'Marie Kondo' your go-to-market
Organizing your GTM portfolio
This is a newsletter about building a software company, written from the trenches of building one.
I write brief essays to reflect... and to counter all the startup myths and “hacks” peddled by influencers looking to make a quick buck.
This week, I’m writing about Go-To-Market organization and prioritization for early-stage founders.
So Many GTM Options, So Little Organization
Go-to-market can be overwhelming.
Cold emails. Cold calls. Partners. SEO. Ads. Events. Communities. Newsletters. Media.
Each channel is difficult to master. Many channels take months (or more!) to see results.
I see founders going in two directions:
Result 1: Impatient Founder Pivots GTM Every 30 Seconds.
Founders try a ton of different things and call it “experimentation.” They mistake poor execution for channel ineffectiveness, and move on to the next thing. They get the book Traction and try every single technique in a few months.
(Aka, me.)
Result 2: Anti-Selling Founder Builds Audience.
There are a ton of Go-to-Market channels you can spend time on that make you feel good about yourself - you’re getting page views, you’re growing an audience - but you’re never making sales. This is fine if you have unlimited runway. But if you actually want to sell software, you need to… sell software.
I’m advising founders who are dealing with Go-To-Market challenges every damn day. I needed a structured way to think about GTM… here’s my first draft.
Organizing GTM
I decided to organize B2B SaaS GTM by channel and “buying journey stage”.
You can advertise to people who are about to make a buying decision. Or you can advertise to people who don’t know they have a problem.
I’ve color-coded the GTM grid to help the typical B2B SaaS founder focus on the the right channels at the right stage in their path to a successful business.
Access the doc here. It is incomplete; I’m still thinking about it as I press “send”. It may not be relevant for your business, for example if your customer lifetime value is low or you have a clear channel partner. Or if you have customer base that’s unique in some way.
Or if you’ve designed your entire business around a GTM strategy, in which case, I applaud you.
Feel free to add comments to improve the doc, including:
“I’ve seen children with better design skills than this”
“You’re missing a bunch of channels here” or “SEO / content / ads is not a channel”
“I know where you live”
-rob