Latest / GTM Made Simple / The GTM OS System That 3,000 Companies Run On

Transcript

The GTM OS System That 3,000 Companies Run On · GTM Made Simple

• 0:00
  Sangram Vajre: Sangram here. Alright. I'm gonna show you how to run on GTMOS, and I'm gonna do this with an iPad over here so I can actually set up the whole thing that we walked CEOs through how they should run on GTMOS, and I'm gonna walk through six specific things. This is gonna take some time. This is gonna require you to dig in and see what it looks like, but at the end of it, you're gonna find out that you know exactly how your organization can run on GTM OS, meaning running something that you know it's repeatable, running something where you know how to make decisions, running something that has a process, running with clarity, alignment, and trust among your teams.
• 0:36
  You remember, all of our research shows that 70% or more of your go to market leaders are saying that, man, only if I had clarity on what to do, only if I understood and we are aligned, only if I know how to do these things, not necessarily looking for certainty, but clarity. And that's the big idea. So I'm gonna walk through all of this. There's a lot of it, and you can get all of this information on run on gtmos.com. So I'm just gonna jump into it.
• 1:00
  So let's say you are in the most well known, which is the go to market planning phase, and maybe it is q one, maybe it is q two, maybe it is q three, maybe it is q four. It really doesn't matter. If you are in any of the quarters trying to figure out what to do, where to go, this is important because this is about why most go to market plans fail. And one of the biggest reasons they fail in companies is because, well, the pipeline that you might be looking at might be all over the place, might be shifted. Maybe one segment is starting to to be wobbly, and you're like, man, we need to go into a different vertical altogether.
• 1:32
  Maybe another is over performing, and so all of a sudden, you have this one rep who sells in one particular segment that never had been done before. But now, because nothing else is working good, you're like, let's put all of our time, energy, resources into this one area, or look at the macroeconomic picture might be shifted. Maybe new competitor has come in, and you are starting to figure out what does my plan look like. And that is 98% of the cases what we see with go to market. We have thousands of companies who have gone through the GTMOS and this is typically reason why that happens.
• 2:05
  And what the issue is what they end up doing and what you might be doing is getting into a planning phase. And none of these things are actually show up in your planning. You know what happens in planning? People come together, talk about the numbers, talk about these big ideas, and everybody has this incredible spreadsheet and a deck that nobody ever looks the very next day, even not even on the flight. All the preparation that you and your team has done to get to that planning phase is gone because nobody believes in it.
• 2:30
  There's an excitement for a moment. There's clarity for a second. And at the end of it, everyone is looking at and going and doing their own thing to protect their own jobs and department because they do not have the ultimate clarity. You all may have clicked as a group and started to trust each other a little bit more for the efforts you're putting in, but from a business strategy perspective, it's still a pretend and show and tell kind of thing. And what we see is that the mistake most CEOs are actually making is treating go to market planning as an annual event.
• 2:59
  And if you talk to any GTMOS, I wrote a whole book on go to market called Move. GTM is an ongoing process. Brian Halligan, is the CEO of HubSpot, explained it the best way. He said, Think about it like a product. It's an ongoing thing.
• 3:11
  Well, you might think of, well, I think I know what go to market is. I bet you don't fully understand because it took me writing a book on it, building two companies over 100,000,000 and still trying to figure out what go to market is. Right now, I have become a student, and here's a very quick refresher for you. Go to market is not a strategy. It's not a planning process.
• 3:29
  It's not a once a year, once a quarter thing. Every day, you're actually making go to market decisions, Focusing on investing in marketing or sales, that's a go to market decision. How many times have you done that today? Opening an office in EMEA or staying in North America, that's a new go to market decision. Putting money in this segment or that segment, that's a go to market decision.
• 3:49
  Launching a campaign or buying a company or creating a new department or investing in this new thing. These are all go to market decisions. So therefore, it cannot be an annual event. It's too late. It's too slow to grow if you actually treat your go to market as an annual event.
• 4:05
  So what it is is that if you truly feel responsible, if at the end of the day, you feel too slow and the complexities are going too fast, that's the reason. Because you as a CEO and executive team is treating go to market as just something that you have to do it once a year, once a quarter to bring teams together, and you have a team idea, not a business idea, if that makes sense. Alright. This is the big idea. And, again, you can go to run on gtmos.com because it...
• 4:27
  That'd be hard to kind of look at every single element of it, but I'm gonna walk through all of these things. We go through this with hundreds of clients, and we have now hundreds of certified partners who do this with their three plus clients, each one of them. So about 3,000 companies are running on GTMOS, and we walk them through five valleys, three p's, 15 problems, alignment, plotting your entire go to market strategy on a slide in order to figure out what should you focus on the next ninety days. I'm gonna show this to you in a rapid fire way because this is where your business is failing. And the reason you might be feeling that it's slow is because you haven't done this part.
• 5:01
  And this might require you to have somebody facilitate the process because as most CEOs are not good at this. So you can look at the certified partners. You have hundreds of them that you can choose from to help, or you can use this as a refresher and watch this video with your team and try to do it. Alright. Let's So walk into the first one.
