Why You Have a Go to Market Problem w/ Sangram Vajre | builders podcast

0:00You don't have a marketing problem, you don't have a sales problem, you don't even have a product problem. We believe every company has a go-to-market problem.

0:15Today on the pod is go-to-market with CEO of GTM Partners, Sangram Vajray, where we discuss how to communicate your unique value proposition to prospects and customers. And then, of course, the first segment is my weekly check-in with editor-in-chief of the Bee Newsletter, Marty Beckerman. We talk about business travel, workplace conflict, and the salad dressing that has given$600 million and counting to charity. Hey, Marty, how are you? Good to see you. Doing great, John. Thanks for having me back on. Yeah, excited to talk to you again this week about what's going on in the newsletter. So let's start first talking about air travel.

0:58On a personal note, I know you have a nine-month-old. Have you taken her on any airplanes? She has been on one trip, and we were really pleasantly surprised. After having been on airplanes my whole life, hearing screaming babies, apparently I was a screaming baby on the airplane. Some might say I'm still a screaming baby. Our daughter was totally calm the whole trip, pretty much. So hopefully that continues at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nice, nice. One of the things that I've noticed about air travel this year, because it really picked up for me, both personal and business, is how packed the airports are.

1:36I mean, it's really striking. They're busier than I've ever seen. I'm almost yearning for the days when – I'm not yearning for a pandemic. Don't cancel me. I was yearning for a pandemic for years because I thought it would bring down housing prices, but then they just went up. Yeah, but back when airports you could get around, there wasn't a super long line every Starbucks and so on. But what you're covering is that business travel is going to go way up next year, even compared to what's going on this year. Right. According to the Global Business Travel Association, eight in 10 company travel managers are saying that they're booking more business trips next year than this year.

2:22The head of Omni Hotels is saying that there's going to be a 20 % increase next year in conferences and team building events. So there's been kind of a trend the last few years of revenge travel, this idea that after we were all in lockdown and not leaving our houses, not seeing the world, not seeing friends and family, people had a lot of savings built up, and they were going to spend that on personal travel. So it seems like 2024 is going to be the year that business travel finally catches up with that trend. Now, what type of business travel is happening? Is it that just people are working remotely, they're coming into the office or is it other things?

3:06Right. Well, we talked to an expert in this who talked about the kind of business travel that employees will be most likely to go along with. You know, companies are struggling to get employees back in the office even a few days a week. So to get them on an airplane and packing their toiletries could be a big ask. But this business expert told us for business travel with a really strong purpose, things like sales meetings with customers or prospects, customer service trips, trade shows, industry events, Whereas things where your company really needs to be there in person, where this could not be a Zoom meeting is the most important thing.

3:50That makes sense. You're also covering next week what happens when there are conflicts in the workplace. And I was kind of shocked by the stat that 50 % of a manager's time is spent managing conflict. That sounds counterproductive to what most businesses are trying to achieve. Yeah, not my manager's time. I'm easy to get along with. Right. Me too. At least at work. So what are you learning and what did you write about? Right. We are doing an excerpt from the book Work Your Magic from an organizational consultant named Sharon Dormari. And she is talking about how workplace conflict is inevitable.

4:39Every company is going to have employees or departments or executives that have different visions for things. What she says is the most important thing is that this needs to be out in the open. Then there needs to be ground rules for it, that it's not going to become a game of people talking behind each other's backs and gossiping and going to their manager and saying, I can't stand this person. she's saying that if you have a problem with how someone's doing something you need to talk with them directly and work something out and come to a compromise that when it's behind people's backs it creates this toxic gossip culture that can actually destroy a company yeah and i i found in my own personal situation when there's some type of professional disagreement there's almost like when it comes to light there's a there's a catharsis and it almost always always gets better That makes sense.

