Most GTM’s fail to scale because they are not authentic.

Authenticity is a major theme among millennials with selfies becoming an expression of that authenticity. “Selfies are authentic, immediate, and personal,” according to Dr Pamela Rutledge.

Authenticity applied to GTM requires the company’s brand promise to be fulfilled promptly by the product experience. More specifically, Authentic GTM requires the company’s GTM strategy to match the customer’s actual product experience. This sounds so simple and basic. But, it is easy to obfuscate the company’s GTM with numerous GTM strategies, tactics and technologies.

The Foundation for Authentic GTM

Authentic GTM starts with matching the first sales meeting experience with a potential customer with the initial onboarding experience of that same customer. From the customer’s perspective, both experiences are with the same company and should obviously be consistent. From the company’s perspective, each experience is managed by a completely different organization (sales and customer success) with different goals and incentives. Also, every startup sells the future vision. This makes matching the two experiences surprisingly difficult.

The first sales meeting experience matches the initial onboarding experience, if they have the same tactical message, same target customer and same use case, as shown in the box below:

Tactical Message. Is the WOW in the first sales meeting the same as the first value of the onboarded customer? WOW is that simple something that energizes a person inside the potential customer to become a Champion (when the Champion says: “Wow! I gotta to have it.”) This wow is authentic, if it matches the first value after onboarding. (see Lincoln Murphy’s blog post on “the secret of successful customer onboarding”).

Target Customer. Did the Champion in the sales process become a Passionate Active User after onboarding? After the wow moment, the Champion should push the product through the company’s internal process and help overcome the internal obstacles. Then in the ideal world, the champion, after buying and onboarding the product, becomes so happy with the product that the champion becomes a passionate and active user of the product. Jacco vanderKooij calls that moment Yeehaw, where the product was delivered as promised, on time and within budget. If so, the GTM is authentic. Sometimes, the champion and passionate active user are different people in the same customer. That’s ok. But, that GTM is harder to scale, since it is harder to buy for someone else. As an analogy, my wife returns most items I purchase for her.

Target Use Case. Is the pain described in the sales process addressed by the actual use case after onboarding? The wow results from the champion believing the product will eliminate a real pain. Hopefully, after onboarding, the champion becomes a Passionate Active User and actually uses the product to eliminate that pain.

If the tactical message, target customer and target use case all match, the reviews and references from the Passionate Active Users should validate the first meeting sales pitch. One way to confirm this matching is to create customer case studies. In the early days of Marketo, I remember Bruce Cleveland asking for single-page customer case studies, and Jon Miller ultimately creating 40+ single-page customer case studies. Having 40+ customer case studies helped identify the primary themes, ensured consistency throughout the organization, and were a great sales resource. Having numerous customer case studies (created by marketing/customer success and used by sales) reinforces the foundation for Authentic GTM. (Note: by using these case studies only for internal use, the company can avoid asking for customer approval.)

Once this foundation is set, we know that the GTM is authentic and potentially scalable.

Expand the Authentic GTM Foundation to Marketing

Completing the foundation for Authentic GTM answers three key marketing questions: who, why and how?

Who is the target customer? more like the Champion’s and Passionate Active User’s. Ideally, they have the same title on LinkedIn. Some call the target customer as persona’s.

Why would someone become a customer? to solve their Pain with the Targeted Use Case.

How to get someone excited? Show the Wow to convert target customers into champions. “Show” could mean seeing a demo, trying the product themselves (through a free trial or freemium) or hearing the product from others.

The company has product market fit.

Now, the company needs to accelerate growth. Basically, it needs to answer the where question: Where to find numerous target customers in a capital efficient manner? The table below categorizes the different approaches to answering the where question. The first column requires a personal connection, which is usually high value but difficult to scale. The second column is a scale process, such as a new marketing technology.

One traditional approach is to hire sales/BD/advisors people with great rolodoxes of the target customers. This approach may have scale issues, unless the new product is just a significantly superior version of the product previously sold by the sales person for the same use case.

The best approach is obviously when the Passionate Active Users sell the product for you. But, this approach may have scale issues, unless the products are very viral.

So, how to get target customers actively seek out the company at scale? One approach is to identify where the target customers go to research or discuss this pain and the potential solutions. As an interesting analogy, the National Ocean Service wrote about how scientists locate schools of fish using sonar. Basically, “their swim bladders (the gas filled chambers found in many fish) reflect sounds waves, making fish schools detectable via sonar.” Going back to our GTM discussion, the sonar equivalent could be search or communities/social. Since people in pain may search for potential solutions, identifying (and optimizing for) the right search phrase is critical. Also, since people in pain may converse in communities for support, identifying (and engaging in) the right community is critical. Leveraging either situation requires great content.

After identifying the meeting spot of the target customers, the company can apply all the digital marketing techniques (content marketing, demand generation, ABM, etc), which have proven to be quite effective.

Authentic GTM also helps answer the when question: When will the deal close after the first sales meeting? The time-to-close exceeds the time-to-value in the onboarding process (notwithstanding the CEO’s or board’s desires). In other words, long time-to-value drives a long sales cycle, and thus limits the GTM strategy options. In contrast, Marketo’s early financing pitch said — “We can go where they can’t” by leveraging fast time to adoption and value.

Implications of Authentic GTM for the CEO

Authentic GTM also empowers the CEO in several ways.

Authentic GTM enables the CEO to break down departmental silo’s and have them work together using Authenticity as the rally theme. Aligning strong departmental leaders (such as VP Sales and VP Customer Success) is not trivial. This is why I am excited to have Winning by Design work with our investments, since they have a strong sales leader (Jacco vanderKooij) working closely with a strong customer success leader (Lincoln Murphy).

Authentic GTM answers the scale question (assuming the unit economics work). Knowing when and how much to scale GTM is always a tough CEO (and thus board) question.

As the CEO ponders the numerous GTM strategies, tactics and technologies, it helps to start with a simple question: does the wow in the first sales meeting match the yeehah after the initial onboarding? Ultimately, the GTM must be Authentic to be scalable.