It’s worth being upfront about what you won’t find in MOVE: The 4-Question Go-to-Market Framework by Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown: it doesn’t cover GTM motions or strategies, such as Inbound-Led or Product-Led.

Here’s what it does do:

• It provides a framework for building an ongoing GTM process.
• It acknowledges that your GTM changes depending on company maturity.
• It explains the critical need for strong, unbiased RevOps reporting into the CFO or COO.
• It makes brutally clear that CEOs own GTM. Others (CMO, CRO, investors) play a role.

What is GTM?

“GTM is a transformational process for accelerating your path to market where high performing revenue teams (marketing, sales, customer success) deliver a connected customer experience and every touchpoint reinforces the brand values and vision of your company.”

GTM is not a project. Nor is it your strategy. It is one of three gears that keeps your company moving forwards:

1. Company strategy – purpose and dreams, competitor and product strategy, positioning, messaging, funding.
2. Customer outcomes – benefits realised, advocacy, NPS, retention, expansion.
3. GTM – brand experience, creates connected experience across mktg, sales and CS.

Why is GTM so hard?

Leaders don’t know which questions to ask, which is a big problem because GTM depends on the continual asking of questions. GTM boils down to the four questions of MOVE:

1. Whom should we market to? (Market)
2. What do we need in order to operate effectively? (Operations)
3. When can we scale our business? (Velocity)
4. Where can we grow the most? (Expansion)

If you can’t answer these questions, you’ll under-perform. If you sell but can’t deliver, or deliver but can’t renew, or renew but can’t expand, there’s a growth stall coming.

Six truths about GTM:

• Truth #1: GTM is like building a new product. It is not a mission, vision or strategy. It’s an iterative process that ensures what you’re selling is what you’re delivering. It is the rhythm of the business. GTM belongs to the CEO. It is not a marketing thing. It is a high-performing revenue thing.
• Truth #2: Revenue consists of Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. GTM covers the full revenue stream – new acquisition, pipeline velocity, expansion, upsell, cross-sell, etc – so all three must work together. If Sales and Marketing don’t already work well together, adding CS won’t help.
• Truth #3: Small is the new big. Don’t focus on TAM, focus on TRM. Pick the smallest, most relevant slice and keep going.
• Truth #4: RevOps is the new growth lever. They should solve the problem of competitive and misaligned teams. They should report to the CFO and be the truth-teller. They are autonomous from Sales, Marketing and CS so they report the numbers without bias or emotion.
• Truth #5: Retention is the new acquisition. Marketing’s main KPI will soon become CLV. You need to count your starting ARR, your new ARR, your churn ARR, your ending ARR, and your Net New ARR (new minus churn). You should be aiming for negative net churn, eg you’re selling more to existing customers to offset others leaving.
• Truth #6: Flywheels are the new funnels. 1% of leads turn into business. A funnel is a wasteful churn machine. A flywheel creates efficient circular movement.

Many companies think they have a marketing problem when they have a GTM problem.

Navigating the GTM maturity curve

There are 3 stages/3 Ps:

1. Ideation – problem market fit. You are lead-focused, sales-led, with inefficient growth. You don’t have a fully developed product. You’re making sure the problem is big enough and the market is big enough to activate success.
2. Transition – product market fit. You’re account-focused, sales and marketing aligned, with efficient growth. You know you need a set number of people buying the product but you have the right product for the right market. Sales needs a repeatable, scalable process at this stage.
3. Execution – platform market fit. You’re customer-focused, with an integrated revenue team and efficient growth at scale. You’re going beyond the idea of one product. You’ve added new personas and new regions. You have a solid understanding of how your platform fits.

Your revenue number is not the indicator of your current stage. You could be in several stages at once.

You have to navigate these stages without losing momentum and stalling. “GTM is a practical path to align your people with the mission. It’s about ongoing transformation and continued growth. It’s about knowing what your next move should be and your next and your next and so on.”

Ideation

Questions to ask at Ideation stage:

1. Are you creating a solution that fills the market right now?
2. Is the market big enough for your solution?

Your focus here is leads. It’s a sales led effort with lots of outbound calls. It’s inefficient. You build GTM in terms of volume at this stage: lists, events, digital ads, inbound and outbound calls and demos. You can’t build a target account list because you don’t know what good looks like yet. Your reps are learning and feeding back to help you get product-market fit.

You need to get to transition quickly. To get there you need to start building a different GTM team with leaders focused on different metrics. You’ll shift from funnel conversions and cost per lead to pipeline coverage, CAC, and gross revenue retention (GRR) broken out by segment.

In Ideation, marketing and sales are not aligned as they’re still learning. They must come together for Transition though, all aligned around segmentation and delivering your solution to relevant and approachable groups.

If you stay in Ideation too long, you’ll stall.

