GTM Velocity

As a startup founder, you have to have a strong point of view on why your product is essential. You should be angry about the problems that your product can solve. And passionate about the solution. For example, if you’re building software for events, you should be frustrated with how bad the customer experience is with existing products. Be passionate about how much better things will be when companies use your tool. Or, if you’re creating automated testing tools for developers, be angry about the issues with current tools—too many false positives/negatives, inefficiency, or wasted costs. Be passionate about making development teams more successful. Many open source software tools are created and maintained from anger at big corporations who stick high prices on simple software and make it unaffordable for many buyers. Communicating your anger and passion to your team creates a shared vision and culture. Your engineers, salespeople, and product managers need to believe they’re improving the world in some way. If your only anger is that prospects use a competitor, then your product is just a "me-too."  If your only passion is to get rich, you won’t. I once worked for a founder whose sole vision was to get a great valuation and sell the company. Every strategy was focused on boosting valuation, not helping customers. The result? High employee and customer churn—and no valuation.

The biggest mistake in B2B marketing attribution was adopting first touch/last touch from B2C. Ask any founder or CMO about how they last purchased a software tool, and they’ll describe a complex process—searches, social posts, recommendations, review sites, emails, demo calls, etc. It’s hard to pinpoint a single source for the purchase, aside from maybe a trusted recommendation. Yet, many still simplify their own pipeline reporting into single touch attribution: -- "Look, Google Ads brought in four $80k deals this quarter. Let’s put more budget there." -- "These six opportunities came from an ebook download. We should hire more product marketers." -- "Those 20 opportunities were sales-generated without marketing involvement. Marketing should be contributing more." If your teams are arguing over attribution, you're wasting time. You’ve created a competition where each team wants to claim the biggest slice of the pie, rather than focusing on generating new pipeline.

Here’s why you need to audit your martech stack and the process I suggest for founders: Martech stacks can get stale fast if no one’s actively managing them. A new manager joins, insists on tools they’ve used before, and you buy them. The manager leaves, but the tools remain. An employee finds a tool to speed up a project, the project ends, and you’re left with the tool. Many startups don’t know how many tools they’ve purchased, who’s using which features, or when tools will automatically renew. Tools are often bought at a discount with annual payments, then renewed without being needed. When you’re growing fast, this is often fine—it’s better for employees to experiment with tools than to get bogged down in approvals. But it’s important to periodically audit and remove unnecessary tools. Audit process: -- Assign one person to handle it. -- Gather all software spend data from the last 12 months—credit card and invoice records. -- Identify each tool, who bought it, and who’s using it now. -- Check costs, renewals, and dates. -- If no one’s using a tool, get login access and review the renewal conditions. -- For tools in use, create a scoring system based on cost, features, and usage. -- Cancel unused or barely used tools. -- Review more expensive tools that aren’t fully utilized. -- For essential tools like CRM, audit user accounts and remove unnecessary ones. -- Assign an owner to each tool (usually the employee managing it). -- In the future, ensure tool ownership is transferred when an employee leaves or changes roles. I consult to B2B SaaS founders on GTM strategy. DM me if you want to talk about martech stacks and how to optimise them.

The number one killer of your pipeline is a lack of pain to solve. We’ve all seen what an urgent deal looks like—when the buyer is in a rush to solve a problem and purchases as quickly as possible. Sometimes that buyer isn't even your core ICP or the perfect persona, but they have a major pain your product can fix. We often talk about vitamins vs. painkillers, nice-to-have vs. need-to-have products. In your discovery and sales meetings, focus on identifying the pain and showing how your product solves it. Don’t just qualify for budgets and authority. When deals keep getting delayed, it’s because there isn’t enough pain driving urgency, or the buyer is focused on bigger issues. Or, you haven’t convinced them that you’re the right painkiller.

Here’s a quick way to improve your website: delete the FAQ page. Be honest… forget about "frequently"—do any of your customers actually ask these questions, or are they just extra marketing messages that didn’t fit elsewhere? Or maybe your SEO team thought they could squeeze in more keywords with an FAQ page? Or perhaps your competitor has one, so you felt the need to copy them? Why is the FAQ page bad? You’ve either filled it with useless text and then distracted your users from real learning with an FAQ link in the menu, or you’ve included some helpful information but forced customers to check multiple pages to find what they need. If any of the questions and answers are genuine, move them to the relevant sections on your website. Put delivery questions on the delivery page, product questions on the product page, and so on. Delete the rest, then delete the page.

