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4 questions that can spark your 2024 GTM strategy
Two years ago this month, our co-founders Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown published MOVE: the 4 Question Go-to-Market Framework.
A lot has changed in two years, and a lot hasn’t!
What has changed:
New analyst firm: Bryan and Sangram co-founded a GTM analyst firm called GTM Partners last year.
New GTM Operating system: Analysts Lindsay Cordell and Bryan Brown created the 8-pillar GTM Operating System along with a host of research-informed frameworks and research reports.
New frameworks informed by work with over 100 B2B companies: Over the last 15 months, we’ve worked with more than 100 companies on GTM strategy and execution, using the GTM Operating System and our frameworks. While we’re often teaching, we’re also learning, and so our understanding of GTM is constantly evolving as we learn.
What hasn’t changed:
GTM is still hard: Companies still struggle to bridge the gap between their vision and effective execution
Our definition of GTM remains the same: GTM is a transformational process for accelerating your path to market with high-performing revenue teams delivering a connected customer experience. GTM acts as the vehicle that bridges your company's strategic objectives (purpose and dreams) with customer outcomes (realized benefits).
MOVE: the 4 Questions
If you want better answers, ask better questions.
These are the 4 questions that can and should define your exploration of your GTM journey:
Who should you MARKET to?
What do you need to OPERATE effectively?
When can you scale your business (VELOCITY)?
Where can you grow the most (EXPANSION)?
Any company that wants to create high-performing GTM revenue teams will benefit from the MOVE framework, because it gives you new ways to get unstuck and keep growing.
MOVE is just the beginning. Our work over the last two years has been about expanding on MOVE and building repeatable, predictable frameworks to address these challenges.
The 6 Core Principles of GTM that still hold true
2 years later, we still agree with these 6 “truths”:
GTM is like building a new product: You can’t approach GTM as if it were your company strategy, vision, or mission. It’s not a trite saying you post on the wall to collect dust. Rather, GTM is an iterative process that ensures what you’re selling is what you’re delivering, and you have to approach it in that way in order to make sure it is always working for you. Just like a product evolves over time with customer data and feedback, GTM should be treated similarly. Treating GTM as a product encourages ongoing investment and improvement.
GTM teams must go beyond marketing and sales to include customer success (and product!): GTM isn’t just a marketing thing; it’s a high-performing revenue thing. GTM revolves around high-performing revenue teams that unite marketing, sales, customer success, and product. Successful GTM implementation requires alignment among these four teams.
Focus on the relevance of your target market, not its size: Instead of targeting the largest possible market (total addressable market), concentrate on customers most relevant to your product (total relevant market).
RevOps drives growth: Accurate and standardized data from a single source is essential for informed decision-making. RevOps (Revenue Operations) acts as the "truth teller" responsible for managing and organizing data. Questions about a business can’t be answered by isolated, siloed departments.
Retention trumps acquisition: Acquiring new customers is more costly than retaining existing ones (5x more expensive on average). GTM should prioritize increasing customer lifetime value and enhancing the value of existing customers.
Embrace flywheels over funnels: Traditional lead funnels have a low conversion rate. Emphasize quality over quantity to avoid a wasteful churn process. Shift your focus from simply driving lead volume to efficient and effective revenue growth, where the goal is to progress opportunities with accounts that are a good fit. It’s quality over quantity, and every stage of the account life cycle has roughly equal weight.
The GTM Maturity Curve and the 3 P’s
To grasp where your GTM process stands, it's essential to understand the GTM maturity curve's three stages and three “P's”:
Ideation (Problem-Market Fit): In this stage, you lack a fully developed product and are uncertain about its market fit.
Transition (Product-Market Fit): With the right product-market fit, you shift focus to developing a repeatable, scalable process to increase market share.
Execution (Platform-Market Fit): As your company evolves into a multiproduct organization, the emphasis shifts from individual products to a platform approach.
Your company's stage in this curve depends on various factors beyond revenue, such as industry dynamics, market, category, and offerings.
The CEO should own GTM
Although in many organizations, marketing or revenue teams own GTM, Sangram and Bryan made the case that the CEO should own it. The CEO's role is to keep all stakeholders aligned and understand the company's current stage and how to progress to the next.
From Ideation to Transition
In the ideation stage, focusing on leads is natural, as your ICP remains undefined.
However, transitioning to the next stage requires a shift in metrics, from funnel conversions to pipeline coverage, customer acquisition costs (CAC), and gross revenue retention. It's also crucial to align sales and marketing teams during this transition.
This transformation takes time, demanding research, patience, diligence, and goal alignment.
If transitioning from ideation to transition is challenging, evaluate key factors, including identifying your ideal customer, reliance on discounts, brand positioning, churn rates, customer understanding of ROI, product delivery, and sales team repeatability.
From Transition to Execution
If your product solves a problem and your GTM strategy focuses on quality acquisition with segmentation, you may be ready to move to the execution stage.
Here, you address multiple issues with additional product offerings on a repeatable and scalable platform. However, it may involve decentralization as you expand.
To transition successfully, assess factors such as product focus, distribution investment, metric predictability, product interdependence, product performance, market dominance, and team readiness.
What’s next?
What’s summarized here is just the first part of the book. Read the whole book to learn how to implement these questions and frameworks.
Better yet, peruse all the research that is available to everyone on the GTM Partners’ website.
We’re trying to do the analyst thing a little differently. We don’t charge for seats or licenses, and you don’t have to be a customer to read our research.
Bryan, Sangram, and Lindsay have spent thousands of hours since MOVE was published answering the question: so you’ve read MOVE, now what?
They’ve invented the GTM Operating System and dozens of workshops, exercises, and frameworks that can guide an implementation of MOVE principles.
It’s all available for you to guide your teams through the Operating System.
If it feels overwhelming to do it yourself and you’d like our help with implementing a GTM strategy, we’d love to talk.
Share your news with us!
We want to be a resource for Go-to-Market leaders beyond sharing our own data. So please send us your:
GTM-focused job openings
Industry events focused on GTM functions
GTM research/data
GTM testimonials
Big company news that is legitimately of use or interest to a broad GTM audience.
Here’s one submission from last week:
The Juice released The State of the B2B Podcast Listener report to answer the question, "what do B2B customers really want from branded podcasts?"
Here’s a snippet from the report:
The modern day B2B podcast listener gravitates toward podcast episode titles that inspire action. 58% of the episode titles in the top 100 most engaged podcasts on The Juice include the phrase “How to”, and have action words like “building”, “changing”, “turning”. Podcast listeners want to make sure that before they commit to a 30-minute or more episode they’ll leave with something tangible. 70% of the top 10 most engaged podcast episodes on The Juice include an actionable word or phrase in their episode title.
Thank you to everyone who came to see us for our New York City roadshow last week. Next up: Los Angeles in November and San Francisco in December! Register here for a roadshow.
Have a great week, and hope this was useful to you!
The GTM Partners’ team
