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As you scale, the GTM team is responsible for every aspect of the USER/BUYER journey. Sales, Education, Marketing, Community and Product must work together. It's critical that the team meet once a week to assess your GTM efforts.
You’ve gone from idea and pitch deck, to mock-ups and innovator interviews, to beta and design partner installs, to your first paying customers and a systematic sales motion to support your GA product.
All of this work culminates in the execution of the ideal USER/BUYER journey, where your product handles the adoption, and your sales team converts that adoption to revenue, with the support of the other GTM roles along the way.
As you continue to scale, the GTM team is responsible for every aspect of the USER/BUYER journey with the exception of building the product itself. Therefore, you need to capture as much data as possible on your prospects and your current customers to continually enhance this journey for new USERS, new customers, and expansion opportunities with existing customers.
The same evolution that we’ve covered for the sales process will also take place for the rest of the GTM functions (marketing, education, and community) in a similar progression. Since the modern GTM resembles a customer flywheel and not siloed functions, it’s critical that the team meet once a week.
The ideal USER/BUYER journey is a continuum, and each member of the GTM team is responsible for, influences, and inherits different parts. You should think about your top-of-the-funnel pipeline in terms of how far along the ideal USER/BUYER journey your prospects are progressing, collecting data on each step.
GTM meetings should be a recurring one-hour hold on the calendar, ideally on Mondays to set the tone for the week and ensure everyone is aligned. As the founder, you should run these meetings, functioning as the orchestrator between the different functions. Each member should take 10-15 minutes to report on their GTM area, always using data as the focus for their update.
Following updates, there should be at least 15 minutes at the end to agree on action items for the coming week. The decisions from these meetings should be captured by someone and live somewhere that teams can easily access (GDrive, Asana, Notion, etc). You as the founder should designate a scribe and record these meetings, e.g., using Zoom, if possible.
The weekly GTM meeting is where your company should take an honest look at the current health of your GTM efforts and top of funnel to address questions like:
These meetings can take the entire hour. Sometimes they’ll only require 30 minutes; other times you’ll need three hours. The duration needs to flex depending on the challenges at hand. It is never an option to not have this meeting even if the updates are quick. This is especially important with distributed teams to foster a sense of camaraderie, alignment, and urgency.
In the beginning, even if the GTM team only consists of the founders, you have to think through the questions that will help you diagnose and correct problems with your GTM strategy.
As you expand your team, don’t assume that hiring a full-time employee to own a function solves the problems related to that area. You are the CEO/CTO/COO/Founder. You must have the vision this GTM is driving toward and hold the team accountable. You have to be the orchestrator of this talented group. You can delegate responsibilities, but you can never delegate the strategic vision the team is collectively chasing.
Lastly, the GTM meeting should be filled with constructive tension. If you sense that the team is holding back or avoiding a topic or data point because it reflects poorly on the current strategy or product, it’s your role as the founder to address the elephants in the room head-on, immediately. Disagreement is healthy and should be expected, especially when you hand over the responsibilities to experts in each function. With that said, after you’re done discussing and disagreeing, the whole team must commit to one course of action. Disagree and commit. Not committing as a unit isn't an option and is usually the main reason why factions begin to form between marketing and sales, community and education, sales and community, etc.
At the beginning of the first Modern GTM Sales article, we posed the question: “what is every step you need to take to create a modern GTM at a seed-stage company to get from a signed term sheet (at month 0) to product-market fit and paying customers (roughly 18 months later)?”
In short, our answer is to break those 18 months into six-month phases, be in constant communication with the market and your ideal USERS to de-risk what you’re building, and keep the USER/BUYER journey at the center of every GTM decision you make.
This is our first attempt at breaking down what a modern GTM looks like for B2B founders. It will always require updating, enhancing, and adjusting since GTM motions, like PMF, are not static but ever changing. The other critical component it requires is feedback. If you found this extremely useful, not useful at all, or fall somewhere in between, it will only get better if we hear from you. So, please take a minute to give us feedback. Thank you for your time!