5:36Last thing I wanted to touch on is you have a cool, I guess, recurring feature called Origin Story in the newsletter. What company are you covering this time around? Sure. We're talking about Newman's Own and how Newman's Own got off the ground. Today, there's so many celebrities that have tequila brands or canned wine and partnerships with watch companies. Ryan Reynolds is very, very, very good at this. He owns a cell phone company. So they're becoming billionaires. A lot of these celebrities are actually making way more money on their business ventures than on their acting or singing. And good for them.

6:20But we're talking about how Newman's Zone started. It wasn't originally supposed to be a business venture at all. Paul Newman would make the salad dressing for dinner guests. He'd have his friends over and he'd serve them salad and other dishes and everyone pointed to the salad dressing. He's like, that's the best salad. That's one hell of a salad dressing there, Paul. You should sell that. You got to sell that in stores. The 80s were simpler times. Yeah. So he finally was like, okay, I'll put it in stores, but I don't need any more money. I'm going to give away every penny that the salad dressing makes.

7:00And that expanded into the whole line of Newman's own products, pizzas and jarred tomato sauce and dozens and dozens of products that have raised$600 million since 1982 for things like underserved children, children with chronic diseases, really good causes. so he was kind of doing the corporate responsibility thing way before it was cool and it all came from just putting some balsamic on uh on some mixed greens yeah it's a cool story amazing story and it's not one percent of you know net proceeds to charity it's everything to charity 600 million a really big deal and my plug would be the fig newmans so they're like you know the uh fig Newton's kind of, but Newman's own version.

7:52They also make a gluten-free one. I have two folks in my family who are gluten-free. They're really delicious. So buy some of that and give some money back to these charities. I'll check them out. It's not Girl Scout cookie season, so maybe that'll hold us over. Okay. All right. Good. Good to see you, Marty. Thanks. Talk to you next week. Thanks a lot, John.

8:17Hi, Sangram. How are you? Good to see you. Great to see you, John. Especially after we're meeting up in New York and seeing an event, doing things together, I feel like, all right, we now know each other well, so we can go deep on some of these topics. Totally. And what's so cool about New York, you live in Atlanta, I think. I live in Seattle. There's always something monumental going on in New York. Last week was UN week. Not great for traffic exactly, but really cool. and there's always something about the creative energy in person in New York that's really hard to replicate. It is. It's funny.

8:54The only thing I feel semi not great about is the speed at which people walk in New York. It immediately reminds me that I live in a suburb in Johns Creek in Atlanta and I'm walking slow and everybody's passing me by like really fast. So New York reminds me of the speed at which everybody's moving. Yeah, I was going through, I took the, I took the subway when I was, when I was there and I like, wasn't fast enough to tap my phone when I was going through the, the turnstiles. People were like queuing behind me there. I got some dirty looks. So yeah, people are moving fast there. No, no question.

9:32So, so I'm so pumped to talk to you today and I kind of want to tee it up, tee it up this, this way. So like, let's say you have a solid product. Most listeners have a solid product or service. You have some customers that like it. You believe in it. You think it drives real value, but you're not growing. So with the old narrative was to say, oh, you've got a problem with sales. Yeah. Or you have a problem with marketing, but that's not what you say. So, so Sangram, what would you characterize as the issue? We have t-shirts with that now. It literally says, you don't have a marketing problem. You don't have a sales problem.

10:09You don't have a CS problem. You don't even have a product problem. We believe every company has a go-to-market problem. And John, as you and I experienced in New York when we did this event was everybody recognizes that a single department or a single function can never solve an entire company problem. And an example of this company that you just shared, well, maybe the solution to that problem is that you need to win a different market. Maybe you need to create a different type of product that might be easy to do. Maybe you need to run a completely different go-to-market motion. Instead of outbound, you need to do PLG.

