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I'm Sangram Vajre. I've built two $200M+ companies, written three books on go-to-market, and designed a GTM operating system that over 3,000 companies operate on today. If I've learned anything, it's this: go-to-market is the business. Keep it simple, and it scales.
This is Go-To-Market Made Simple. Every episode, you're getting a backstage pass to three things I work on daily: the closed-room conversations I have with CEOs and founders working through real GTM challenges, the systems and frameworks I've built and tested over the last two decades, and the weekly mastermind sessions with our certified partners where we see what's actually working across thousands of companies and industries.
Go-to-market doesn't have to be hard. We're here to make it simple.
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Sangramhere. So in nine months, both the GTM partners and terminus, we went from 0 to $1
million in revenue. And we did it without a marketing team or a sales team. And I'm not trying
to brag about it, but I was able to do that twice and it wasn't magic. And so every time somebody
asked me a question around that, I have to go through the process. I put it all together, and
I want to teach you exactly that process. Right now, most companies have too many questions, maybe
even too many systems, and they get inundated with all the different things they want to do, but they
don't ask the questions they need to ask. And I'm going to have these eight questions that
surrounded every single day around everything we did. And everybody in the company understood what
those questions were and how to answer those questions. That helped us build a 0 to 1 million
in revenue in nine months. Now, this is again not a magic trick. This is not something that I'm
sharing. And I'm saying, well, what it is. Well, two things that I want you to know. Number one,
terminus was built in 2014 2015. So that was an upmarket the times for good. And so during that time
we raised a little bit of money and we showed how to do account based marketing. That was
a new category that we built. So I'm sharing that because in 2014, zero two, 1,000,009 months, but a
little bit of investment and a little bit of money to drive the business was something most
companies were doing go to market. Partners, on the other hand, was in 2021. That was post-Covid. That
was not the time where people were investing a lot of money in, in companies. And yet we were
still able to do 0 to $1 million in nine months. So when I look at both times where one is funded,
one wasn't funded, one was an upmarket, one was in down market. I think about what were the
principles and the questions keeps coming up in all the CEO roundtables we do. So I'm going to
just walk you through those eight questions as to why this happened and how you should apply those
questions and the answers to those questions, because they're going to be different. The answers
are obviously going to be different. You might be a services business, you might be in healthcare,
you might be a tech company. You might be a course building company, like whatever it is. Those eight
questions remain the same, but the answers are going to be different. And it really matters how
you think about those eight questions. So I'm just going to walk you through those eight questions
and how I answered it for both of my companies. And you can just take a pen and paper, write it
down and see if you can try to answer these questions the best way you can. And here is the
punchline. I'm going to share that with you upfront. I might repeat it again towards the end.
The importance of answering these questions is not having certainty. It is about
having clarity. Let me say that again and just double click on that. Most folks try to have a
certain answers like, all right, this is gonna give us leads. This is gonna drive our business forward.
This is gonna do something different. This is gonna take away competitors off. That's not what
this is about. This is about you as the CEO and your team as an executive team. If you're on a go
to market executive team for you all to have clarity around it, because all the research we
have done, most businesses fail not because they don't have the perfect go to market strategy, not
because they don't have a clear goal. They fail because they do not have a system. And James Clear
in his book Atomic Habits, said it really well. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You
actually fall to the level of your systems. So this whole session that I'm about to do with you,
I'm here to help you have clarity around the questions that are going to be the most important
questions that you and your team need to have clarity on. So here we go. Question number one
where can you grow the most? Now that is a very important question. The most is the intentional
part of it. For us at terminus, we were going after demand gen marketers because they had the budget
to drive their business forward. So we were tapping into the demand gen first and saying, you
can do more with account based marketing. And that's where we decided to grow. That was our
ideal customer profile. When you think about GTM partners, now, we look at, well, go to market is more
of an executive function. We believe that CEO should own go to market. So where can we grow the
most? We have to figure out how to focus on go to market executives and CEO. So we started
roundtables at the executive level. We started to bring roadshows to different cities where only
executives were brought in. So that's the idea. We were very clear that we want to grow and go to
market partners at the executive CEO, C-suite level. Whereas at terminus, we were trying to grow
at the demand gen level, the VP of marketing level. That level of clarity allowed us to have great
campaigns, great positioning and everything we did. Which really brings me to question number two
which products create the highest customer value. Now you think about that question as to which
products. Well, you can launch any number of products at terminus. We had account based
advertising as the first product because it was easy to implement, easy to launch, easy to get
people excited about. The ability to target accounts was phenomenal. So people wanted to do
that. As a result of that, we had a really quick close ratio, right? We had we literally would have
a few conversations or do an event called Flip My Funnel, and that drove 25 to 30 clients every
single time we did that. The reason was it was easy to buy, but then we ended up buying five
different companies because we identified that these people needed to grow their business. And in
order to grow their business, advertising was just one thing. They wanted to have analytics. So we
bought an analytics company. They wanted to have chat systems, we bought a chat company. Then they
wanted to have ability to send email signature and get first party, third party data. So we bought
that company. We ended up buying five companies because that's where the customers was getting
the highest value, so they can stay with us and grow with us. That's how we build terminus within
the first nine months. We focused on account based advertising because that was the fastest way for
us to grow and create the most customer value. On the flip side, you think about go to market
partners. Now have we got to a zero? 2 million was at that time people wanted to do research in 2020
when as we launched, they wanted to figure out how can they grow at the sea level as a CEO.
