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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.
GTM Partners created the Go-to-Market Operating System™ (GTM OS), a company-wide framework that helps CEOs and executive teams connect strategy to execution across Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Revenue Operations, and Leadership.
Today, GTM Made Simple brings together executive conversations, GTM masterclasses, framework breakdowns, case studies, and practical field lessons from across the GTM Partners ecosystem. New episodes draw from the same ideas and operating principles Sangram is teaching across YouTube, GTM Partners research, and the GTM Operating System™. Expect practical frameworks, executive perspectives, real-world GTM case studies, and direct answers to the questions CEOs and GTM leaders are trying to solve.
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Go to market is almost self-evident [music] at this point in the company. Everybody understands flywheel. Everybody understands we're going to compete and do well at high scale in the growth sector. We're going to do what we need to do to win in the commercial sort of the mid-market space. We're going to be relentless in going to the enterprise. But all of those things feed off of each other because your flywheel customer that was a champion user at teenytiny startup company that just changed jobs and went to Mega Enterprise is going to be that person that's on the ground singing your praises [music] when we come in as part of the RFP and then and they get to say no no full story is awesome. So it starts with almost a a strategic ethos within the company that everybody knows, but then it evolves.
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I'm Brian Brown. And I'm Sangram Wadre. And this is Seven [music] Truths and One Lie, an original series helping you rethink the way your company goes to market. What has been fascinating in our research, the big difference between companies that experience real growth and those that dream of it comes down to one thing, an effective go-to market process. Let me set the stage a bit. You can build a business on effective growth, but to scale that growth, you have to think about it differently. Growth comes from customers. As a matter of fact, we recommend throwing out the playbook of cramming more leads into the top of the funnel. Instead of funnels, think flywheel. Truth number six, flywheels are the new funnels.
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The question that matters is [music] how are we going to design and dominate a giant category that matters and take twothirds of the economics. That's the only question that matters. [music] So if you want to have a sales conversation, a sales conversation should sit in the context of a category conversation, which is what is our sales strategy and approach to design and dominate a giant category that matters and take two-thirds of the economics. If you're having a sales conversation in absence of a category conversation, you will go nowhere because until people believe at some kind of scale that the problem that you solve matters [music] and you're highly differentiated and therefore highly valuable, your salespeople can do all they want and it won't matter. You can do as many demos as you want. You can do as many [ __ ] uh ROI studies and you can whatever you want, [music] but until there is scale around the belief that this matters and we should spend time, money, and energy on the this whatever the this is the category, your salespeople aren't going to be able to get very much done. Here's the aha here. Sang everything we believe everything that we value we get taught to value including human life itself. You [clears throat] you want to hear a story about this? Yeah, let's do it. So today approximately 80% of brides in the United States of America are given a diamond engagement ring. In the 1930s, it was less than 20%. Diamonds were not very valuable. And then a company called Debeers said, "We need [music] to change the category because we're not selling enough diamonds and people don't [music] view them as valuable and important. So, how do we increase the size of the category called diamonds?" The aha they had was they had to [music] create a category. And they were smart. They niched down on the engagement ring. They didn't go after all jewelry. They didn't say rings and necklaces and earrings and nose rings and belly rings [music] and tow rings and I don't know what. [laughter] They said engagement rings. Yeah. Super tight, right? And then they began marketing a point of view forever. A diamond lasts forever. So, not only did they begin to niche down on the engagement ring, they also told people how to value it. It was not valued at all. And over the course of about a generation, they went from 20% to 80%. And so, nothing has any intrinsic value until we get taught to value it. Whether it's diamonds or human life or SAS software, what you want is a point of view that is so powerful that when people experience it, they can't unsee it. And so the minute ban off says no software, [music] he changes the world, right? It's a provocative, engaging point of view, right? And he's framing the problem. You have to paint a picture of not just the [music] future, but you also have to reframe the present and and give it a name. And so what you've got to be able to do if you want to do this quickly, and it still took Benny off 20 years to get this right, and we're still very far [music] into the evolution of the cloud. However, the superconsumers of CRM at the time, really Salesforce automation, began to think, okay, well, wait a minute, maybe this maniac's up to something. [music] And the minute you do that, aha. So, so that's the first thing. The second thing is it turns out that [music] there's creating net new demand. There's competing for demand, which is what morons who want to lose all their money do. The vast majority of people in business have been taught to do. That's what MBAs get taught to do. That's what you get taught to do at marketing school. That's what every business and marketing strategy book is about. So, it's it's not their fault. [music] Remember this. So, so I live in Santa Cruz, California. And one of my favorite things to do, Sangram, [music] is to sit and watch pelicans hunt. And have you ever seen a pelican hunt? No. So, there's generally more than one of them and the other. They're incredible flying dinosaurs. And they'll fly very close to you. They head out from the land to the ocean and they begin to see a school of fish. One of them will spy a fish and and it's like it looks like a pretty straight 90° drop at rocket speed. They come down. There's a very sort of very cool Olympic quality dive that happens with a very cool but [music] you know precision. Precision and they catch the fish and if they're close enough to you, you can see the fish. Yeah. And then they fly out. Yeah. Here's the fascinating thing about that. Think about the fish. No idea. The fish spends its entire life thinking the world is one way, water. And for two seconds at the end of its life, it discovers, "Holy [ __ ] there's a whole other world." And then it dies. So everybody's been taught everybody's swimming in competition [music] and they don't understand that there's a world outside of the water and because they don't if you are a brand marketer if you are a traditional entrepreneur if you are Sevil and SAP [music] versus Salesforce you are swimming and then bam you're dead.
