Latest / GTM Made Simple / The Secret to Scaling Faster in B2B GTM
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- Go to market is one of those nebulous terms, historically like cloud computing. And so many people claim to have a strategy, but what in fact they're talking about a wide variety of things that vary by company and the kind of leadership a company has. For me, historically, [music] I think about how are we finding a match between what we're offering and the checkbooks of customers, not to be crass about it. It's a very different thing for customers, prospects to tell you they love your product, to tell you they're going to tell their friends about your product, use the product versus them writing you checks that you can run a profitable business with. And it's easy, especially in overfunded growth companies, to not really understand that difference. But if you don't have a value proposition strong enough uh to warrant the revenue you need to grow the company, then you don't have a good go-to-market. I'm Brian Brown. And I'm Sangram Vajre. And this is seven truths and one lie, an original series helping you rethink the way your company goes [music] to market. Truth number two, the revenue team has a new roommate. As we heard in the last episode, achieving the dream is never done. It's an ongoing business transformation. Just like your go-to-market strategy, it continues to evolve. [music] But here's where there's a disconnect. Go-to-market certainly involves your [music] marketing team, but it's not a marketing process. It's bigger than that, and it's about alignment. And alignment doesn't include only your marketing and sales teams working together. There's a new roommate, [music] one that is surfacing to be just as critical to the success of an organization. [music] Who is this new roommate? It's customer success. It's a function being thought about in an entirely [music] different way. [music] [music] [music] When you don't know the company, like say we're looking at a new investment, we're always looking for dynamic team dynamic and how aligned and supportive are folks of one another. Is this [music] group a real team? And in go-to-market, we look for that in spades, right? I think it can be a flag if it's someone's taking the air out of the room, or if, you know, there isn't a a deference to, "Oh, why don't you talk about that?" And if you don't see that, it makes you want to dig deep and see do they really have alignment. What varies though is is it health and retention, which better be the objective sub 10 million, and still should be uh but you have better [music] metrics and patterns and and levers for for driving re- not only retention, but net maybe net retention. It's rare that a CSM is a salesperson, but if they have access to the right data and [music] the right go-to-market motion uh that is focused on the customer journey sits with success in conjunction with marketing, obviously. Delivering on the value that sales sold, there is the ability to expand as well. And by the way, success is how you learn about your customer. Marketing and sales should be really caring about what success knows and is seeing and the insights and the dynamics going on with retention [music] and with expansion. If you're not learning from your customers who your best customers are, you know, then what are you doing? You're wasting time and money. [music] In the '80s and the '90s, it was all about product and you was market, sell it. By the way, after you sell it, drop it off and have a partner implement it and move on. The customer success was the customer's problem, not yours. All you had to do is say the product worked. [music] What's happened in this century is the power equation has shifted. The customer's much more powerful. The supply chain is much more accessible from multiple sources. So, all of a sudden, you can maintain a connection to the customer for upsell, resell, ongoing relationships, reducing churn, retention, all those things. That's a customer success problem. So, that brought customer success out of the back office into the front office. Cuz remember, it used to be called customer support. Now, it was out front. And then I think what we're discovering in the in the in this decade is, "Hey guys, your best point of contact with your customer is not your sales people. It is your customer success people." And so, you need to be rethinking about what is the customer really trying to accomplish, what business value are they really trying to get, and how can you align with that as opposed to trying to jam them into your product? The old model was just jam them into your product and move on. The success was nowhere near the equation. The 1990s, we brought the global economy into existence with product on prem. I mean, that was client server. That was SaaS. That was Oracle. That was Cisco, Intel, Microsoft. I mean, God bless. Yeah. But, it was a nightmare. [music] Well, Silverpop was uh born in a time that's not unlike the current times, where there's a lot of money and a lot of optimism. The company had raised a lot of money going after several different somewhat unrelated markets. And because it was just sky's the limit, you can go do anything. I got there and and brought in a few senior executives, and we went through a very methodical process, cuz that's what I do. And you know, we said ABCD, we ranked them and we ended up going after what became volume marketing, email marketing platform. That was a bit of a pivot in a sense cuz we were going in some other directions which I think were interesting, but we had to pick. If you chase two rabbits, you won't catch either one as they say. I liked it because it was both technically complicated so it was not easy for other people to copy it if done correctly. Many, many, many people do it poorly and if you look in your inbox today, most people do it poorly, but when you do email correctly, it can be an incredibly powerful tool. That