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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.
Subscribe, and if you know a CEO or founder who needs this, share it with them. Learn more at runongtmos.com/move.
All right, I'm going to show you how to run on GTM OS. And I'm going to do this with an iPad over
here. So I can actually set up the whole thing that we walked SEOs through, how they should run
on GMOs. And I'm going to walk through six specific things. This is going to take some time.
This is going to require you to dig in and see what it looks like. But at the end of it, you're
going to find out that you know exactly how your organization can run on GTM OS, meaning running
something that you know it's repeatable, running something where you know how to make decisions,
running something that has a process, running with clarity, alignment, and trust among your teams. You
remember, all of our research shows that 70% or more of your go to market leaders are saying that
man only fat clarity on what to do. Only if I understood if we are aligned, only if I know how
to do these things. Not necessarily looking for certainty, but clarity. And that's the big idea. So
I'm going to walk through all of it. So there's a lot of it. And you can get all of this information
on run on GMOs. Com so I'm just going to jump into it. So let's say you are in the most well-known,
which is the go to market planning phase, and maybe it is Q1, maybe it is Q2, maybe it is Q3,
maybe it is Q4. It really doesn't matter if you are in any of the quarters trying to figure out
what to do, where to go. This is important because this is about why most go to market plans fail,
and one of the biggest reasons they fail in companies is because, well, the pipeline that you
might be looking at might be all over the place, might be shifted. Maybe one segment is starting to
to be wobbly and you're like, man, we need to go into a different vertical altogether. Maybe
another is over performing. And so all of a sudden you have this one rep who sells in one particular
segment that never had been done before, but now, because nothing else is working good, you're like,
let's put all of our time energy resources into this one area, or look at the
macroeconomic picture might be shifted. Maybe new competitor has come in and you are starting to
figure out what is my plan look like. And that is 98% of the cases. What we see with go to market, we
have thousands of companies who have gone through the GMOs, and this is typically a reason why that
happens and what the issue is, what they end up doing and what you might be doing is getting into
a planning phase. And none of these things are actually to show up in your planning. You know
what happens in planning? People come together, talk about the numbers, talk about these big ideas.
And everybody has this incredible spreadsheet and a deck that nobody ever looks the very next day,
even not even on the flight, all the preparation that you and your team has done to get to that
planning phase is gone because nobody believes in it. There's an excitement for a moment. There's
clarity for a second in at the end of it, everyone is looking at and going and doing their own thing
to protect their own jobs and department, because they do not have the ultimate clarity. You all may
have clicked as a group and started to trust each other a little bit more for the efforts you're
putting in, but from a business strategy perspective, it's still a pretend and show and
tell kind of thing. And what we see is that the mistake most CEOs are actually making is treating
go to market planning as an annual event. And if you talk to any GMOs, I wrote a whole book on go
to market called move! GTM is an ongoing process. Brian Halligan was the CEO of HubSpot. Explain it
the best way he said. Think about it like a product. It's an ongoing thing. You might think
like, well, I think I know what go to market is. I bet you don't fully understand because it took me
writing a book on it, building two companies over $100 billion and still trying to figure out what
go to market is. Right now. I have become a student. And here's a very quick refresher for you. Go to
market is not a strategy. It's not a planning process. It's not once a year or once a quarter
thing every day. You're actually making go to market decisions, focusing on investing in
marketing or sales. That's a go to market decision. How many times have you done that today? Opening
an office in me or staying in North America? That's a new go to market decision. Putting money
in this segment or that segment, that's a go to market decision. Launching a campaign or buying a
company or creating a new department or investing in this new thing. These are all good marketing
decisions. So therefore it cannot be an annual event. It's too late. It's too slow to grow. If you
actually treat your go to market as an annual event. So what it is is that if you truly feel
responsible, if at the end of the day you feel too slow and the complexities are going too fast,
that's the reason, because you as a CEO and executive team is treating go to market as just
something that you have to do it once a year, once a quarter to bring teams together and you have a
team idea and not a business idea, if that makes sense. All right. This is the big idea. Again, you
can go to run on gmos.com. Because it might be hard to kind of look at every single element of
it. But I'm going to walk through all of these things. We go through this with hundreds of
clients, and we have now hundreds of certified partners who do this with their three plus
clients, each one of them. So about 3000 companies are running on GMOs, and we walk them through to
five valleys, three peas, 15 problems, alignment, plotting your entire go to market strategy on a
slide in order to figure out what should you focus in the next 90 days? I'm going to show this
in a rapid fire way, because this is where your business is failing and the reason you might be
feeling that it's slow is because you haven't done this part, and this might require you to have
somebody facilitate the process, because most of us are not good at this. So you can look at the
certified partners. You have hundreds of them that you can choose from to help. Or you can use this
as a refresher and watch this video with your team and try to do it. All right. So let's walk
into the first one, the first question. And there again there are only six steps really five steps.