10:48Whatever it might be, it is a team decision. It requires marketing, sales, customer success, and product team to come together and solve it in a way that they're thinking about it as a business. And I think the way to frame it is, okay, we've got a go-to-market problem. Let's figure out how to solve it together. So you talk to dozens, hundreds of companies sort of experiencing the highs and lows of growing a business. And you yourself have experienced some real rocket ships like at Pardot. When you think at the highest level of top-performing organizations and have really – whether or not they've solved it, it's good.

11:30It's top of the line. What are some of the characteristics that you see, just to get the ball rolling here? Yeah, I think there is a part that is not talked about much, and I've experienced it so much in my career. I think the top performing companies typically have a team that I call is built of dreamers, doers, and drivers. People don't think about it in that sense. And so how many times, John, you may have hired somebody who's on paper amazing, came with highly recommended folks and said, oh, this person is amazing. He's the best person, seen that, done that, all that. And you hired them and all of a sudden a week later, you're like, I don't think this is working out.

12:11I don't think I got the right person. And this has happened to me multiple times. And the reason was because I hired for the skill set, not for the mindset. and every stage of the business every way the business are built you need to hire people in a certain functions and for the stage as well so if it's a if it's a new department where everything is new regardless of big small but if it's a new thing you need a dreamer you need somebody who loves chaos who can say i don't come in i don't need a process i'm just gonna figure things out but you need that so so that's a dreamer mindset a driver is someone when you need a department like, all right, they're just not moving fast enough.

12:53They just are not on the ball as much as they should. So you need a driver there who's, who recognizes and has a sense of urgency around certain things. And that's when you know that things are moving faster. And then most organization, almost 80 % are made up of doers who are ultimately the people you can trust that these people are going to get things done. They're going to get things done on time. They're going to look at all the details. They're going to make a phenomenal, do a phenomenal job of it. And the combination of a great company or a great team is this dreamer, doer, driver combination.

13:25And because if you have too many dreamers, guess what? Everybody's dreaming, nothing is getting done. If you have too many doers, everybody's just trying to get things done, but they don't know where they're going. And if you have drivers, they're just killing each other because they're like, why haven't you done this? Why haven't you done that? So you need this amazing combination of dreamer, doer, driver. And I feel most amazing companies that I have worked with at Pardot, at Salesforce, at Terminus, and now even at Go-To-Market Partners. To me, that's what I'm looking for, and that's what drives these businesses forward.

13:56That's a great way of thinking about it. So if you're a leader hearing this, should you start by thinking across your team and saying, okay, Sally, she's my dreamer. Bob, he's my doer, et cetera. Is that how to think about it in one way to see what your gaps are? Yeah, I think the best way you would know it. I think most people, as soon as I said those words, it probably popped in their brain. Like, okay, I think I'm a dreamer. I think I have a doer. Oh, I know where my problems are. Because when you're hiring, it's hard to do, oh, I'm going to do a disc profile of somebody. You're not doing that.

14:33You need that for more depth, in-depth understanding of how to work. but ultimately you need to know immediately as a hiring person as a as a company that is scaling or moving fast is like what do I need so the first question you need to ask to yourself as a leader who do I need on my team right now for this particular job not skill set but mindset wise and as soon as you ask that question it's immediate most times for people okay I need somebody who's going to walk into this chaos and say hallelujah this is awesome I'm here for a reason. This is what I want to do. Versus somebody who looks at that and saying, whoa, you've got problems.

15:07I don't know how you're going to solve for it. You don't need that person. You know, that's the last person you want in that. You want a person who looks at a problem and jump in and that's a dreamer. But sometimes when you're scaling and the departments are working fine, sometimes you need a doer leader because you just want to make sure things are done and you don't need to move things too much over there. You just want to make sure things are done right because that's what's needed over there. So all are leadership roles, but you need to know what mindset you're hiring for at what time. I really like that.

