4 Key Considerations to Connect Product and GTM Strategies to Accelerate Growth at Every Stage

our next speaker it's my pleasure to introduce Scott gfus he is the CEO of no fraud he is also a limited partner in GTM fund he is a master of startups this is actually his seventh startup so he is the person to learn from welcome s all right well thanks um I'm already pretty loud so hopefully the mic doesn't make it worse I always sort of laugh when when I come to speak at things because I I see all these other speakers

that are really impressive and I wonder why I'm here but um but over the next 20 minutes um and and soie said by the way this is my I'm working my seventh startup uh I've run companies like frame.io and AD roll and a bunch of others and seen all sorts of stages of scale so I enjoy uh being involved in these stages and I I advise a lot of early stage Founders and businesses and that's actually one of the things I love the most I have a I have a special

appreciation for the the brilliant crazy people that start companies from scratch um so we're going to talk for four things four different areas real quickly we're going to move fast every one of these things could probably be an event of its own let alone a 30 second speech so we're going to get through it quick um but you're going to talk about how the product is really the foundation I think a lot of folks make the mistake of thinking of them as discret strategic areas and in fact they have to be deeply deeply connected and that's true at every single stage of the journey and

every inflection point in your growth talk about pricing and packaging just briefly as the connective tissue between your go to market strategy and your product and it's really important and if you get it wrong you're going to have a bad day uh talk about how you can Orient your entire team business and operating model around your customer life cycle and then talk a little bit about building teams and tools and I'm I'm basically just going to share some cheat coats uh of all the sort of hard lessons I've learned along the way and all the mistakes that I've made over the years

which is a pretty long list so um all right so your product is the foundation and it's really the foundation for the clicker working everything um and so without getting into too much detail about it when you think about your product you really have to understand from the get-go how you're building your product in terms of how you're going to acquire customers right who's the buyer companies come to me all the time a lot of a lot of companies say oh we want to create a plg motion I say oh it's interesting is your user the

same as your buyer they say no I said well then you don't have a plg motion on the acquisition side now does your business scale automatically right you have a twilio sort of model where usage kind of rapidly accelerates and you have this built-in ndr expansion motion oh no we don't have that well then you're not going to have that expansion that land and expand kind of construct so you really have to understand how you're building the product from the get-go and by the way if you already have your product then you have to really be intellectually honest with yourself about what does my product do how do people buy it how do people discover it

how do people get onboarded through it right is it a lengthy big process do I need a whole Professional Services operation to make customers successful how do do I accelerate time to Value right and then on the retention and expansion side if it's all you can eat up front and it's a user-based model then that's how your companies are going to expand and contract you're not going to have a cross- sell motion right so you have to think about these things and you have to be very deeply uh sort of thoughtful and honest about what your product is and that's the foundation for

how you build your goto Market I talked to so many companies that try to shoehorn new strategies or approaches into their their business their product isn't built for it so don't fight it build it on top of your your your product motion that's that's kind of the key key takeaway there pricing and packaging is something that I'm really passionate about could spend the whole talk just on this topic but it's such an important piece and it is the connective tissue between how people sort of observe you how they think about you how

they value you how they buy you and how you grow your product uh and your business and so it's really important to be thoughtful about that the one thing I'll say to folks is people put a lot of energy and empasis UPF front about their pricing and packaging they they sort of agonize over the decisions relax you can change your pricing and packaging right just like everything else at different stages of your journey okay but again it has to be built on top of your product and it has to be built in a way that you're you're really thinking about what your go to market motion is so there's a

few cheat codes that uh We've sort of introduced over the years so the first thing is you really need to be customer Centric and what I mean by that is you have to think about who is this package for what customer is going to use this package and why right and I think you know if you look at a lot of businesses HubSpot was one of my favorite examples in the very early days right they had the CRM that was free for everybody and you could get up to 500 emails and then at every stage of a customer's growth with their product they introduced

different concepts different ideas different opportunities and it really reflected where a company was in its growth and why they would buy right so really think about who is buying which package there's different sort of vectors that customers sit across right and people people sort of package in different ways could be small medium large right it could be beginner intermediate and advanced it could be low complexity medium complexity High complexity but you have to think about those vectors and then what your packaging and pricing is going to entail