post-Covid, they want to figure out what is the new playbook, how do I go about it? So we invented
this thing called go to market operating system, and we started doing advisory around those eight
pillars of the operating system. So the highest value for a CEO was clarity and transformation
for their business. That was what we focused on. That really made most of the money for us in the
first nine months, helping us to get to $1 million. Which really brings me to question number three.
How will you engage your customers with a differentiated point of view at terminus. This was
very easy. This was one of the best things that we ended up doing. We launched this this movement
called flip my funnel. If you go online, you will take a look at it. There's 100,000 people were
part of this movement. We did events and we literally created a flipped funnel, meaning we
said, well, for for a number of years, if you're in sales and marketing, everybody knows the top down
funnel. Well, you like literally it's a bucket where you put a lot of leads at the top and you
get 1% of the leads at the bottom. We said, what if? What if you can flip it? And we created this idea
of flip my funnel, where you could start with the best accounts that you want to target, and then
from there engage them and target them and turn them into advocates. That idea, not the software.
That idea became our differentiated point of view. People wanted to be on that journey with us. We
started a podcast on it. We did so many things on it, but that was our differentiated point of view.
Flipped my funnel on the go to market side. We figured out like the way CEOs want to run their
business. They want clarity on transformation. So we created this operating system that was not
about how marketing works, how sales works, how CS works, but rather then go to market team works.
Think about it. Every CEO, what do they want? They want clarity. They want transformation in their
business. They don't want bickering. They don't want people running after each other saying I'm
better or my job is more important, or here are my numbers. What they want is for everybody to work
together as a high performing team. So as a result of that, our differentiated point of view started
becoming about go to market operating system. You should run your business on GTM OS, because that's
like running on an operating system that is constantly getting upgraded to have a high
performing business that's stuck. So that's how our brand and demand, that's how we were created, a
differentiated point of view. Which brings me to question number four, which go to market motions
get you and your revenue faster. So most people think if I want to go faster, I'm
going to start doing inbound. I'm going to start doing outbound calls. I'm going to start doing
sending more emails out. All of those things are good ideas. But the question is which go to market?
Motion will get you your revenue goal faster to get to your revenue. Go faster. At terminus, we saw
well, nobody was at that time. This is 2014, 2015. Nobody was running executive oriented
events for Dimension People. So we started running flip flop events. Remember, that's our
differentiated point of view. So why not run a differentiated point of view event. So we invited
not only our customers but our competitors to the same event. As a result of which what
happened was industry leaders started to come to that event. As a result of this, analysts started
to come to that event. And every time we will do an event called flatMap funnel, because it wasn't
a terminus event. It was a flip map for an industry event. It became the most important event
that people started to do. Other events around it. And all of a sudden, we were the most important
event that was happening. Not once, not twice, but almost four times a year. As a result of that, we
drove every single time we did an event. We would create 25 to 30 new customers. That was our
fastest way to grow our revenue. When I think about GTM partners, the way we went in the first
year was we had a book called move, just like had IBM's B2B book at the terminus to build that
thought leadership at the event. We wrote a book called move that became a Wall Street Journal
bestseller. So we wrote that, and then we did events around for executives because we
understood events is one of the best ways to to build that relationship, especially if you're
building a new brand where they don't know about you. And if you run ads to people who don't know
about it, they might see your ad and you need to send 10,000 ads. Or I think there are stats that
says you have to have 10,000 emails or some sort of content they have to see in order for you to
for them to trust you and potentially buy from you. That is worth 10,000, 50,000 or 100,000 words.
