You need a GTM Framework in B2B SaaS made of 4 Pillars and 10 Go-To-Market Fundamentals for gaining healthy growth.
Especially if you are selling into Middle Market and Enterprise.
Table of Contents
Thanks to “The Last Dance” on Netflix many people know that Phil Jackson was the head coach of the Chicago Bulls.
He let the Bulls to six NBA championships.
Not everyone knows that Jackson also coached the Los Angeles Lakers after the Bulls.
He won further 5 championships.
The secret formula was a Framework: The Triangle.
Having Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant in the team does not explain on its own the continuity of the successes of these two teams.
GTM Framework in B2B SaaS is a Four Pillar Game plan
People & Organization
There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to building a B2B revenue organisation.
Too many variable in the game.
The stage of the company for example:
- Are you just starting up and have a lot of VC money in the bank?
- Are you bootstrapping?
- Are you a 5 or 10M in ARR with the revenue team to be rebuilt from scratch because things did not go as you expected?
Different situations, different solutions.
To provide another example, also the average deal size has an influence on the type of organisational strategy and plan.
As far as Go-To-Market leadership is concerned, in a previous post we discussed that ideally before hiring a Revenue Leader you should first build a team of 5-10 people:
- Two-three BDRs (Business Development Representatives)
- A few Account Executives with proven experience on similar deal sizes, of which at least two of them should be “on quota”.
- One Revenue Operation Lead with experience in Salesforce and B2B SaaS.
- Two Customer Success Managers with B2B SaaS experience on similar ARPA (Average Revenue Per Account).
If you want to be attractive for good and experienced Revenue Leaders the company must demonstrate traction and a decent initial revenue organisation in place.
When good candidates understand they have to transform, cut, build from scratch, and so on, they know that this process can take up to one year and a lot of energy and risk.
Many of them, the good ones, will pass.
Watch out for the young pros and their “title inflation”.
Would you let someone drive your Ferrari as soon as they got the driving license?
Concerning the sales profiles that are able to deliver quotas of 500K-1M+ in bookings per year, there are no shortcuts neither.
Don’t go cheap. Extend the search to key European hubs.
Look for people that have the key skills and proven experience to be successful.
Individual contributors motivated by the possibility to join a serious project and earn good money.
A great Leader finds a way to tie her stars to the destiny of the company. They’re carrying the day for her.
Sales is a hard job. If someone’s going to succeed, they need to truly believe that what they’re selling is going to be an enormous benefit to the customer.
From day one, the good Leader helps her team understand why the product is the equivalent of the cure for the worst sickness for the target customers.
It’s that sense of belief in what they are selling that will sustain the people through the frequent drudgery of the sales process.
Proposition & Focus
In recent years Customers have been demanding more depth, expertise and proof of performance.
They expect salespeople to teach them things they don’t know.
These are the skills of the future, and any revenue force that ignores this message does so at its peril.
You should formalise a Strategic Statement as the matrix of the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS.
As soon as the product-market fit is kind of validated, the CEO and the Go-To-Market Leader should build a one pager of Strategic Statement.
The one pager clearly defines the foundational why and value proposition of the company.
At the same time, you need also to be able to quantify the business impact and value you bring to your customers.
Most European companies have a good understanding of what they are selling, and who is buying.
They have nice scrolling websites filled with all sort of products features and client case studies.
But lots of them are missing a foundational why. A bigger reason to exist.
They don’t have a why (much less a why now). And that’s the story you should really be starting with.
You want to create your version of an art gallery, where the goal is to walk the viewer through three rooms in sequence.
Room One isn’t about your company at all – it’s about the context of your company.
It’s about what you see going on in the broader commercial world that makes you relevant.
Once you have established the context, only then do you head into Room Two and articulate the value – the objective benefits based on roles and industries.
That’s when you start drilling a little deeper in order to provide specific role-based advice and relevant case studies.
Finally Room Three, what your service really does – its features and mechanics.
A template of Strategic Statement would need to include things like
- market insight and trends
- company ambition
- why us and why now
- how we deliver our why
- what is that we sell
- success stories
- how to quantify the value for each of our customer. ROI simulator
- pricing and business model.
Is price more important than ARPA (Average Revenue Per Account)?
Pricing and the way the business model should be communicated to prospects deserve a special place within the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS.
Pricing is a key growth lever, 4 times more powerful than Customer Acquisition and twice stronger than Retention.
Your product could be sitting on vast amount of unrealised value, simply because it hasn’t taken the time to test the market with new pricing strategies.
Or because it is not packaged or communicated properly.
You don’t need to guess anymore, but you do need to test.
It is certain that successful scaleups, generally, update their pricing at least annually. It means they are thinking about pricing constantly throughout the year.
In the era of AI the pricing frameworks are changing.
SaaS is moving from “Software as a Service” to “Service as a Software” and this is going to have a huge impact on the way pricing will work.
Dave Kellogg wrote a very interesting article about how the concept of ARR is challenged AI bringing new forms of value-based pricing, e.g, unit-of-work, usage-based or outcome-based pricing. Link to the article.
