How to Rock Your Go-to-Market Strategy, Sales, and Efficiency

3 Ecosystem Experts offer Advice to Fast-growing Startups

For any sustainable tech startup, having a go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a must-have. In this economy, we think sharing best practices on how to approach GTM is also a must.

To do so, we gathered tips from a new event series we launched called ‘Bits for Birds’, where we invite experts from the Earlybird ecosystem to share knowledge with some of our portfolio companies. We have since decided to share these insights more broadly with the community.

For these GTM sessions, we relied on the collective knowledge of Jennifer Bers, Mirko Novakovic, and Remy Lazarovici, who each delivered unique insights.

The core content focused on: How to refine your G2M strategy & boost your sales and efficiency?

According to Gartner, a GTM strategy leverages a company’s USP to engage and win customers to buy their products or services. So a good GTM strategy should explain the pricing, desired channels, and the buyer’s journey — including product-related aspects like rebranding, product info, and identification of new markets.

For our guests, Sales GTM is a blend of art and science: the science is getting repeatable in sales and the art of it is creatively optimizing. With that in mind, here are three experienced perspectives.

🛡The Sales Pro Perspective: Jennifer Bers

Jennifer Bers draws on her experience as a GTM Expert with Notion Capital and CRO of Unbabel when she says, customers mainly care about 2 things: 1) How can you solve my problem? and most importantly 2) Why are you the best option to solve my problem?

Jennifer’s formula for success is to find and cultivate a deep relationship with an internal champion within the organization to which you are selling. Without them, you will not win a deal. A champion means they sell internally on your behalf when you’re not in the room, have a vested interest in your success, and wield some power, influence, and credibility within the account.

An internal champion is somebody who promotes your product or service internally. You need to make sure your champion is successful as a result of bringing in your solution, e.g. by saving x amount of costs or increasing productivity by x.

As most early-stage startups build their first wins around founder-led sales, it is essential to focus on creating and documenting a repeatable process that is as detailed as possible so all the domain knowledge can be shared, and doesn’t just live in one person’s head.

This means: start documenting from day one (e.g. have a FAQ, objection handling, etc.) The learnings that come from this will form the basis of a customer journey and the sales team build-out.

Jennifer encourages ‘qualifying deals out’ in order to sharpen focus on the relevant and realistic accounts. Also, remember that people buy from people they like and trust. That’s not all though, in this economy you HAVE to prove value.

😇 The CEO & Angel Investor Perspective: Mirko Novakovic

Mirko Nocakovic is a sales veteran and brings long-time CEO, advisor, and investor experience from technical companies in the cloud, engineering, and coding space. Often at the intersection of management and tools, he deeply understands how important strategic sales is — both from the builder and investor side.

Mirko encourages startups to ‘Focus on team ramp-up.’

For high-performing startups on a “double triple triple double” journey to explode their € 1 million in ARR, ideally after the first year of launch, he shares tips and tricks to successfully ramp up the enterprise SaaS GTM & Sales team after successful founder-led sales.

Mirko’s rule of thumb for sales leadership: hire a great sales leader first. Good sales leaders normally bring great people with them, know your industry, and know your current startup stage and one or two stages ahead — it’s somebody who has done it before.

Mirko’s KPIs on Team Building (numbers may differ), once you have your sales leader in place and are progressing on your double triple triple double:

1. Ensure that you hire ahead of the curve to get the right sales team in place and fully onboarded to achieve the next goals.
2. A strong-performing and ramped-up Account Executive (AE) should be able to close roughly 1 million in ARR.
3. Give AEs time to ramp up — at least 3 months to onboard, understand the tech and customer journey and start to build pipeline; typically the AE will be fully ramped up at 12 months.
4. The ratio of SDR to AE depends on the complexity of the product, who the customers are, and how complicated it is to generate a pipeline.
5. On average, six AEs need one manager.

Here are more early KPIs to assess before the first closed deals and the end of a probation period:

• Compare your new people to your past top performers to create a benchmark
• Do not only look at outcomes but also consider the complexity and duration of typical sales cycles
• Consider other conversion rates in the funnel before a first deal is closed, e.g. meetings, calls, and outreaches, etc.
• Have many 1:1s in order to continuously review progress

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) should be ready when you start selling. Selling to customers with massive deals size but who do not fit your ICP will not help you to improve your product; rather, it will create a high workload for development and Customer Service team.

Finally, aligning marketing and sales is key. Develop specific revenue KPIs for Marketing and do not base this on the number of deals at the top of the funnel coming from marketing efforts.

🛣 A GTM Journey Perspective: Remy Lazarovici

Remy Lazarovici is Managing Director DACH and one of the first employees at Munich-based decacorn, Celonis, a global leader in process mining. Its cloud-based software provides other companies with a modern way to run and optimize their business processes entirely on data and intelligence. Celonis pioneered the process mining category 10 years ago when developing the ability to automatically X-ray processes and find inefficiencies.

Remy’s focus here was to inspire founders to build a powerful Enterprise GTM motion and a coverage model for scale by reflecting on Celonis’ success story and its early GTM efforts.

🔥 Some burning questions followed:

Is it possible to tackle both large and smaller customers at the same time? Remy responded that he is a fan of clear focus: especially in the early days, find your sweet spot, and be clear about your ICP.

Remy also explained how he implemented a powerful Pre-Sales methodology to better qualify customer needs and effectively prove the value of the technology.

Another question was how to create a sense of ‘urgency’ in a sales cycle: be sure to align the sequence of events and clear timelines with the economic buyer. After all, both sides are investing into the cycle and a go/no-go decision is required at some point.

And as to what to scale first? Ensure product-market fit is clear before scaling the GTM team. Then hire ahead of the curve as you need to mind the ramp times of new joiners and anticipate the duration of sales cycles. As always, good planning is key!

Hope you benefitted from these conversation outtakes. You can catch our previous session write-up here. Keep up with the Earlybird team via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Edited by Elisheva Marcus, VP Communications at Earlybird