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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.
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Sangam. Yeah, just doing day two on, just recording a whole bunch of musings if you will, around go to
market, entertain and laugh over KL. And one of the things that I've been thinking about quite a bit
is this idea of context switching every single leader, but definitely as a CEO
or the greatest challenge that people face is context switching. How do you go from a sales call
in a second to a customer call, who's about to turn to another call where some customer is very,
very happy, and then again, someone who's turning and then back to the sales call. And then every
single time you have to keep your energy up. If it goes down, the people can see it. And if you don't
believe in yourself, then nobody will, right? So you have to keep it. And sometimes it feels like
you're faking it. Sometimes it feels like others might be thinking that you're just making it up,
but you actually, deep down, believe in it. But still, sometimes it becomes challenging. And as I'm
going back from at least six calls today where we had a mastermind where several people signed up
to join that. I had a great sales call where we were explaining them how to go to market and
another advisory call in in all in all. What came back to me as I'm driving back home is go to
market is the business. And if you absolutely do not believe in what you do, nobody else is going
to believe in you. And so it doesn't really matter if you have to fake it as they call it. You really
have to believe in it until several people in several days will go by where you're just okay.
And I learned is that at terminus, you know, my last company where we went from 1 million to 5 to
to 15 and then, you know, close to 50 million plus and private equity exit is I remember me and my
co-founder, we had a tough week. We were trying to raise money and we had an issue over there. We had
hiring snafus. We have some churn issues. And so we both walked into a meeting and we were kind of
down. We were we were literally not feeling it. And I remember that meeting where we walked in with a
little bit of a, you know, down phase, and it was just a standard meetings that we were not overly
prepared around it. And as we got to it, we saw that the momentum in the meeting just went
sideways. There was nothing happening. Everybody was also feeling like we were almost making
everybody feel low because we were low. And at that day we walked out and I remember telling
Eric, my co-founder, that never again, never again will I ever walk in thinking about my own
problems when I'm here to serve, to support, to to build all those things. Right. So from there on, I
just made this commitment and this is the little framework I use. I literally before I walk in, I
just thank God. Number one, I love him before meetings and map all my meetings as green, yellow
and red. So green meetings are the meetings I absolutely want to have. They're exciting. They're
typically their sales or partnership or customer calls and we're super excited about it. Then there
are yellow where I'm on podcast, I'm on conversations, I'm on team meetings that are okay
meetings, but they're not the thing that that I look forward to every single day. And then there
are red meetings, and the red meetings are the meetings where I'm trying to look for I shouldn't
have more than 2 or 3 meetings a week. If my calendar shows a lot of green, several yellows, and
1 or 2 red. It's a great week. If my calendar is a whole bunch of reds, I got a problem. But here's
the best part. The red meetings makes me aware of it. What that meaning is. So throughout the week,
let's say I'm on Monday. I'm meeting red meetings on Thursday. I'm thinking about that meeting every
time I look at my calendar. We all look at our calendars like what, 50 times a day? So I'm looking
at it. It's in my mind at that meeting. So I'm trying to do two things. One, I'm trying to figure
out how do I get out of that meeting. So either I'm trying to to figure out how do I solve a
problem that that particular meeting has. And even before I get on the meeting, how do I solve for
that? So that's number one. And number two, I'm prepared for that meeting. I'm not going from
meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting with no absolute thinking around or thought around this
thing. This is why context switching could be hard, but this is the way. The strategy to make sure
that no matter what it is, if your calendar is marked green, yellow or red, you're going to be
just fine. And you just have to figure out, well, maybe in the beginning you have a lot of reds and
then some yellows and maybe 1 or 2 greens. And the goal in business and in life is to just have a
whole bunch of greens and yellow and then be prepared for the red. And when you are, you'll be
just a better leader, a better CEO, a better executive and a better, hopefully a husband, a
father or a wife or a daughter. Whoever you are, whatever your role is, if you know if you're green,
yellow or red before you walk into a conversation, you're going to be just way more prepared. Green.
I'm excited. I already know I'm naturally am yellow. All right, I need to put on a couple of
extra thoughts around in red. I gotta be prepared for this conversation, and I'm gonna not let
anything in the world stop me from being productive in that. So the start of the day, let me
know what you think. And if you're ready, let's get moving.