• 5:17
  The first question, and there, again, there are only six steps. So really five steps. The sixth is an outcome of it. So I'm gonna walk through each one of them in a little bit detail, but not too detailed where you're like, I'm not solving that problem together at the same time. So let's get into the first one, which is the five valleys of death.
• 5:32
  Now this is very important. You have to know which valley of death you are in. What do I mean by that? Well, here are the five valleys. And again, our book and research, everything really got deep into this, where maybe you have a great product that you have created, but you can market.
• 5:48
  And you might be saying that's a marketing issue now. Well, in reality, what you have is that you have launched a great product, but you haven't been able to create enough demand for it. And that is a problem. That is why you are in this valley of death. Maybe you're created to create great brand.
• 6:01
  Think about HubSpot having tons of inbound coming in, but you are not able to generate sales. Well, then you are... You're gonna... You have a market, but can't sell. Maybe you can sell, but you can deliver, which means your customers are buying, but the team is struggling to figure out how to deliver it.
• 6:16
  Ever had someone where a salesperson has sold an enterprise deal and then your product team is going back and trying to create features? Well, I've been there and I've seen that happen, but you do what you do. You sell what you sell. You hunt what you can, and and a lot of times, you are in that mode all the time. This is where most companies, by the way, go to die because you overpromise and under deliver, and that doesn't sustain a great company.
• 6:37
  The other part is you can deliver but can't renew. This is very important for you to understand. If you can deliver but you cannot renew, which means you're not able to keep the client going, which means they are not renewing, well, that is a big problem that you're gonna have. This is where most company have an ROI problem. I'm walk into that in a second.
• 6:56
  And then finally, you can renew but can expand. This is where you go from what I call problem market fit to product market fit to platform market fit, the three p's. We're gonna walk through that too. But those are the five valleys of death. Any of these five valleys, most companies, all of our research shows that you are in one, if not two, if not three valleys of death, and that's okay.
• 7:15
  The issue is not what value of debt you are. The issue is that you do not know which value of debt you are in, and that is what stops you from growing your business. So what I'm gonna help you do figure out is that you need to take all the stuff. I'm gonna try to clean up so you maybe even take a screenshot of it if you want, or if you can go to run on gtmos.com. But you need to figure out which value of debt you're in.
• 7:35
  One, two, three, four, five, and pick and start working on it. Because as a CEO, your job is to pick one of these actively costing growth engines right now that's stopping your business from growing. And as you can see, this is not talking about your marketing problem or sales problem or CS problem. What it's talking about is that, hey. Where is your go to market problem?
• 7:55
  Alright? So that's number one. Step number two. Now this is my favorite. This is the heart of this whole process of go to market, is to figure out what stage of the business you're in.
• 8:05
  Are you in a problem product market fit, or platform market fit? Tell me a quick story. I had a CEO who was a client of ours a long time ago, it was a long... Well, a few years ago, where they built a $20,000,000 business, and they were not able to get great valuation. They got over $100,000,000 in valuation, so just 5x.
• 8:23
  It's a SaaS business. He was expecting 10x. There was another competitor who was about 5,000,000 in revenue, and their valuation was about 500,000,000. And he was really mad. He said, Segham, how is that possible?
• 8:35
  I have 20,000,000 and only have five x valuation. That company has similar segments, similar markets, similar product, but yet they have 5,000,000 revenue and have $500,000,000 valuation. How does that work? And I was like, well, here's the problem. You think you're in 20 millions.
• 8:50
  You think you're in problem product market fit. Right? He said, of course. I'm like, well, no. You're not in product market fit.
• 8:56
  You actually are in a problem market fit. And he's like, well, how so? I'm like, well, is the market big enough? You obviously have solved that problem. That market is there for your product.
• 9:05
  But every single time you sell this, you have to customize it. Yep. You have to hire people. Yep. You have to develop more product solutions.
• 9:12
  Yep. You have to have customization for it. Yep. Well, that puts you back into the problem market fit. Whereas that $5,000,000 company, they don't have to add a single new person no matter how many products they sell because they have a product that is repeatable for the same segment.
• 9:25
  They're in only two industries, and they're dominating it. So the growth engine for the investment that the invest investing committee is gonna make into that particular product is gonna help it grow 10 x more than you because even you with 20,000,000 in revenue, every time you get a new client, you have more investments that need to be done. So he got the point, and this is the point most founders most use... Miss. Revenue is not makes...
• 9:48
  What drives your business. What drives your business is how you can grow profitably. And in order to grow profitably, you have to know what stage of the business you're in. So problem market fit is literally a place where there's a big enough market and you have a problem that you can solve. A product market fit is where it's a repeatable business, and you know it's gonna happen over and over again.
• 10:07
  And platform market fit is where you can expand, where you can sell something more to the same... Think about Salesforce. Going back to the company that I acquired by Salesforce, I was over there, and they had a marketing cloud, then a sales cloud, a customer success cloud, and a developer cloud. And so they were selling to the same client four types of different products, and before you knew, they were growing crazily. And that's what a platform market fit looks like.