Teaching & Qualifying Choreography
As far as the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS is concerned the most important driver of sales success is the capability to be educational and insightful towards the Prospects.
Your team narrative should challenge the mindset of the Prospect and propose a unique perspective of the market and therefore of the company value proposition.
As a matter of fact as soon as you will have defined the Strategic Statement, you should focus on Product Marketing and build a Teaching & Qualifying Choreography to guide the sales conversations.
In the emerging sales model the direction of the information flow with the prospects is supplier-generated insight valuable to the customer.
This is the new physics of sales – it’s like the whole world is spinning in the opposite direction than it used to be a few years ago when the conversation was focused on customer-generated intelligence valuable to the supplier.
The first meeting in agenda with a prospect should never be a demo, as many still practice against all the evidence and industry best practices.
To sell into Mid-Market and Enterprise you need to say goodbye to features in your initial conversations.
Build a customizable Simulator of ROI
Let’s assume the sales team has qualified that the Prospect is actively looking for a solution like yours.
If they are not looking, at least they should have internally a “concrete anxiety” for the issue.
In that case your team should try asap to direct the conversation towards the build up of a customised Simulator/Business Case.
The business case should become the focus of the engagement in order to involve the right people internally and move the agenda forward.
You want the CFO or a finance senior person involved as soon as possible on that table as well.
Playbook
Do you think that the Playbook is a set of documents that explain to the team:
- how the process works
- what the Sales protocol is
- what are the stages of an Opportunity
- how they should use Salesforce and the rest of the tech stack?
If that is the case, you are not looking at Playbook with the appropriate perspective. Read more in this previous article.
You could write down the best SaaS GTM playbook (with or without the help of AI) and it could be worthless in reality.
The GTM Playbook is Behavior in Execution, Not a piece of Paper.
Basketball provides other good analogies when it comes to Playbook.
I will use a statement of Elad Gil in “High Growth Handbook” and adapt it to basketball.
“You know why playing a game is fun? Because it has rules, and you have a way to win”.
Picture a bunch of people showing in basketball playground with no rules. People are going to get hurt. You don’t know what you are playing for, you don’t know how to win, you don’t know how to score, and you don’t know what the objectives are.
The real challenge is not the process or the tech stack, the real challenge of the GTM Playbook in B2B SaaS is how to find the right people and help them execute well.
Building a world-class revenue engine is a journey, not an overnight trip.
To kick-off the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS rapidly and efficiently you should focus initially on a set of priorities:
- Get the Account List right.
- Get the Value Proposition & Pricing & Packaging right.
- Set the right “cadences” for getting good qualified meetings for the Account Executives
- Build teaching choreographies to get Account Executives manage authentic and straight-to-the-point conversations.
- Salesforce in place with initial and basic configuration mirroring the Playbook.
- A solid Funnel and two key Salesforce dashboards (one for the team activities, one for the sales pipeline).
- Continuous coaching and regular team meetings.
- As soon as Sales ramps up, a similar approach for Customer Success.
- KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Planning & Real Time Execution of the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS
There are different lives when you scale up a B2B SaaS company.
From 0 to 1M in ARR is Childhood. You enjoy the journey with your first employees. You have a good product and it doesn’t hurt not to have the right process, the right price, the right strategy, the right pitch. It’s all about Founders’ energy.
From 1M to 5M, you would typically spend a lot of energy in building a professional machine. The right People, the right Pitch, the right Playbook. It’s the Teen age.
The third life – Adulthood – starts at 5M when you aim to the magic number of 10M ARR, after which you would be in Major League with your valuation of 50-100M+ .
In adulthood the GTM leader should spends 50% of her time to look for and nurture the best people in the industry (VPs, Sales, Customer Success, Marketing). She hunts for experience and talent.
The effective leader knows that she needs to develop internally a great Zoom-in / Zoom-out capability: the ability to be fast, very strategic and very operational at the same time. Planning and Execution happens in Real Time, all the time.
In Operational terms her team works in SQUADS made of SDRs, Lead generators, AEs, CSs, Demand Gen, Revenue Operation.
Targets and Activities are organised around clear and measurable Outcomes.
The “court” of the Go-To-Market strategy game, at the center of the action, is the Customer Funnel. Everything is transparente and well organized in Salesforce. Continuous coaching becomes critical.
Conclusions for the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS
Growing healthily a B2B Sales business to 5-10-30M in revenue has become also a Science. It’s not only Art and Passion.
It can become simple and natural if you follow a proven framework. I’m not saying easy.
It’s about knowing What to focus on, When and with Which Framework.
Jeoffrey West brings great evidence of scaling as a law of nature in his great book “Scale”: ” Scaling simply refers, in its most elementary form, to how a system responds when its size changes”.
Modern and effective go-to-market leaders learn from their mistakes and from industry knowledge.
They know how to attract and retain the best talent with experience and never stop focusing obsessively on a GTM Framework in B2B SaaS made of 4 Pillars and 10 main Fundamentals.
If you enjoyed this post, you will also like Is the “classic” VP Sales model broken? and What the Playbook is and what is not.
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