A different, less cringe-worthy, way to go to market

"Just reaching out one last time..."

This is a newsletter I write to figure out what’s real… for founders who are trying to build something real.

When everyone else is focused on get-rich-quick schemes (ahem, crypto investing), you’re trying to create a sustainable business. Good on you.

This week, I’m writing about Go-To-Market. Everyone cares about growing their businesses, and yet all the startups I see haven’t evolved beyond the 2011 book Predictable Revenue. Things have changed.

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Outbound works… but is annoying

Judging from my LinkedIn and email inbox, outbound prospecting still follows a 3-step process:

1. Find a list of people who are your “ideal customer profile”

2. Write generic messaging based on the same “cold email templates” article everyone else uses

3. Spam the pants off (1) with (2)

This works - you can get a 1-2% meeting rate with a decent list and bland messaging.

But this generic approach annoys a lot of recipients. And who’s to say you couldn’t get a 10%+ meeting rate with a better approach?

So while the 10-year-old model for go-to-market works better than doing nothing, there are massive opportunities for improvement.

How people buy

The entire problem with go-to-market, especially outbound sales, is that the “ideal customer profile” focuses on WHO THE TARGET CUSTOMER IS, NOT WHAT HAPPENS IN THEIR WORLD.

If I’m your target customer, you’ll focus on my demographics - my job title, my company size, my industry.

But these demographics don’t cause me to buy things.

I don’t wake up one morning and say, “Gosh, I am a 29-year-old first-time founder and so that means today’s the day I buy a CRM.”

Something happens in my world that causes me to say, “Dammit, today’s the day I need a CRM.”

364 days of 365, if you reach out to me and say, “Hey Rob, do you need a CRM?” I’m not going to reply.

I don’t care if it’s positive-ROI. I don’t care if someone else is using it. I don’t care if you have positive reviews, are the leader in your category, or just raised a big funding round. I couldn’t care less about how pretty your website is. I don’t want to talk about my business growth plans with you, I don’t want to share my pain points, I don’t want your Calendly link “just in case”. And I’ll just get angrier as you send me 6 additional emails over the next 3 weeks.

I have shit to do, and 364 days out of 365, you’re getting in my way.

But.

If you can catch me on that ONE day when I actually need you, I’m not just going to reply - I’ll be HAPPY to hear from you. I’ll be open to buying. You can teach me about CRMs in a way that causes me to understand why yours is meaningfully different, why it’s right for me. And I’ll probably buy very quickly.

The question becomes: How do you catch me on that ONE day?

Triggers & signals

Remember, something happens in my world that causes me to say, “Today’s the day…”

Your job is to figure out what that is.

I was talking with a friend about his business. In our conversation, we realized that every customer who bought his software had hired for a particular position a few months before buying.

Interesting.

It seemed like something about hiring that role caused them to be open to considering my friend’s software.

We dug in further, and came up with a few hypotheses:

• They hire for this role because their software has quality issues

• They expect the person in this role to solve the quality issues

• After 2-4 months, they realize that “solving the quality issues” is a lot more complicated than they initially thought, and are open to new ideas

The last point is what I call the trigger - the thing that causes your “ideal customer profile” to be open to meeting with you and even buying from you.

If you can build your go-to-market around triggers, you’ll have clearer messaging, higher win rates, faster sales cycles, and fewer “screw off” replies to your cold emails.

Importantly - in the words of my idols April Dunford and Bob Moesta - you’ll be helping your customers buy, rather than selling. The difference is meaningful.

How do you do design your GTM around triggers?

You look for signals that your ideal customer has experienced - or will experience - the trigger. So, in my friend’s case, some obvious signals they could find include:

• A company searches “quality engineer job description” in Google

• A company posts a job for a quality engineer

• A company hires a quality engineer

• A company searches something in Google that indicates that they’ve realized “solving their quality issues” is more complicated than they expected

All these signal that a company is headed towards - or in the middle of - that 1 day of 365 where they’d be open to a sales conversation with my friend.

Build GTM around triggers & signals

Tomorrow’s GTM will be designed around triggers & signals.

Companies will succeed by “owning” triggers: When someone experiences that trigger, they usually purchase your software.

And this requires a different approach to GTM. Because instead of having a bunch of people who do “cold emails”, you’ll want multi-skilled teams who tackle signals in different ways.

Here’s how my friend’s company might tackle the trigger of “hiring a quality engineer”:

• A company searches “quality engineer job description” in Google -> SEO

• A company posts a job for a quality engineer -> Outbound (top-down)

• A company hires a quality engineer -> Outbound (top-down AND bottom-up)

• A company searches something in Google that indicates that they’ve realized “solving their quality issues” is more complicated than they expected -> SEO, Outbound

They’d build meaningful content that customers hiring for a quality engineer would appreciate. And their outreach messaging and sales demo would be designed in the context of the customer experiencing this trigger.

An outbound message designed for a trigger is infinitely better than one designed around a static customer profile. “Hey I saw you’re hiring for your first quality engineer, I assume you have big automation plans and would love to share some pitfalls,” beats “Are you having quality issues?” every day of the year.

What do you think?