was the very first product we sold. This would have been probably 2002 when that came into focus. [music] When we made the product, the vision and it was designed to give you a CD-ROM that you would install behind in your data center. Wait, wait, wait, go back. What a CD-ROM? Yeah, yeah, it's just this thing is a silver round thing about 5 in circular and you'd stick it in this thing that people thought was a as a a cup holder. We were trying to be innovative and how can we make this easy to demo so that someone doesn't have to go through the entire notion. So we said, wait a minute, why don't we let people demo it over the web? Well, that would mean we'd have to create the application interface accessible over the web. No one's really done that before. One thing led to another and we ended up launching a product as a web only tool. This is long before anyone the term SaaS existed. It was called application service providers I think. It was ASPs. Yeah, yeah. So that was another thing that I think really helped our company and really helped the marketing tech industry. Over time many other marketing tech companies adopted and embraced SaaS. But even in those early days you go to investors and you sit there saying, well, you just need to collect the revenue all up front. I mean these these you're growing too slowly. I said, but this is predictable revenue. This is you can build systems around this kind of revenue. You can upsell your existing customers. This is so much better. I was fired by Oracle after 10 months and 17 days of being in a role that they created for me [music] specifically, which was around how do we help the 23,000 sales reps at Oracle leverage the power of social networks to find their buyers, listen, relate, connect, and engage with their buyers. And so, it was really this transformational [music] thing within Oracle. And this was back in 2013. So, that was actually fairly early for big companies to actually embrace their employees building personal brands and and having the leeway to post content on [music] social networks. So, that's what I was there to do and boy, did it backfire. I had done an interview, provided a quote to an a reporter at AdAge. What that translated to was I was speaking to a reporter, which I wasn't allowed to speak to reporters. And I didn't think of AdAge as you know, the reporter that Business Insider when I did that interview, that was I think I knew it was a no-no. But that that's why HR got on the phone with me and what needed to happen at Oracle was customer at the center. I don't regret a single thing about my time at Oracle. You might have loyal customers for [music] a period of time. But if you don't do the right things to continue to listen and learn from your customers and continue to develop the things that your customer needs, then you might have loyalty to a point in time, but things change. And so, you as a business and as a product and as a platform, you have to evolve or your [music] customer can go somewhere else. I don't think you would start a SaaS company in 2021 and not have a CS team at some point, right? That'd be crazy. People would wonder what you're doing wrong. But back in 2013 when we launched Gainsight, it wasn't standard. Honestly, I think most people when I said, "Oh, we're working on customer success." You know what they probably thought we were doing? Customer support. That's the next gen of Zendesk or something, right? It's about answering people's emails or responding to their issues or maybe it's about NPS. What happened in customer success is it all goes back to Salesforce. Like a lot of SaaS, you know, a lot of SaaS we had to Whatever we're doing now, you know, Benioff was doing 20 years ago, right? And the story we've heard I wasn't at Salesforce, but what we've heard from early employees is they, you know, early on they'd sold all this great software all on these subscription contracts for the first time, but, you know, no surprise some of the customers that hadn't started using it weren't renewing. And so, they created really the first customer success team in the world and the first customer success managers. And I, you know, the story goes that Benioff came up with that term, customer success manager. But, you know, what happened was in 2004, that time frame, there weren't a lot of SaaS companies. You know, I don't know, maybe Workday was just getting started. And And so, we basically took on the charter, much like you've done with your space, of trying to not just evangelize our company, but evangelize the concept of customer success, right? And so, we're back in 2013, people [music] would say, "What is customer success?" And then later on, by the way, they might have said, "Why do I need to do it?" And nobody in in SaaS would say, "What is customer success?" or why? The only thing they say now is how. How do I do it really well? How do I make it scale? How do I justify the cost? How do I decide when it makes sense to have your human beings versus automation? How do I decide where it fits in the org structure? But it's kind of been cool to see that evolution just like you've seen in it in ABM where it's not about just education anymore about why. Now it's about people want to be great at it. Many companies go to market is still driven in many cases by by the sales people. And in in some cases maybe a little bit for the sales and marketing. Are you seeing a shift there? Like what is the new modern go to market team look like? Yeah, absolutely. There's a big shift happening and I think there's there're probably two underlying trends that are driving the shift. One is this trend of obviously that customers having a lot more power and more and more of selling happening after the initial sale. It's not just about that initial sale. It's about the ongoing life cycle of that customer. Hence you got to have sales, marketing and CS together. But what's going to turbocharge this and make what you guys are doing