15:36And I think that it reminds me of how Amazon approaches hiring in that they have these leadership principles. I don't know how many they have anymore. But when you're hiring at Amazon, you're sort of thinking, does this person need to think big? Does this person need to dive deep? Does this person need to invent and simplify? And so it's a way of sorting among candidates all who have the same experience but might bring a special superpower to the table that someone doesn't. I really think that's a good way of thinking about it and also prepping the interview panel about how to think about what you're looking for beyond.

16:20And, you know, they also worked at a platform company and they also have had a marketing title and whatever. That's really cool. So a lot of what we went through in New York and what I'm excited to kind of work on within my team is how GTM strategy can be improved. And I liked the audacity that you have on your site about saying there are 15 problems in the GTM world. There are exactly 15. There are only 15. Like, I want to actually go through some of these because they're really interesting to talk about. But how did you arrive on this journey of looking at, like, specific problems within someone's GTM strategy and then how to diagnose and correct those?

17:09Oh, man, it's a fun story, John. When we wrote, Brian and I wrote the book Move, we started asking go-to-market questions to Brian Halligan, who was the CEO of HubSpot at that time, to Mark Robert from Stage 2 Capital, to a ton of marketers like Megan Eisenberg and Sidney Sloan, and VC who has had 200 exits like Kelly Ford and others. and we kept asking questions, who owns go-to-market? How do you think about go-to-market? What go-to-market problems are you struggling with that? Then all these questions, it came down to these very clear patterns that people started to do. And then we dropped a research and saying, all right, let's look at how do these patterns emerge?

17:48And we then ran through 3 ,000 or so go-to-market leaders and over and over, we just saw these 15 come back. We never saw a 16th one come back at all. And so when we saw that, oh, there are literally a finite number of problems. Now, you may say it a little bit differently and different companies say it differently. We try to take the jargon off. Like all these 15 problems are literally what some people say, well, you know, we're board meeting yesterday because that's what we talked about. So we know these words actually connect emotionally. These are real words, real people use in their companies to solve and think about problems.

18:24But the challenge that everybody faces is they never look at this as a go-to-market problem. They look at this as, oh, churn is killing my business? That's a customer success problem. Oh, we don't have enough leads? Oh, that's a marketing problem. That's where it breaks down. That's when you have just forgotten the point we are here. We're here to solve go-to-market problems, not a functional problem. That's where it breaks down completely. Yeah, and it's because you have shared responsibility for things, need to look at things holistically like a pipeline or whatever. So I want to dive deeper on three of the problems and sort of whether you've had personal experience with these or if you've advised companies from these or how you think about them.

19:06So one that I found really, really interesting was the GTM problem of business is relying on heroic sales players but not sales plays. And I've seen this a lot, whether it's a startup that I'm working on or a startup that I'm close to, where you've got two or three folks and or maybe the founder who cut the first big deal and it's amazing. And they cut the second big deal and it's amazing. And we say, OK, we've got two big deals. It's driving revenue. Now we need 30. Yeah. And then you're trying to scale the sales team. It doesn't work. And so you're trying to find, like, how do you capture this magic?

19:53So maybe you can talk about this problem as you've seen it and why you put it. Maybe there's a reason why you put it number one in terms of the list of problems. It certainly has been. So even for every single, we've done 10 go-to-market roadshows by now. And every time we run it, that happens to be one of the top three go-to-market problems that come up. So you're absolutely right. There's a reason why it's number one there. It's not saying that this is the most important problem, but it is the most common problem that most companies face. And if you talk about, let's just segment this. Let's just say it's an early stage.

20:26The problem that you described, John, is exactly that. As a founder-led sales, they know how to do it. They're so unclear about the problem they're solving. They're selling through passion and energy and excitement for it. And people are going to give it a shot if they know enough about you and all that. And that works. And that is not sales. That is pure heroics at that point. And people should not consider that as a, oh, we got a product market fit. Not true at all. But at the same time, what has changed, John, you and I have experienced this is 10 years ago or five years ago, people would say, oh, okay, we did a couple of things.