The sixth is an outcome of it. So I'm going to walk through each one of them a little bit of
detail but not too detailed, where you're like, I'm not solving that problem together at the same
time. So let's get into the first one, which is the five values of death. Now this is very important.
You have to know which value of that you are in. What do I mean by that? Well here are the five
values. And again our book and research. Everything really got deep into this where maybe you have a
great product that you have created, but you can mark it and you might be saying it's a marketing
issue now. Well, in reality what you have is that you have launched a great product, but you haven't
been able to create enough demand for it. And that is a problem. That is why you are in this valley
of debt. Maybe you agree to create great brand. Think about HubSpot having tons of inbound coming
in, but you are not able to generate sales. Well, then you are going to have a market but can't
sell. Maybe you can sell, but you can deliver, which means your customers are buying. But the team is
struggling to figure out how to deliver it. Ever had someone where a salesperson has sold an
enterprise deal, and then your product team is going back and trying to create features? Well,
I've been there and I've seen that happen. But you do what you do. You sell what you sell, you hunt
what you can. And a lot of times you are in that mode all the time. This is where most companies, by
the way, go to die because you overpromise and under deliver, and that doesn't sustain a great
company. The other part is you can deliver but can't renew. This is very important for you to
understand if you can deliver, but you cannot renew, which means you're not able to keep the
client going, which means they are not renewing. Well, that is a big problem that you're going to
have. This is where most companies have an ROI problem. I'm going to walk into that in a second.
And then finally you can renew but can't expand. This is where you go from what I call problem
market fit to product, market fit to platform, market fit. The three pieces we're going to walk
through that too. But those are the five values of debt. Any of these five values. Most companies all
of our research shows that you are in one if not two, if not three valleys of death. And that's okay.
The issue is not what value that you are. The issue is that you do not know which value of that
you are in, and that is what stops you from growing your business. So what I'm going to help
you do figure out is that you need to take all the stuff I'm going to try to clean up, so you
maybe even take a screenshot of it if you want, or if you can go to run on dotcom, but you need to
figure it out which value of that you're in. 123, four, five and pick and start working on it.
Because as a CEO, your job is to pick one of these actively costly growth engines. Right now, that's
stopping your business from growing. And as you can see, this is not talking about your marketing
problem or sales problem or sales problem. What it's talking about is that, hey, where is your go
to market problem? All right. That's number one. Step number two. Now, this is my favorite. This is
the heart of this whole process of go to market, is to figure out what stage of the business
you're in. Are you in a problem? Market fit a product market fit of platform, market fit? Let me
a quick story. I had a CEO who was a client of ours a long time ago and a few years ago where
they built a $20 million business and they were not able to get great valuation. They got over
$100 million in valuation. So just five x it's a SaaS business. He was expecting ten x. There was
another competitor who was about 5 million in revenue, and their valuation was about half a
billion. And he was really mad. He said, Singham, how is that possible? I have 20 million and I only
have five x valuation. That company has similar segments, similar market, similar product, but yet
they have 5 million revenue and have half $1 billion valuation. How does that work? And I was
like, well, here's the problem. You think you're in 20 millions. You think you're in problem product
market fit, right. You said, of course, I'm like, well, no, you're not in product market fit. You actually
are in a problem market fit. And he's like, well how so? I'm like, well is the market big enough? You
obviously have solved that problem. That market is there for your product. But every single time you
sell this you have to customize it. Yep. You have to hire people. Yep. You have to develop more
product solutions. Yep. You have to have customization for it. Yeah. Well that puts you back
into the problem market fit. Whereas that $5 million company they don't have to add a single
new person no matter how many products they sell, because they have a product that is repeatable
for the same segment, there are only two industries and they're dominating it. So the
growth engine for the investment that the investing committee is going to make into that
particular product is going to help it grow ten x more than you, because even you with 20 million in
revenue, every time you get a new client, you have more investments that need to be done. So he got
the point. And this is the point most founders most use. Mis revenue is not mix. What drives your
business? What drives your business is how you can grow profitably. And in order to grow go
profitably, you have to know what stage of the business you're in. So probably market fit is
literally a place where there's a big enough market and you have a problem that you can solve.