um again the HubSpot example is a favorite one of mine be use case oriented what HubSpot did brilliantly is they got people excited to be able to spend more money with them as they grew right in those early days they introduced different things into to their email marketing automation product where they could once you cross a certain threshold you could start segmenting and then you got to another threshold you could start doing AB testing and multivariate testing as examples right those things were only appropriate when you got to the right size and scale and you actually celebrated getting to that point in your

journey as a customer you were excited to spend more money with that with that business because it meant you achieve something you could do something new and interesting so really think about your packaging in this way see so many companies with this long list of features that you can do and all these other things and honestly it's it sucks it's hard to figure out don't waste your time Orient around those things remember that simple wins right I remember in the early days when Twitter was coming out to Market I was at adroll and we were helping them figure out

their whole strategy in terms of how they were going to price and package their uh their new ad offering and they wanted to sell on engage I guess you can't call it Twitter anymore sorry but uh but you know they wanted to talk about engagement and all these unique things and I said guys nobody gives a what you're talking about that's not how marketers buy the product people buy on clicks they buy on CPC they buy on CPM don't fight the tide if you're if you're creating a brand new category fine right if you really deeply believe philosophically there's a different way the market should think about it and you

want to take that fight fine but remember that keep it simple people want to know they want to be e be able to easily understand how to think about your product how to buy your product and the last piece and this was actually I updated I said don't gate the goal but I see a lot of companies gating the thing that makes their product valuable people start gating things like how many Integrations can you have for your data sets don't do that you want them to feed everything you can into you at frameo we

we when I got there we were gating types of Integrations that people could use to upload media assets to our to our platform worst thing you could do we wanted to be the place where all your assets lived right so don't gate the thing I know in your head you're like well that creates a lot of value yeah sure it does but build value on top of the value that customers are going to get from you right so don't gate the thing that's going to make you sticky that's going to make them successful with your product never do that all right so those are a couple quick cheat codes hopefully it's helpful I'm trying to keep on time here I'm doing like okay

so right sort of on track yeah I just talk really fast and try not to throw up okay so um the the last the third one here is Orient around the customer life cycle what I mean by this is Orient everything around your customer life cycle and there's a couple things I I'm going to conflate my my cheat code slide in this slide but people often will confuse customer life cycle with customer Journey customer life cycle is your relationship with the customer the

customer journey is how they experience and buy your product don't confuse those two things but when you talk about the customer life cycle this thing doesn't have like a pointer does it um you know one of the things I do every company I join and every company I advise I I sit down and I'll talk to them about okay how do we get everybody on the same page and what I mean by that is not just sales and marketing which is often the conversation but your product team is part of your go to market team just how I started at the GetGo so every single touch point you have with your customers

should be mapped to the to the uh customer life cycle and you should have a shared view of what the entrance and exit criteria is at every stage of that Journey it's really important and you should connect all the dots how many times have you been in a conversation where marketer talking about well we drove X many mqls and the sales teams like I didn't see any mqls and everybody saw of this and was like Well I measur this conversion I measur that I measur this conversion holy you're going to lose your mind and as you scale it gets harder and harder and harder and

harder right everybody should have the same definitions now that doesn't mean that marketing can't have its own sort of subsets right so what you can see up here what you can sort of see up here this is a mirror board and it's a really useful tool but it doesn't translate well the slides but basically you know marketing has its own set of of stages right um and those are all things that they can measure but they have to be aign between sort of what the exit criteria is what you're ultimately trying to achieve your product is also part of that conversation I can't tell

you how many times I've been in conversations with companies where product doesn't have any goom Market goals there's no expectations of driving leads driving activations driving opportunities converting converting leads guys everybody should be on the same page they should have the same set of goals right and so it's really important to have established the exit criteria establish and align the teams and the work that they're doing because what this is going to do is just going to give you a whole bunch of opportunity to run your business better companies

Plateau all the time at different stages it used to be pretty pretty standard at 10 million they started to Flatline at 50 million they start to Flatline right we've all experience some of these things you start to panic can't figure out why so the cheat code is understand how these things connect understand your points of Leverage and understand how to align the entire team to solve the thing that's going to give you the most value value for your business right and so you talked about life cycle is the journey one model all motions match everything

together right so your sdrs if you have sdrs which I don't recommend but that's a different conversation but if you have an SDR function um you know they should be working hand inhand with marketing and the product right the signals that you're seeing inside of your product should inform all the other sort of activities that are happening in your business the signals that you're seeing with your marketing communication with your support all of that should be connected and it's very hard to do in Reverse so if you're early in your