Reasons why companies fail to leave Ideation:

1. You haven’t found the ideal customer for your product
2. Heavy discounting – your key use case is getting commoditised
3. Brand and positioning are weak, leading to poor demand
4. There is no one reason for churn so you can’t fix it
5. You have no common enemy and no direction
6. Customers are unsure of ROI at renewal
7. What you sell is not what you deliver
8. You reply on heroics in sales and there’s no repeatability

If you’re struggling, go through this list and address the issues that apply.

How do you know you’re ready to transition? When you have the right product for the right market for the right customer (who can see ROI and will renew). Then you can move. At this stage you will need efficient growth. Segmentation and alignment of teams around a set of accounts is key.

Transition

You have some repeatable processes and you’re proactive about who you’re going after. You must measure performance by segment – you’ll be losing customers after Ideation so you need to segment and know who to abandon.

You have a great product market fit and you’re at account stage. Some companies stay here as it’s a great place to be, although you could get commoditised.

Your GTM here will focus on accounts, quality acquisition by design using segmentation, named accounts and tiers, prescriptive plays, better fit, happier customers, higher ACV.

Execution

Your existing customers will sow the seeds for new customers. You create new customer segments and you focus on CLV, NRR, multi-product adoption as you expand into new categories/create new solutions/acquire new companies. You’re building a much bigger business.

What prevents you leaving Transition and entering Execution?

1. You’re focused on a single product because you have weak vision
2. You’ve under-invested in the distribution required for future revenue growth
3. You only have one way to hit your number and there’s a lack of predictability
4. Your second or third products are really just features of the first, a sign of poor product strategy
5. Your second or third products aren’t taking flight (but should be) due to poor incentive structures or poor enablement across new teams
6. You’re trying to compete on multiple fronts while dominating none
7. Everyone is working but no-one is winning
8. Teams don’t understand their role in executing the strategy and they can’t say no to anything

Once you have multiple products/services, you’re at the platform stage. You need to centralise processes. Marketing, Sales and CS should now be a highly trained flight crew. Your focus is on long-term customers and long-term growth ability. Your GTM will be a process that delivers repeatability and predictability. You still do all the leads and account targeting.

GTM Maturity Model

1. Undefined – Company strategy may exist but GTM does not. Company is in disorder. Business performance is inconsistent. Success isn’t repeated consistently.
2. Defined – Company strategy and GTM exist but are not the glue holding the org together.
3. Managed – Company strategy and GTM are defined, aligned and reasonably operationalised.
4. Repeatable – There is consistent measurement of execution and results across GTM initiatives and supporting functions.
5. Predictable – Execution and results are repeatable and forecasting of business is predictable. Company has hit plan for 3 straight quarters.

You must navigate the maturity curve of the GTM transformation. Figure out where you are and what your next step needs to be.

The MOVE Framework

Market

• Whom should we market to? It’s the RELEVANCY that matters.
• Gather good data about your best customers to build your ICP.
• Then get intent data to go after them.
  • Are they visiting your website
  • Do they already know your brand?
  • Are they looking for a solution like yours?
  • If the target account is an existing customer, are they seeing value?
  • How well does your team interact with them?
  • Do they take your calls?
  • Do they have meetings with you?
• First, we have to categorise and prioritise the accounts:
  • TAM – use firmographics (no of employees/location/revenue/funding/verticals) and technographics (vendors, types of software, renewal times). Can you predict them adding you?
  • TRM – ICP using psychographics. This uses observed data in company messaging on websites etc with keyword trending and natural language processing to find fit.
  • Intent Accounts – they’re in the market. Relationships, engagement, research intent, hiring (first touch engagements, hiring, content habits, how many 2-way interactions have they had with your brand?)
  • In-pipeline Accounts
• At Ideation stage you focus on TAM. At Transition you focus on TRM.

Operations

“If you don’t have a single source of truth by the time you get to the Transition stage of GTM maturity, if the silos are still firmly in place, you’re done for.” This is where aeroplanes stall and fall out of the sky.

