how do you grow tenfold with even the same number of customers? And that's
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  what upsell serving is all about. I learned that at Salesforce when my last company, Pardot, got
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  acquired by Salesforce, I went from a $10 million company to a $10 billion company. And I used to
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  wonder, how does a $10 billion company operate? How can they forecast? How do they do all these
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  projections to the marketplace and be so close to the penny almost, or sometimes two hundreds of
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  thousands of dollars for a $10 billion company? Well guess what? Let me bring you in on a little
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  secret. The way they're able to do that is because 6,070% of the revenue is already baked
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  in with existing customers, because they knew that they're going to have more licenses with them and
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  more revenue, and it's already baked into the contracts. So they already had that 70% of the
• 14:25
  revenue. All they were doing was maybe 10 to 30% of the revenue that they were really, truly
• 14:30
  forecasting. So I've thought about the same thing when we're building terminals. All right. How can
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  we observe our customers at that time? Because it was a new category called account based. We were
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  like, we had two choices. Either we build or we actually buy. So instead of building
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  more products, we started to buy products because we're able to buy them at cheap because they were
• 14:53
  solving problems that they didn't know. They didn't have the narrative, they didn't have a
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  differentiated point of view, they didn't have a powerful backing. They didn't have thought
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  leadership like we did with the books. So we use that to our advantage. And in the first year we
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  started looking at acquisitions, observing became the name of the game, and that helped us to grow
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  not just to 1,000,009 months, but to five and then 15 in the third year, and then ultimately getting
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  acquired by a private equity firm. When I think about go to market partners, because we were
• 15:21
  focused on CEOs, what is it that the CEOs will care about that they will pay more of? We found
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  out that advisory workshops were really good, so we would do 100,000 advisory workshops, but then
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  they needed to talk to someone. They wanted to be in a room where nothing is recorded and
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  everything can be spoken without telling their teams the problems they are facing. They didn't
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  want that. So what we decided to do was, all right, what if we do one on one advisory or a group
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  advisory for CEOs that will bring them in, but they can share their challenges and be together.
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  Try to solve for it with no recordings, no nothings. And therefore you will see me saying, hey,
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  I had a conversation with the $19 million series CDC, CMO, or CEO about this. The reason I do those
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  videos is because I can tell exactly the details of the business, but I can tell you the details of
• 16:09
  the problem because the problems are very similar. So we created a close knit network of these
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  CEOs and executives to figure out how they can have transformation in their business, and that
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  became a much better product for it. So we did research with them, we did advisory with them, and
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  we did workshops for them. And each one of them was a layer up. And the more they want time with
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  us, or the more clarity they want, the more transformation they want. They ended up buying
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  5000, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, upwards of Of $300,000 worth of services from us.
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  Which brings me the next question, which is this is very important. What are the key metrics that
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  builds the health of our business? When I was building terminus, the number one metric we looked
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  at was an RR net revenue retention. Can a customer how long it takes to acquire,
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  but also how much it requires for me to keep them as a customer. But most importantly, what will it
• 17:04
  take me to observe that customer so that I can have return of it? Because I've already spent the
• 17:09
  money to acquire this customer? Most businesses have a leaky bucket. They do not focus on keeping
• 17:15
  the customer longer or more importantly, selling more to them. We will know that that is one of the
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  best thing. The metric out there is that if your NRI is about 120%, you can grow without adding a
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  single new customer, and almost you can grow like double your revenue in 3.8 years without
• 17:34
  adding a single new customer if your NRI is 120%. So I understood that
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  stat cold and I focused on that. And as a team, we all focused on that. And that helped us to grow at
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  a million to 5 to 15, because that was the key metric we looked at. Now when I look at go to
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  Market partners, we're two people. And in terminus we had 300 people. As we grew beyond Milan and all
• 17:57
  that stuff, we're just still two people and building about a $10 million business. And in the
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  first year, what we looked at was simply that is how do we get new, new customers? But then the
• 18:08
  new metric has emerged, which is employee per revenue. We had no idea what that metric meant
• 18:14
  when we're building terminals, but now that we're building this, this makes a lot of sense. Employee
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  per revenue is a way of looking at, well, how much more revenue can I get from when an employee is
• 18:24
  in the company, either full time or fractional? So now there was a time at terminus where we could
• 18:30
  say, if you get if somebody is at $100,000 employee, and if you get 300,000 out of out of
• 18:35
  outcome out of them, then that's great. Now, I believe with AI and everything we look at is then,
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  hey, if you're gonna hire a fractional or an employee, if that person needs to have ten x, if
• 18:46
  you put 100,000, we need to get a million worth of return from the investment we make because of
• 18:52
  what's available to do with AI. That is the health of the matrix. So you have to figure out what is
• 18:57
  the metric that's going to bring people together, have clarity for the business. And and you can get,
• 19:02
  by the way, all these details on round GTM. The assessment will give you dashboards
• 19:09
  of each of the metrics that you should focus on for your business. Some might make sense right now,
• 19:15
  some might make later on, but you can go to run GTM and get that assessment. Which, by the way,
• 19:21
  brings me to the last and probably the most important question. How do you give your team
• 19:26
  clarity, alignment, and trust? Well, at terminus, I remember in the first few months we were just
• 19:33
  cats and dogs because we couldn't figure out what what was working, what was not working. So we would
• 19:39
  just have this argument and debates around, well, this is better, that is better. And remember, we
• 19:43
  didn't have a marketing team, we didn't have a sales team. We were just trying to build it. As
• 19:47
  founders. We're selling, we were evangelizing, we were buying, we're doing marketing, we're writing
• 19:52
  copy, we're doing events. So we were just it was chaos. But at that time, what kept us clear
• 19:59
  was a differentiated point of view. And all the seven questions that I shared with you, what is
• 20:03
  the ROI with it? What is the customers experiencing? What does their ICP look like? Where
• 20:08
  can we grow the most like? Those seven questions really brought us together, and every time we
• 20:13
  would meet, we would walk through some level of these eight questions. So let's say we were
• 20:18
  thinking of of acquiring a new business. We'll walk through these seven questions and come back
• 20:24
  to this eight question like, do we have clarity, alignment and trust to do that thing, to
• 20:31
  acquire a company, to hire a new employee, to build a new function, to invest in this new idea that
• 20:37
  somebody saying, do we have clarity? Do we have alignment at the executive level? Do we have trust
• 20:42
  that even if that idea fails, will be okay? And if we don't have that, we wouldn't do it. The same
• 20:49
  thing we're doing with GTM partners and the same thing we're doing right now with hundreds of
• 20:53
  there are over 3000 companies that are run on GTM OS. We help them think through this clarity,
• 20:58
  alignment and trust. So if you are a business who's trying to figure out how do I grow from
• 21:04
  zero to million? Or like we do that term from million to 5 to 15 and a private equity or right
• 21:09
  now we're building a $10 million business with two people and a fractional group. If you're
• 21:13
  trying to figure out really just go to run on GTM. Com and there is an assessment that
• 21:20
  is custom made. Over 3000 companies have gone through it. Just take a look at it and see. It will
• 21:26
  give you the path you need to have clarity around these eight questions. So if you're ready,
• 21:33
  let's get moving.