So if we are doing advisory, that is typically a $100,000 advisory. We wanted to have trust. And the
way you build trust for CEOs is by spending time with them and teaching the go to market operating
system. So we did an executive sessions, roundtables, not 1000 people that we didn't flip
our funnel because that was after marketing directors and at that level. So you could get
thousands of people for that event. This one was 30, 40 people. Executive roundtables were
peers. The CEOs wanted to learn from each other. Executives wanted to learn from each other. They
didn't want it to be recorded. They wanted it to be vulnerable. They want to talk about the biggest
stakes that their business have and the bets that they are taking. And that's why we were able to
grow really fast, because they were able to see trust in the result of that operating system that
helped us create more pipeline and drive more revenue. Which brings me to question number five.
How do your customers experience ROI? This is very important. A lot of times
companies think that will the ROI of my in my business is the product and the features that we
have. And therefore you are probably always talking about how good your product is. That's not
how it works in our customers mind at terminus. The ROI for them was, for the very first time, they
could do advertising to accounts. For the very first time, they could say, hey, if you spend $100
on these five accounts, we would see the results and we will see how many impressions are there on
those accounts, because B2B was all about accounts. So for the very first time, the ROI for them was
how easily they can spin up an account based advertising thing. That was the ROI. So we talked
about that all the time at the at GTM partners. What we figured out the ROI for them was going
back to clarity and transformation. What CEOs wanted more than anything wasn't a playbook,
wasn't a roadmap as much as everybody wants to sell about it. They wanted to say, what do I need
to do now? Where should I go? How do I create a differentiated point of view which go to market?
And all these eight questions are the same eight questions they were facing. And we gave them
frameworks to answer those questions. So the ROI in their mind was pure clarity, because even one
idea for a CEO, if they get it and they're able to implement, could drive their business so much more
forward. So we had to understand what was the ROI in their mind. Which brings me to the next
question, which is what else can you observe them with? Right. What else can you buy? Because
ultimately the way businesses grow is not by selling the same product over and over. That is
great. That is fine. But how do you grow tenfold with even the same number of customers? And that's
what upsell serving is all about. I learned that at Salesforce when my last company, Pardot, got
acquired by Salesforce, I went from a $10 million company to a $10 billion company. And I used to
wonder, how does a $10 billion company operate? How can they forecast? How do they do all these
projections to the marketplace and be so close to the penny almost, or sometimes two hundreds of
thousands of dollars for a $10 billion company? Well guess what? Let me bring you in on a little
secret. The way they're able to do that is because 6,070% of the revenue is already baked
in with existing customers, because they knew that they're going to have more licenses with them and
more revenue, and it's already baked into the contracts. So they already had that 70% of the
revenue. All they were doing was maybe 10 to 30% of the revenue that they were really, truly
forecasting. So I've thought about the same thing when we're building terminals. All right. How can
we observe our customers at that time? Because it was a new category called account based. We were
like, we had two choices. Either we build or we actually buy. So instead of building
more products, we started to buy products because we're able to buy them at cheap because they were
solving problems that they didn't know. They didn't have the narrative, they didn't have a
differentiated point of view, they didn't have a powerful backing. They didn't have thought
leadership like we did with the books. So we use that to our advantage. And in the first year we
started looking at acquisitions, observing became the name of the game, and that helped us to grow
not just to 1,000,009 months, but to five and then 15 in the third year, and then ultimately getting
acquired by a private equity firm. When I think about go to market partners, because we were
focused on CEOs, what is it that the CEOs will care about that they will pay more of? We found
out that advisory workshops were really good, so we would do 100,000 advisory workshops, but then
they needed to talk to someone. They wanted to be in a room where nothing is recorded and
everything can be spoken without telling their teams the problems they are facing. They didn't
want that. So what we decided to do was, all right, what if we do one on one advisory or a group
advisory for CEOs that will bring them in, but they can share their challenges and be together.