• This is all about RevOps.
• RevOps must lead repeatable processes, data, systems, tech stack and metrics.
• RevOps is not about efficiency – it is about effectiveness. They are the leader of GTM.
• RevOps must report to the CFO or COO. They are the modern operating model for driving efficient, predictable revenue by using an interconnected, observable end to end process.
• The questions they have to answer:
  • How do we create repeatable processes?
  • How do we make sure our customer data is as clean as possible to determine what’s working for which segments and why?
  • How do we make sure our systems work the way they’re supposed to so we can create more predictable and reliable data?
  • What metrics should we use to measure our success in the market?
• This doesn’t matter at Ideation stage but it really matters at Transition stage so you have to plan for it early.
• “Create RevOps to support Marketing, Sales, and CS, and put the right elements into place (repeatable processes, data, your systems and tech stack, and a set of metrics that allow you to determine where things are going) and you’ll have what you need to operate your next move as an organisation.”
• The metrics/tech that RevOps needs to be thinking about:
  • Ideation Metrics: sales calls, demos, opps + marketing leads and traffic + funnel conversion CPL, bookings and win-rates.
  • Ideation Tech: CRM, marketing automation, conversion tracking, sales automation
  • Transition Metrics: Ideation metrics + engagement, pipeline coverage, deal velocity, average deal size, gross retention rate, CAC (all measured by segment)
  • Transition Tech: Ideation tech + ABM, intent data, intelligence data, analytics, autonomous training, configure-price-quote, billing automation
  • Execution Metrics: Transition metrics + CLV + time to value + NPS + customer ROI
  • Execution Tech: customer data platform + integrated stack + data stack with AI/ML module

Velocity

• Every business leader asks “when can we scale our business/systems/people?”. Time kills all great ideas but you can be too late or too early.
• There are two velocity ramps to consider:
  • People: The people ramp determines how fast people get things done and achieve success in their roles.
    • When you hire a new team member, how quickly can you set them on a project?
    • When you add someone to your CS team, how quickly can you get them to upsell/upserve or expand the deal to grow account?
    • When you hire a new sales person, how quickly can you ramp up the quota and exceed it?
    • When you get a new marketing team member, how quickly can you get them generating demand and awareness?
  • Enablement: This is about organising the Marketing, Sales and CS team – the training, documentation, decks, playbooks, kickoffs, QBRs. If you don’t get this right, you won’t scale without burning people out or delivering a poor customer experience.
  • The mistake question is often: how many salespeople do we need to hire? It should be how quickly can we get our salespeople to reach our quota?
  • You can’t just hire CS, Marketing, Sales and expect them to work together at high performance level. You need an enablement process.
  • If you have an Olympic rowing team with two people rowing the wrong way, adding more people won’t help.
  • An enablement org should be centralised outside of Marketing, Sales and CS by the time you reach Execution stage.
  • For example – questions you would ask if you were launching a product:
    • What will the Sales teams NOT do or do less of to cover this activity?
    • How much airtime do we need to schedule to keep it top of mind?
    • Which gaps must enablement overcome in order to enact the strategy? Knowledge, throughput, product, market.
    • What is the level of difficulty? New products/competitors/value statements/personas/market segments.
    • How will we resource the launch? New teams?
    • How will we measure the launch?
  • Enablement ramps will change depending on stage:
    • Ideation – put out fires.
    • Transition – improve selling and service.
    • Execution – improve CX.

Expansion

• Where is the next opportunity? Some businesses don’t know how to expand, or they tried and failed with the wrong product or market, or it was too early or too late.
• You can expand 3 ways:
  • With sales – start with direct, then referral partners, then channel partners. You have to distribute widely. 40% of revenue came from partners for Hubspot and 50% for Snowflake.
  • Coverage – geographical expansion or vertical expansion or upmarket (Salesforce) or downmarket (Zoom).
  • Solutions – almost every company goes multi-product at some point. When to do it/when to acquire/which category to choose? You need to understand your centre of gravity better than the other players. Category expansion:
    • Category depth – what would make your existing customers happier?
    • Adjacent niche – what additional use cases could you solve?
    • Emerging categories – who could you partner with, with a view to M&A?
    • Established categories – who is likely to enter your space?
• Put it all together:
  • Identify your current business stage.
  • Align to your current GTM focus.
  • Answer the 4 question framework.
  • Run your business off the KPIs.
  • Test your outcomes – if you have no growth, it is the 3Ps? Or a GTM problem?

There is huge misalignment around GTM:

• Investors – You do not own GTM. Your job is to guide the CEO by empowering them to do it. Some investors even have a centre of excellence to help with it.
• CEO – The CEO must own GTM. Don’t see it as execution. It starts with an exec team that has a shared understanding, KPIs and data. At Transition stage you have to work out what you’re NOT going to do, as it’s tempting to hold onto multiple enticing segments. Pick one segment and grow it – don’t be a CEO who is always introducing chaos into the business. And remember that misaligned data = misaligned teams.
• CMO – The Galvaniser. Think about revenue above all else. Focus on ICPs because you’ll need them for M of Move. ABM is a strong tactic for Transition. Customer advocacy is best for Execution.
• CRO – The Orchestrator. The CRO must own the CS function so all revenue comes through them.

The book provides a thorough list of questions that you can go through with your team and evaluate yourself on the GTM maturity curve.

Your next steps:

If you want to know more about putting a solid GTM foundation in place, read MOVE: The 4-Question Go-to-Market book or check out their other materials at www.gtmpartners.com