When the customer is doing the marketing for you at some level, the flywheel effect from my perspective from a word of mouth standpoint is it allows your sales and marketing resources, your go-to market team to devote more of those resources to other things other than sort of awareness building, right? or driving people through the funnel because the clients themselves, the previous iteration of customers will will do the awareness for you, right? So then you can focus on product improvements, on ops, on any number of things um that that actually make the business better. It's a very efficient way to deploy your resources, but most companies don't have that flywheel because they don't have a strong enough word of mouth. You know, if you say, "Hey, um you know, how do you like your insurance agent?" Fine. You should talk to him. But I'm not I'm not going out of my way to phone you up and be like, "Zang, you won't believe what happened when I was at my insurance." You know, there's a huge difference between reactive word of mouth and proactive word of mouth. Reactive word of mouth. Tell me about your insurance person and I'm like, "Yeah, I like them." As opposed to, "Let me go out of my way to tell you about my insurance." That's a giant difference, right? So, if you can bridge that, go from reactive to proactive, then it frees up all all of your sales and marketing resources to do to do other things and get that flywheel working. For example, one of the great word of mouth case studies in the history of business is Double Tree Hotels. Chocolate chip cookie. Everybody knows it. Every person at a Double Tree, they just brought it back, gets a warm chocolate chip cookie when they check in. They've been doing this every day for 30 years, which is crazy to me, right? Before the pandemic, at their peak, they were doing 75,000 cookies a day worldwide. That's a lot of cookies. Okay. So, because it's such a kind of quintessential word of mouth story, I wanted to prove like how effective is it? So, I did a whole uh national survey and found that 34% of their customers have told somebody else a story about that cookie. 34% time 75,000 a day is like 25,500 people a day telling a story about a chocolate chip cookie. When's the last time you saw an ad for Double Tree? Like almost never because they spend dramatically less than other hotels in that same category on advertising because the cookie is the ad and the guests are the sales and marketing department. That's a genius way of doing business, right? But the key part of that is that it's an experience. Importantly, it's not a pile of cookies under a glass dome. They have a oven in each hotel. Warm cookie hand it to you. The handtohand pass is the brand standard and key because now you're experiencing it. You can feel it. You can smell it. You can see it. Obviously, you can taste it eventually. It's not just like take a cookie if you want one because you've been to lots of nice hotels that have citrus or bananas by the elevator. Nobody ever talks about that. It's a waste of good fruit. One of my favorite sayings in business is from Robert Stevens, who was the founder of Geek Squad and a full-on genius. He's an unbelievable business leader. He said that advertising is a tax paid by the unremarkable. Now, that's not entirely true. There's a time and a place of ad for advertising, especially hyper relevant B2B ABM driven advertising, right? Advertising that is relevant is advertising you want, not just advertising you tolerate. broad-based spray and prey, let's build awareness advertising is typically a waste of money. And most of the brands that are really effective and successful don't spend that much on advertising. How is that possible? Because their customers do it for them.
Nothing was more important [music] than serving the needs of our customers and their very high expectations. And those only increased over time as we were supporting larger enterprises and powering more mission critical communications. the tolerance for mistakes and errors was [music] you know virtually zero you know very very small but at the same time you have to keep innovating you have to keep thinking differently you have to keep building new products and it's really why you'll see you know Salesforce set an amazing example with the app exchange but you see it across the software landscaped of innovating through partners and innovating through platform is a strong way to go innovating through ecosystem and that's a wonderful way to experiment and try lots of new concepts at scale without really touching the core code and everything that's associated with performance and scale and not letting your customers down. Early days of starting a new company, you have a lot of founder selling and it's founders, you know, just having passion and conviction and and hopefully a network where they can get the early adopters to say yes and try the product. I remember going through that. So that that's like phase one that's important. Phase two [music] is are those customers successful and are they renewing and and staying with you and do they really see value? and then and then kind of quickly followed by can you hire a sales team and a sales leader who can sell beyond the founder and and create repeatability. So so I think what we look for when we know something's really working is repeatability and the the customer is buying for the same reason. You know there's consistency of the use case is really important to look for. We have many companies that go very broad early and they're solving a different problem for every single customer and it gets really difficult to kind of find their power alley and find repeatability. So we find at least in our experience that companies have done better have started with maybe a smaller problem to solve and get a lot of repeatability and then over time they they kind of expand from there. I I think the I think the right dimensions today, you know, building, you know, kind of a modern SAS company is you have to think about you have to think about productled growth at least through the lens of how do I build a product that quickly delivers value that consumers, buyers of the software can find, try and ultimately become a customer. So I think that's got to be one dimension is the kind of easy frictionless you know onboarding. Second dimension is how do I end up building more companywide or enterprise relationships once I'm seeing usage and traction you know through that productled growth and and I think the in-person selling or now you know via Zoom selling is so important once again just to build relationships and to really understand needs and [music] for companies today you're certainly searching for the best software product and the best solution but ultimately you're you're you're searching for the best relationship ship, you know, and the best team that can really drive solutions and can really drive success and drive a long-term relationship. And in many ways at Exact Target, I felt like we were maybe better relationship builders than our competitors and maybe even more so than having the best product in the market. So, I still think the relationship building, understanding needs, doing discovery, building long-term relationships, helping your customers really be successful, that's ultimately the most important. But that that's kind of the second dimension. And then third dimension is is still that channel partner arena of what partners can we integrate with so the products become stronger together and then what partners can help us reach customers in a much more expansive way than we could on our own. So we try to build that kind of roadmap with all of our early stage companies productled growth so there's a seamless experience relationship building so we can really understand customer needs and then channel partners or ecosystem partners that can really fuel our growth.