so important is this new concept of product led growth. So in the new world, we're pushing the the goal line even further back because now the customer actually starts using your product before they ever talked to you. And what that is doing is saying, okay, what's the line between pre-sale and post-sale? It's totally blurry. What's the line between what's marketing and sales? Totally blurry. What's the line between what's customer success and marketing? Totally blurry. You can't think of these as totally separate concepts anymore. You've got to think of a revenue team. I was talking to a friend of mine, Race Cavona, who's the CRO at Mural. You probably heard of Mural, it's a very hot whiteboarding startup. They basically have this incredibly integrated go to market. And he runs sales and and CS all kind of all together and he thinks of this thing is like let's not think of the sales team and the CS team and the marketing team. Let's think of the different phases of the customer life cycle and how are the different teams coming together for those phases. And so I think at the more and more you see people that understand all the pieces of the puzzle, the more you're going to see this integrated go-to-market concept. I think less mature businesses get caught up in messy org design from early on because of a reaction to what customers are needing. Yeah. And you got to get out in front of it to say, well, first of all, why does my product need so much services? Like, let's button that up, right? As products mature and platforms mature, less services will be needed. Between SaaS software architected appropriately, you should be able to have a really good understanding of usage and signals [music] of health. The new CSM or customer success manager, the new, you know, the modern one, um knows this, lives in the data, understands the customer not just through reactive or proactive in interactions, but a lot of the proactive interactions [music] are driven by data and driven by usage patterns, [music] and they could be positive ones, [music] they could be ones that are flagging unhealth. Yeah. And then it's a matter [music] of if this, then that for the CSM, what to do about it. Tech and tools have improved, Yep. which empowers a new profile of CSM, which makes them more strategic to the organization. That undoes the as contract signed, throw it over the fence. It also [music] uh relies upon truly understanding value that is sold so that the value can be delivered. So, as a customer, I want to have a great customer service experience. [music] And, you know, we recently had John Rossman on my podcast, the author of The Amazon Way, legendary book. He was sharing with me was how much Jeff Bezos, for a very long time now, has been obsessed with returns. And there's a great example of counterintuitive thinking. His mission was to make it as as easy as possible from the very beginning to return product. You look at most companies, it's [ __ ] hard to return [ __ ] They purposely make it hard. Whereas Amazon, if you've ever returned a product on Amazon, it's really easy. And the other genius of Amazon, John was the um guy that led the creation of what they call the marketplace business. So, in the beginning, of course, Amazon selling books, and they moved to CDs and other things, but they're selling things that they inventory, right? The genius of Amazon was to wrap the Amazon experience around all those third-party vendors. So, Amazon took responsibility for the fact that if you buy, you know, some nichey product from some vendor that we've never heard of, and you don't like it, and you want to return it, they facilitate the return, and and the vendor has to play by Amazon's rules and treat the customer the way Amazon says customers need to be treated, or they get kicked off the platform. So, my point is, legendary companies do focus on getting customer service right. And an untold part of how Amazon became a category king is their legendary returns. As important as it is, and it is, [music] it makes very little difference in determining who the category queen or king is. Most digital startups have complete [ __ ] customer service. It's impossible to call anybody. So, you're now dealing with email, and good luck. To make fun of this, by the way, if you want to email us, you got to email blackhole@locked.com because we all know when you go to the Wix website and you're trying to email them to get help on, in my case, how to move domain from them to someone else, good [ __ ] luck. They don't want you to do it. If you think about go to market long-term, I the way I think about it is it's a lot like product. People think of product and they think, "Oh, that's the code that's we store in, you know, GitLab or GitHub or whatever and we we push to production and it's on our Amazon servers or Google or Microsoft. That's our product." But the reality of product is that whole customer experience. And that product includes the website where I first learn about Terminus, right? And includes, you know, the chat experience I have online and includes, you know, the sales experience and includes my implementation and the documentation website and the online community I go to and the conference I go to to meet other customers. That is the product. Right. Right? And so, who owns the product in a company? Well, I think in most really good companies, the CEO thinks of themselves long-term as owning the product. Right? Not not to say you don't have a chief product officer who owns the actual execution of the product, but like really good CEOs, they care about the product. Yeah. Right? They really do. I don't know you can tell like a good company or not by whether the CEO cares about the product. Really good CEOs care about the go-to-market. That's why you can no longer be either a product-led CEO or a go-to-market sales CEO. You've got to be customer CEO cuz that brings those two together, the whole customer experience. [music] Mhm.