21:02So now they just hired 30 more salespeople and they're gonna start doing the same calls and emails and we're gonna get more deals in. That playbook is gone. There is not a single company we advise today where we would recommend that. Although if you go back and look at four years ago, that's exactly the playbook of how ZoomInfo grew and SalesLoft grew and Salesforce grew and all these other companies grew. But that is not the playbook for any company right now where you hire more bodies in order to get more calls and more emails. You don't need, people are no longer subscribing to that. So what's the new playbook?

21:34Well, the new playbook is one, instead of focusing on PRAS, SDR, AE, marketing, CS as a siloed area, you really are creating, here are the list of our target accounts. Let's together run the right campaigns, run the right programs to get them. Maybe that means you need to bring them to an event. Maybe that means you need to create a special webinar only for 10 people, not 100, but 10 people in that industry, in that category that will bring them to that particular call. Maybe you need to create incredible experiences for them through direct mail or happy hours or whatnot that will bring these conversations to life.

22:13That is the new playbook. The old playbook where, well, we're just going to put a bunch of people on the call. It's just not working. So the heroic sales is really killing. And here's the other bad news on that. The companies who do that. Because it is something that has been thought about as the way to grow, people are spending so much money on it. And I've always said companies are not running out of ideas. They're running out of money. And when you run out of money, you run out of time to do that. and it is one of the costliest tests or experiment you can do is to hide a bunch of bodies to do this.

22:45So taking a step back from Heroics, our advice to most companies is like, all right, if you are in a founder-led sales, now you need to find a way to create this as a go-to-market unit, not just hide an SDR because that's an immediate instinct you get or an AE, but to say, what will bring the next 10 customers? Yeah, it was so funny. Next 15, yeah. Oh, at the event that we were at where I don't remember as you or a colleague asked the question, you know, what does it mean when you've just hired three or four or five salespersons and someone in the crowd said you just got funding? I remember that.

23:20Yeah, congratulations. Yeah, so funny. Okay, so next problem I want to dive into is you want to go up market, but your current customer base is SMB. And I'm curious as to the lens with which you see this. I mean, from my standpoint, some of the challenges from going upmarket is just either you don't know exactly who to talk to or there are multiple people involved in a decision to buy your product. And you kind of got to get both of them. And the org is so big and you just sort of say, I don't know what to do. Yeah. Well, you know, HubSpot is one of the classic examples for that. their majority of their customer base is still SMB.

24:05And they're a billion dollar company, multi-billion as a matter of fact, and are fine. And they are trying to go and have a certain segment upmarket. But the reality is majority, almost 80 % or more of their customer base still seems to be SMB. And there's so much written about it. So the question is not that the real motive, the reason why people want to go, we have to really take a step back, John, on this one. And we will ask the question, Why do you want to go up market? Well, because we think it's going to be bigger deals that will essentially give us better return and they will have longer thing.

24:39They probably be sticky. And most likely, that's what the board is actually asking you to do, because that's what they feel is the security for the return on investment. So it is less about customers and it's more about the returns and the VC and the outcome that people are looking for. And that's where people miss. They have the wrong motive. And if you have the wrong motive around that, then your product, if it was created for SMB, go all in. Become the best product for your SMB customers. And there's nobody who's coming in and jumping in that. So you go, go for it. But companies very quickly just go back to the old playbook.

25:15Oh, we have sold this for SMB. If we sell one mid-market or one enterprise, that will take care of for 50 SMB customer cost-wise. So let's do it. Mathematically, it makes perfect sense. but if your product is not designed for that, if your messaging is not talking to them and if your value prop is very much away from that, then you're gonna be muddy. And we have this and you saw at the ROI report that we do where we call this the muddy middle. This is where companies go to die. Literally, it's the muddy middle where you just have an indirect way of showing value and it happens more and more and more because all of a sudden your product and your value prop and your positioning is not talking to the customer who actually cares about that.