Try to solve for it with no recordings, no nothings. And therefore you will see me saying, hey,
I had a conversation with the $19 million series CDC, CMO, or CEO about this. The reason I do those
videos is because I can tell exactly the details of the business, but I can tell you the details of
the problem because the problems are very similar. So we created a close knit network of these
CEOs and executives to figure out how they can have transformation in their business, and that
became a much better product for it. So we did research with them, we did advisory with them, and
we did workshops for them. And each one of them was a layer up. And the more they want time with
us, or the more clarity they want, the more transformation they want. They ended up buying
5000, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, upwards of Of $300,000 worth of services from us.
Which brings me the next question, which is this is very important. What are the key metrics that
builds the health of our business? When I was building terminus, the number one metric we looked
at was an RR net revenue retention. Can a customer how long it takes to acquire,
but also how much it requires for me to keep them as a customer. But most importantly, what will it
take me to observe that customer so that I can have return of it? Because I've already spent the
money to acquire this customer? Most businesses have a leaky bucket. They do not focus on keeping
the customer longer or more importantly, selling more to them. We will know that that is one of the
best thing. The metric out there is that if your NRI is about 120%, you can grow without adding a
single new customer, and almost you can grow like double your revenue in 3.8 years without
adding a single new customer if your NRI is 120%. So I understood that
stat cold and I focused on that. And as a team, we all focused on that. And that helped us to grow at
a million to 5 to 15, because that was the key metric we looked at. Now when I look at go to
Market partners, we're two people. And in terminus we had 300 people. As we grew beyond Milan and all
that stuff, we're just still two people and building about a $10 million business. And in the
first year, what we looked at was simply that is how do we get new, new customers? But then the
new metric has emerged, which is employee per revenue. We had no idea what that metric meant
when we're building terminals, but now that we're building this, this makes a lot of sense. Employee
per revenue is a way of looking at, well, how much more revenue can I get from when an employee is
in the company, either full time or fractional? So now there was a time at terminus where we could
say, if you get if somebody is at $100,000 employee, and if you get 300,000 out of out of
outcome out of them, then that's great. Now, I believe with AI and everything we look at is then,
hey, if you're gonna hire a fractional or an employee, if that person needs to have ten x, if
you put 100,000, we need to get a million worth of return from the investment we make because of
what's available to do with AI. That is the health of the matrix. So you have to figure out what is
the metric that's going to bring people together, have clarity for the business. And and you can get,
by the way, all these details on round GTM. The assessment will give you dashboards
of each of the metrics that you should focus on for your business. Some might make sense right now,
some might make later on, but you can go to run GTM and get that assessment. Which, by the way,
brings me to the last and probably the most important question. How do you give your team
clarity, alignment, and trust? Well, at terminus, I remember in the first few months we were just
cats and dogs because we couldn't figure out what what was working, what was not working. So we would
just have this argument and debates around, well, this is better, that is better. And remember, we
didn't have a marketing team, we didn't have a sales team. We were just trying to build it. As
founders. We're selling, we were evangelizing, we were buying, we're doing marketing, we're writing
copy, we're doing events. So we were just it was chaos. But at that time, what kept us clear
was a differentiated point of view. And all the seven questions that I shared with you, what is
the ROI with it? What is the customers experiencing? What does their ICP look like? Where
can we grow the most like? Those seven questions really brought us together, and every time we
would meet, we would walk through some level of these eight questions. So let's say we were
thinking of of acquiring a new business. We'll walk through these seven questions and come back
to this eight question like, do we have clarity, alignment and trust to do that thing, to
acquire a company, to hire a new employee, to build a new function, to invest in this new idea that
somebody saying, do we have clarity? Do we have alignment at the executive level? Do we have trust
that even if that idea fails, will be okay? And if we don't have that, we wouldn't do it. The same
thing we're doing with GTM partners and the same thing we're doing right now with hundreds of
there are over 3000 companies that are run on GTM OS. We help them think through this clarity,
alignment and trust. So if you are a business who's trying to figure out how do I grow from
zero to million? Or like we do that term from million to 5 to 15 and a private equity or right
now we're building a $10 million business with two people and a fractional group. If you're
trying to figure out really just go to run on GTM. Com and there is an assessment that
is custom made. Over 3000 companies have gone through it. Just take a look at it and see. It will
give you the path you need to have clarity around these eight questions. So if you're ready,
let's get moving.