If you don't differentiate your product, your audience will do it for you—and you might not like the result. Think about all the pizza restaurants you can order from. Your mind has them mapped in a multidimensional structure: there's an axis for delivery speed, others for cost, taste, and authenticity. Maybe you even have one for dietary or allergy flexibility. There aren't many pizza places you consider identical in every way. Even if they are, your mind creates its own map. One place delivered late once, so you think of it as "slow delivery," for instance. Even the branding on the store, the smell as you walk past, the ambiance—these factors all shape how you categorize your options. But what happens when two pizza shops are very similar, and you don’t have enough data to differentiate them? Buyers hate it when they can’t understand the difference between two similar products, so they’ll almost always go with the market leader. If one pizza shop has multiple outlets or appears busier, that one wins. Now, back to your SaaS product... Your prospective buyers will map you out against others in the category they place you in. This is why people love Gartner and Forrester grids—they define a category and neatly place brands inside it. The understanding prospects have of you is shaped by both your marketing and sales efforts, as well as word of mouth and reviews. -- Don’t confuse your buyer with fancy categories you've created or by saying you have no competition. -- Accept that much of your prospect's understanding will come from word of mouth and channels outside of your control, so ensuring happy customers is crucial. -- Look for every opportunity in your control to clearly explain your product and position it the way you want to be understood. This isn't just your website's hero text—it's every social media post, marketing collateral, email, and other touchpoints with your prospects. I work with B2B SaaS founders on GTM strategy and execution. DM me if you'd like to chat.

SEO is a nightmare for B2B SaaS in 2024. Many companies have seen their traffic drop over the last 6-18 months as Google's big algorithm changes rolled out. So, what can you do? There are several options: keep doing what used to work, make incremental changes, or create higher-impact content. But I want to highlight an idea that many founders haven’t considered—forget about SEO. Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and an SEO thought leader for the last decade, took a completely different approach with his new company, SparkToro. He invested nothing in SEO, and the company ranks for almost nothing except its own brand name. He says, "I would much rather have people search for our brand name than rank #1 for unbranded keywords in our sector." His focus is on building the brand so people search for it directly, rather than trying to rank for non-branded terms. Now, imagine taking all the time, effort, and resources you would spend in the coming years trying to rank for "Best ABC Software" (including SEO reviews and reporting) and instead, investing it into building your own brand. Instead of tracking the ranking of hundreds of random keywords and organic traffic to hundreds of blog posts, you just track the organic search volume for your brand. It might sound crazy to some, but if you sell to mid-market or enterprise customers, it’s a very real option. In fact, most of your high-converting inbound leads likely come from those already searching for your brand. DM me if you’d like to discuss how this could work for your product.

The number one superpower for a founder is the willingness to spend time on the activities that they hate doing. As a busy founder, it’s easy to convince yourself that the tasks you enjoy are the most important. Meanwhile, the activities you dislike get delayed, ignored, or delegated, and you justify that they "don’t matter right now." This is generally true for anyone, not just founders. But the reason it is so important for founders to understand, is that your team takes cues from you and your focus. If you want the company to understand what is most important, you don't need to say anything. Your team will understand the priorities from where you are focusing your energy. If you are sending out slack messages with lists of critical priorities, and then spending your time on other things, you will confuse your team.

Words to stop using in your SaaS marketing copy: Elevate Boost Level up Growth Innovative Seamless "Your XYZ Game" End-to-End All-in-One World-class cutting-edge What all these types of words reflect, is that you don't understand the real problems that your product solves for your audience.. A finance team wants to reduce the time taken for manual data entry of invoices, not to "Elevate your Finance Game" An ecommerce marketer wants to reduce CAC and increase repeat purchase frequency, not "Deliver Growth for Your Ecommerce Brand" Useless words make their way into copy when everyone is in a rush. The new website page has to go live, and the designer added a sub heading, so now someone has to create the copy immediately. So we get blah blah blah.  But no one comes back later to fix it. Once a quarter, look through every product/solution/company page of your website, and hunt for meaningless words that are just filling up space. What other words do we all need to stop using?

How NOT to do US GTM as a successful Indian SaaS company: -- Hire a scattered, remote team in the US. -- Hire a US VP of Sales to manage them. -- Use the same sales playbooks and collaterals that worked in India. -- Target the same ICP segments you've been selling to in India for years. -- Require all spend approvals and business processes to be managed from India. -- Complain that the US team is unmotivated and only gives excuses, not results. -- Arrange random trips to the US for different leaders to 'motivate' the US team. -- Fire the VP of Sales every 9 months (if they haven’t quit yet), and fire non-performing AEs every 6 months. -- Announce every 12 months that the next 12 months will be better because "now we have the right people on board." How to do US GTM as a successful Indian SaaS company: -- Assume the US will need a different GTM strategy than what worked elsewhere. -- Understand that your success in India may carry little value to US buyers. -- Be very very open to the fact that your product may need changes for the US market. -- Recognize that a quality product with minimal customer servicing might be more appealing than promises of high-touch service. -- Create a focused strategy: start with a much narrower ICP than you're used to. One segment, one customer size. Everyone should be obsessed with winning that segment and getting reference customers. -- Hire a US team in one location, with an in-person work expectation. The team should be hired based on the ICP segment you've chosen, rather than experience in your product category. -- Open an office, a few WeWork desks are fine. -- A founder or senior leader should move to the US to act as VP of Sales until the team is established—both financially with customers and revenue, and culturally. -- Build a strong culture within the local team. It's more important for them to bond and enjoy working together than to feel connected to HQ in India. -- Celebrate small wins. It can be demotivating for a new US team to see their results compared to established territories that deliver 10x-50x the revenue. If you're telling them their region is critical, they need to feel proud of their wins—just like when the company first started. What am I missing?