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Your Product is No Longer Your Moat · GTM Made Simple

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  For most companies and for most of my career, the answer to what's your moat has been the product.
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  Better features, better experience, better tech? Sometimes is the last year something has changed.
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  Something has stopped being true, and I had to sit with it. And the fact that what protected my
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  business for a decade was about to to stop protecting me and the business that I'm building.
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  So today I'm going to just walk through what has changed in the last decade and how you can
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  protect the moat and what really is the moat that builds businesses. Here's the problem. Most B2B
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  founders are defending a moat that's already been filled in. AI is making the product parity faster.
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  It's making it cheaper. It's making it more universal than any point in the last 20 years. The
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  CEOs who are still betting on that, the company that we have a better product, are going to be
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  surprised that in about a month, if not weeks, somebody's going to be able to replicate the very
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  product that you have engineers from all over the world and scientists maybe working on it can be
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  replicated like that using AI. I realized this as a very interesting moment when I was at
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  Pardot in a Salesforce. Remember when I was running marketing at Pardot and we got acquired
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  by Salesforce? I had the opportunity to see Salesforce behind the scenes, and I took a lot of
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  those learnings and build terminus and now GTM partners. But here's what what led me to what I
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  call the moat. The real moat behind the scenes for all the businesses. And that's what I want to
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  share with you in a second. But before that, let's talk about the two big companies that change my
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  thinking. Number one is Salesforce. As I said, part of when I ran marketing was a $10 million company.
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  When we got out of the acquisition of the exact target and then ultimately Salesforce, all of a
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  sudden I found myself at a $10 billion company. So of course, I became a student and I wanted to
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  learn everything about marketing, sales, go to market strategies, planning. How do you come up
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  with the message and all of those things? It was like a mini, mini, mini MBA if not PhD, staying over
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  there for a couple of years. Now. Here's what happened I saw what Salesforce was doing was in
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  order to create a bigger moat, at least what I thought they were buying companies left and right.
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  They were buying on an average, I think, roughly around ten different companies at any given time.
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  That's exactly what I did when I got to terminus. When we started building terminus, we were zero,
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  and then we had a million and a five and a 15 and then obviously had a great private equity exit. We
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  actually ended up buying. Most people don't know this. Five companies in a matter of eight years.
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  Think about that again at terminus. The last company I built before GTM partners, we bought
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  five companies we saw. We started with advertising account based advertising because that was the
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  easiest way to get people to try something new, try out advertising to their accounts in B2B. We
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  very quickly realized that they needed to do analytics, and there wasn't anybody doing
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  analytics on it now. Or at least we didn't see it. And we were far behind because we were building a
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  new tech. This is again 6 or 7 years ago, so building tech took time right now. That's not an
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  issue. You can replicate any tech, whatever that is, however complex it is right now, over a period of
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  time with a few smart people, you can replicate any tech. So product is no longer in the mode. But
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  at that time it was. So we bought an analytics company. Then we saw that there was a huge
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  transition happening in the chat. Like on the website, people could do chat. So we bought a chat
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  company. We saw that we didn't have great data, and data was the key to make sure that your
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  advertising is happening to the right account. So we bought a data company. Then we saw that, well,
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  this is only marketing running it and sales needed to know what to do, what not to do. So we
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  bought a sales company. Then we saw that marketing needed to use even more first party data in
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  addition to third party data. So we bought an email signature company. So every problem our
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  clients said they had, we ended up going, going and making the decision, saying as a CEO and you know,
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  as founders, we were making that decision saying, well, should we buy or build? And we ended up in
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  many cases just buying something because we bought something that that at a much lower price
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  for the business that we were in, because we're building a new category and I'm gonna get into
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  that. So both at terminus and at Salesforce, the moat was the product. At least we thought at that
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  time. At least I thought that. And we were just bonding more products and going, that's no longer
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  going to be the true. What I now know. Looking at what AI and how AI has transformed, I think
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  now for the very first time is changing. You see at terminus and at Salesforce and any big company
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  out there today, products they know very well that product is no longer the moat. So what is it? I
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  think it's these three things systems, community and category. That's the framework I want to leave
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  you with. Think about this. Every one of these. I'll just use again Salesforce and Terminals as an
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  example. Salesforce is building a CRM category. Terminus was building an ABM category. So
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  categorization and leading a category is very, very important. How did they do that? Not only by
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  positioning and saying we build the category. They did the second thing, which is community.
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  Salesforce created Dreamforce 150,000 people from all over the world would come to this one event
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  in happening in Moscone West in San Francisco, whereas we would do at terminus called flip my
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  Funnel community, where we bring in our own small little world, thousands of people coming in and
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  attending that conference and not just one with multiple conferences throughout the year. So we
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  created a community around it that was mode number two. Mode number three, which leads me from
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  category creation to community creation to the number three systems. What systems are we using at
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  Salesforce? The behind the scenes was it was a connected system. If you are in the Salesforce
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  ecosystem, you're going to be part of the marketplace. And anything that hooks up into the
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  Salesforce ecosystem marketplace, they will get preferential statement. As a matter of fact,
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  systems also include partners. They have a high percentage of partners building technologies,
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  selling services around the ecosystem of Salesforce. That's what that terminus. We actually
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  build the first biggest partner program within our small ABM community by helping lots of
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  businesses that are now 10 to $2000 million businesses, based on what we built at terminus. So
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  what becomes the moat today, if you ask me, if I were to redo what we did ten years ago and
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  getting acquired by companies for multi-million dollar or $100 million or $2.7 billion, like, like
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  Salesforce acquired Exacttarget, that part of it was part of um or terminus that got acquired by a
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  private equity firm. I would say it's not the product. It's not the product. Anybody can build
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  the product now. Anybody can. Doesn't mean you don't need to focus and think about critically
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  problem solving. But product is no longer the moat. As soon as you have a great idea on a product,
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  somebody would would go ahead and get it. So if you can build a new category on the microphone,
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  literally own the microphone around it, build a community that will go to the length of being
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  part of loyal to you. Otherwise it can be loyalty can be bought if you don't have a community and a
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  tribe that believes in the problem you're trying to solve. And if you can't create an ecosystem, a
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  distribution platform, which is what all these companies did in order to stay ahead of it in
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  addition to product. I'm so glad they did that, because if product was only the mode, they would
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  all die. The reason these companies are still existing and doing really well is because they
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  also have the higher level of mode, which is category, community and system, which is the
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  ecosystem for driving business. So if you are thinking about what to do and where to where to
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  go from here and think about man, I'm not sure if product is a moat and understand the concepts
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  behind it. You can go to run on GTM. Com slash move and it will walk you through what stage of the
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  business you're in, what frameworks you need to figure out, how to create a new category, or how to
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  build a community, or what kind of ecosystem, what kind of go to market motion you should be running.
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  Because at the end of the day, if your mode is not clear to you, it won't be clear to your employees.
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  It certainly won't be clear to your customers, and that's how you stop moving. But if all of this
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  makes sense, and if this is something where your product is no longer, the moat idea makes sense to
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  you and you want to figure out what is your real moat. Hop on to run on GMOs and let's get moving.