• 10:30
  So once you figure out what valley of death is stopping you and your team from growing, and then two, what stage of the business you're in comes in step number three. What is the problem that's stopping you from growing? What is the one, two, and three things? This is the part that most CEOs just don't wanna do. There's so many reasons why go to market breaks.
• 10:50
  That you might say there are hundreds of it. We have done the research. I will literally show there are only 15 go to market problems. 15. This is not a sixteenth one.
• 10:59
  So stop burning calories trying to come up with a new language, a new word. We have done the work for you. You literally need to sit down with your team and saying, hey. What are my top go to market problems? Your team will tell you and let them do it independently, and then bring it all together.
• 11:12
  Sometimes they would say, well, our number one problem is that business is relying on heroic sales. Okay. Well, that's a problem. Our team is not aligned. Okay.
• 11:18
  That's a problem. Our churn is killing our business. Okay. That's a problem. And you go through the process.
• 11:23
  Our research shows with thousands of companies having done this, most companies have at least five, if not seven, of these 15 go to market problems, and that's okay. Again, the issue is not having problems. Of course, every business is gonna have problem. The issue is not identifying the problem. So by putting it in this perspective, what you're doing is taking away the emotion out of it and saying, it's not a marketing team against sales team.
• 11:45
  We're literally looking at business problems, and how do we solve the business problems? So at this point, what you can do is bring your team together say, one, two, three, let's rank them and figure out what it is. There would be a healthy debate, which is what you likely never had. You always had individual people talk about issues, but never had a team talking about it from a business perspective like a healthy debate. So you're gonna go through this process and say, what are the one, two, and three of this this thing?
• 12:08
  And as you go through it, you're gonna figure out, oh, most of the team feels this is the big issue. Oh, I thought this was the big issue, but the reason you have this issue is because of this issue. And very quickly, you're gonna identify the one or two issues that you really need to solve, which brings me to step number four. Have your team go through a quick assessment. We do this a 100 times and never has it disappointed us.
• 12:31
  This is individual assessment, which at this point, if you have figured out which value of death you're in, maybe one, maybe two, maybe three. If you have figured out if you're in a problem, product, or platform stage, or where you are navigating it to be. If you have identified the top three go to market challenges that's stopping your growth, this is the place where you come in and say validate that to be true or not. So every dot represents somebody on your team having gone through this. And let's say the red dot is you, the CEO, and everybody else is over here for every single thing.
• 13:01
  So this is a a screenshot of an assessment we did with a client, and it will show, oh, we're pretty aligned here. We're not aligned as much here. Oh, we are really not aligned over here. This brings the right conversations. Now you know the problems why you're having and how to solve those problems.
• 13:17
  Right? That's what's happening at this point. Some people are trying to do metrics, but you're saying, well, we're not a platform market fit. Why are we focused on this? This is what you need.
• 13:25
  You need to solve these problems because without that, you're just going around it. So lastly, what you do is make sure that you are able to answer all the eight questions of GTM OS on one slide. We call it the eight questions GTM OS on a slide. This is making sure that every single thing that you ever learned in it will be on this eight question GTM OS. So as you go through this process of figuring out what is Vale, what is the three Ps, what are the 15 problems, the assessment, and you map your entire go to market operating system on a slide for your executive team to look at, you are gonna come up with what we call as ninety day projects.
• 14:01
  You would be saying, what is it do I need to solve? This process is gonna give you the ultimate clarity for you and your team to focus on, oh, our ICP sucks. We need to fix it. It's not a marketing problem. It's a business problem.
• 14:15
  We need to fix as a group. We can be running around. Oh, our point of view works for this industry, but not that industry. So let's fix it, and let's focus on this one point of view. Let's not have three different points of view.
• 14:26
  Oh, our issue is not pipeline. It's sales enablement, and so we need to hire somebody in sales enablement to solve for that problem. Oh, we cannot get to this rev ops infrastructure, right now because if we don't solve the top three problems, this infrastructure thing is not gonna do anything for us. This is how you get your team to prioritize. This is what's missing.
• 14:47
  This is what's gonna grow your business. I'm so passionate about this. If every company goes through this quarterly or every single time a new segment is launched, new product is launched, new market is there, all the reasons the macroeconomics are changing, your sales and marketing people are fighting. If you go through this process, there is no fighting. The only fight left would be the fight for your business, to drive the business forward, to move the business forward.
• 15:08
  We have our clients do this quarterly. Some of them do it weekly. Some of them do it monthly. Some of them it every single time they launch it. The point is you have to look at go to market strategy as not a one time thing, but an ongoing thing, and bring it up every time you have a new business decision to make and align your executive team because they want, your team demands, to have clarity, alignment, and trust.
• 15:31
  That's what grows business. Not just one of the AI feature, not just one of the product launch, but clarity, alignment, and trust. So with that, if it makes sense, you can go to rungtmos.com and get all of the stuff right then and there. It will show you how to think about it, how to launch it, how to make it better. And if you're ready, let's get moving.