How Founders Should Think about GTM — Part 3: Systems

If you’ve made it to this post you are probably a founder thinking about your GTM strategy. And hopefully you’ve already read our posts on people and processes. Now we’re going to share the foundations for systems.

Systems: Set the right foundation

Once you have your initial team and repeatable processes, you need to give them the tools and infrastructure to succeed and scale. In today’s world, startups can find themselves with 40+ SaaS applications easily within a year of starting their business. Bottomline, you don’t need a whole suite of marketing, sales, and customer success platforms to start effectively prospecting, closing, and retaining your first customers. Too many applications means needless time and energy spent managing that software and context switching, and less time spent on actual go-to-market execution. Unnecessary additional systems are a distraction and increase your cost of sale, often without a material impact on your top-line. Here are the true essentials to get you started so you and your team can focus on execution and understand your basic performance so that you can steer the business.

Website

First, you need a website! If you’re actively selling, you’re not in stealth and your prospects and customers expect it. It helps you reinforce your story and narrative. Moreover, you need to start building your brand and that starts with your website (the other channels can come after). And it’s the first step to help drive that inbound interest, so make sure you have that contact us / request a demo button!

Your website will be iterative as you evolve your product positioning, so don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Make sure you position your product in terms of what it allows your buyer to do. You don’t always need to explain the exciting underlying technology to them. Besides that, it’s helpful to have a contact us / contact sales page, a careers site, and to list your investors to bring you credibility.

And this shouldn’t cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s incredibly easy to build a website that works well for you and drives strong conversion with services like GoDaddy, Figma, Wix, and Webflow.

Customer Relationship Management System

Second, and most importantly, you need a CRM. You need a system of record to store all your company’s prospects, customers, contacts, interactions, and any other customer information. If you’re truly early, you can hack this with Google Sheets or Notion. But if you can get by with those tools, you’re likely not ready to invest in your go-to-market organization yet.

There are really two options out there if you’re planning to scale your GTM team: Hubspot and Salesforce. If you’re still early and small, you can start with Hubspot. It’s great for small businesses that need the basic CRM features and there’s even a free version that might work for your needs. And with fewer customization options, it’s definitely more intuitive. For larger businesses (100+ users), we typically see them use Salesforce for the robust feature set, reporting, and integrations. You can truly customize it for anything and you’ll soon want to build strategy specific systems and processes to support sales & customer success.

If you put your CRM in place early, you can start collecting data and answer questions like:

• What’s our pipeline?
• How did we do this month?
• What types of customers are we winning and what prospects are we losing? And why are we losing (e.g. Closed Lost Reasons)?
• Who are we competing against?
• Who are our top performers?

And you can answer them when you need to — otherwise you’ll find yourself realizing you should’ve started collecting this data months ago and having to start collecting now to be able to answer this months later when you need those insights today.

Having insight into the health of your sales and customer success organizations will help you lead your team effectively. It helps you decide where to invest time, where to change strategy, and where to make bets.

• What’s your sales cycle length?
• What is your average contract value?
• What are your conversion rates from MQL to SQL and SQL to Sale?
• What’s your win rate?
• What industries or geos are the best performing?

You need to constantly evaluate the effectiveness of your GTM strategy and having these answers readily available will help you focus on driving the business instead of reporting on the business. Keep in mind that the benchmarks you’ll strive for will vary across industries, segments, and a variety of factors. But these will help you track both team and individual performance and whether the iterations of your strategy are effective.

Build a platform for long-term success. Over time, the data you’re collecting will lead to insights into your sales process. It will help refine the customer value proposition. The data will inform strategic product decisions. For your growing sales function, it will build a detailed understanding of what drives repeatable sales success and, over time, evolve into your first iterations of a sales playbook. The value for you as a founder is that you begin the untethering of being the VP of Sales and focus on being the CEO.

That’s it! That’s your bare bones. With that you should have what you need to start the early innings of your GTM growth. Don’t worry about CPQ or advanced reporting / forecasting, commissions software, call intelligence, etc. Evaluating, implementing, and enabling anything beyond a CRM would be a distraction from execution and any additional SaaS spend will just increase your cost of sale or cost of service.

After that initial phase, you can start thinking about marketing automation as you drive demand gen (make sure you hire marketing leaders who’ve done this before vs. working at an established brand where you’re just reiterating brand vs. building it). And at a later point you’ll want to evaluate sales engagement software like Outreach or Salesloft.

Key Actions

• Create a simple website that communicates the problem you’re solving and your product positioning.
• Make sure your website allows your prospects and customers to contact you easily.
• Include details about the history of the company, the mission, and the team.
• Buy and implement a CRM to support and streamline your GTM execution.
• Build some basic reports to help you monitor and steer the business.

So there you have it! If you want to revisit any of the previous posts, you can check out Part 1: People, and Part 2: Processes. And if you have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!