A product market fit is where it's a repeatable business, and you know it's going to happen over
and over again. And platform market fit is where you can expand, where you can sell something more
to the same. But think about Salesforce. Going back to the company that I acquired by Salesforce, I
was over there and they had a marketing cloud. They had a sales cloud and a customer Success
cloud and a developer cloud. And so they were selling to the same client for types of different
products. And before you knew they were growing crazily. And that's what a platform market fit
looks like. So once you figure out what value of that is stopping you and your team from growing
and then to what stage of the business you're in comes in step number three, what is the problem
that's stopping you from growing? What is the one, two and three things? This is the part that most
CEOs just don't want to do. There are so many reasons why go to market breaks that you might
say there are hundreds of it. We have done the research. I will literally show there are only 15
go to market problems 15. This is not a 16th one, so stop burning calories trying to come up with a
new language, a new word. We have done the work for you. You literally need to sit down with your team
and saying, hey, what are my top go to market problems? Your team will tell you and let them do
it independently and then bring it all together. Sometimes they would say, well, our number one
problem is that business is relying on heroic sells. Okay, well that's a problem. Our team is not
aligned okay. That's a problem. Our churn is killing our business okay. That's a problem. And
you go through the process. Our research shows with thousands of companies having done this, most
companies have at least five if not seven of these 15 go to market problems. And that's okay.
Again, the issue is not having problems. Of course, every business is going to have problem. The issue
is not identifying the problem. So by putting it in this perspective, what you're doing is taking
away the emotion out of it and saying there's not a marketing team against sales team. You're
literally looking at business problems and how do we solve the business problem. So at this point,
what you can do is bring your team together and say one, two, 8123. Let's rank them and figure out
what it is. There will be a healthy debate, which is what you likely never had. You always had
individual people talk about issues, but never had a team talking about it from a business
perspective, like a healthy debate. So you're going to go through this process and say, what are the
one, two and three of this thing? And as you go through it, you're going to figure out how most of
the team feels. This is the big issue. Oh, I thought this was the big issue. But the reason you have
this issue is because of this issue. And very quickly, you're going to identify the 1 or 2
issues that you really need to solve. Which brings me to step number four. Have your team go through
a quick assessment. We do this a hundred times and never has it disappointed us. This is an
individual assessment which at this point, if you have figured out which valley of death you're in,
maybe one, maybe two, maybe three. If you figured out if you're in a problem product or platform
stage or where you are navigating it to be, if you have identified the top three go to market
challenges, that's stopping your growth. This is the place where you come in and say, validate that
to be true or not. So every dot represents somebody on your team having gone through this.
And let's say the red dot is you, the CEO, and everybody else is over here for every single
thing. So this is a screenshot of an assessment we did with a client. And it will show, oh, we're
pretty aligned here. We're not aligned as much here. Oh we are really not aligned over here. This
brings the right conversations. Now you know the problems why you're having and how to solve those
problems. Right. That's what's happening at this point. Some people are trying to do metrics, but
you're saying, well, we are a platform market fit. Why are we focused on this? This is what you need.
You need to solve these problems because without that you're just going around it. So lastly, what
you do is make sure that you are able to answer all the eight questions of GTM OS on one slide. We
call it the eight questions goes on the slide. This is making sure that every single thing that
you ever learned in it will be on this eight question demos. So as you go through this process
of figuring out what is valid, what is the three P's, what are the 15 problems, the assessment, and
you map your entire go to market operating system on a slide for your executive team to look at. You
are going to come up with what we call a 90 day projects. You would be saying, what is it? Do I need
to solve this process is going to give you the ultimate clarity for you and your team to focus
on. Oh, our ICP sucks. We need to fix it. It's not a marketing problem, it's a business problem. We need
to fix this as a group. We can be running around. Oh, our point of view works for this industry, but
not that industry. So let's fix it and let's focus on this one point of view. Let's not have three
different points of view. Oh, our issue is not pipeline it's sales enablement. And so we need to
hire somebody in sales enablement to solve for that problem. Oh we cannot get to this rev ops
infrastructure right now because if we don't solve the top three problems, this infrastructure
thing is not going to do anything for us. This is how you get your team to prioritize. This is
what's missing. This is what's going to grow your business. I'm so passionate about this. If every
company goes through this quarterly or every single time a new segment is launched, a new
product is launched, a new market. Is there all the reasons the macroeconomics are changing your
sales and marketing people are fighting. If you go through this process, there is no fighting. The
only fight left would be to fight for your business, to drive the business forward, to move
the business forward. We have our clients do this quarterly. Some of them do weekly, some of them do
it monthly. Some do it every single time they launch it. The point is, you have to look at go to
market strategy as not a one time thing, but an ongoing thing and bring it up every time you have
a new business decision to make and align your executive team because they want your team
demands to have clarity, alignment and trust. That's what grows business, not just on the AI
feature. Not just on the product launch, but clarity, alignment and trust. So with that, if it
makes sense, you can go to run comm and get all of the stuff right then and there. It will show you
how to think about it, how to launch it, how to make it better. And if you're ready, let's get
moving.