business spend the time to instrument your business and do it holistically Define failure so so as you do this what it's going to do is it's going to surface all the opportunities for the biggest points of Leverage right and there's this sort of Matrix that you think about in terms of level of effort and and sort of impact for your business the sort of Third Dimension to that is how practical is it right how how much of a lwh hanging fruit is it people talk about oh we're going to fix churn it's like well do you understand why people churn they said no then you're not going

to fix churn right so solve something else I want to create you know I want to turn mud to Gold that sounds really great it's just not going to happen right now so so um as you define or identify these opportunities for your business and where you think you can drive growth everybody's very good at picking out well what would success look like right and and some folks are good at picking out like what are early indicators of success look like which is important in longer term bets but what people seem to suck at is is defining when do I kill this thing right you've

got to be really crisp on defining failure and be upfront and be hard about it and give yourself a deadline um and then the last piece here is you really want to make sure that you're go to mark first of all and I'll talk about this in the team building piece you go to market Ops person or rev Ops person is such a critical role do not skimp on that role hire that person early I also think you should hire ahead of people early but go to market Ops early and make sure that

these are not just tacticians but these these people have great business and financial Acumen because they are the glue and then you want to make sure that go to market Ops your Finance team if you have a bi function right everybody is working on the same structure the same set of metrics I don't know how many folks have been in a room where some you know Finance is giving a a set of information and then your revops team is giving another set of information you say these are two different

businesses what am I doing here don't do that so all right so make sure that they're on the same page and that goes back to the one model all motions if those two things are true you're going to have a much better time identifying opportunity in your business all right actually pretty impressed with myself uh and then on the fourth piece uh yep see the last one was a replant slide I'll tell you what that actually is it's a secret um all right so these are some of the cheat codes for Just team building that I will share

with you so the first thing thing is never hire one I see companies all the time and look we're all living in a day and age where you're trying to be very thoughtful about every dollar that goes out the door and you want to experiment right you're going to say okay we're going to we're going to dip our toe in the water in this thing if you're going to bet on something bet on it and put resources against it but most importantly if you have just one person you're not going to know if it was a a success or a failure without that per

without having two right also unless you're selling Like Liquor which is great by the way if you do I don't have any problem with that but unless you're selling something that's really a commodity they need people that they can learn from each other with it's not just a question of of benchmarking and managing performance it's also a function of learning this new act this new motion right so you always want to have at least two people uh against something and there's a bunch of other reasons like what if they one person

leaves um hire next one is eliminate the sort of what if Factor hire great talent people always want to go for somebody like far more junior or far more you know somebody green or somebody that's never done anything like this before and I'm not suggesting and and I'll talk about this in a second about experience because I don't I don't really put a premium on that but hire A+ talent to do the thing have fewer people place fewer bets but

do not skimp on talent because at the end of it you're going to go through the Journey and if it's not successful you're going to you're going to question whether or not you did it right whether or not you had the right people the right resources so so go for it right don't don't do it if you're not going to do it right so eliminate the what if by hiring great talent part of that is hiring for grit especially when you're in the startup stage um uh the guy right before was talking about the uh or or sorry two two Colin was talking

about you know Scrappy versus systems Etc always hire for grit I don't care what stage or scale you are never lose that the thing that makes startup so special is the fire is the is the sort of like get done attitude it's so important you want to hang on to that forever like never ever let that go so hire for grit it's the number one attribute in general you want to hire for attributes and skills over experiences in my opinion and the other

thing I talk about is hire for right now be really crisp in your mind about why you're hiring a person or why you're putting somebody into a new seat right and what that person is going to do over the next six or 12 months and be explicit about the goals if you're thinking about what this person's going to do three years from now you're thinking way too far ahead I get it it's exciting it's fun we want to bring this person in that had this big job at this other company and guess what they're not going to do for the next three years here until you're ready to to be at that stage so hire somebody that's

that's done the journey but 18 months from now maybe three years from now and they've literally lived through this thing so hire for what you're trying to solve for today and then listen companies do grow faster than people and you're going to change your leadership team multiple times that is okay um you know you'll be fine this goes back to my SDR thing CS over SDR you cannot over you can over invest in acquisition you can over invest in retention you cannot over invest in

onboarding it's the most important Motion in your business especially if you're a product focused business right and so I at frame iio we had basically what we did was we mapped out with this really nice flywheel uh just to you know pick on uh pick out Sophie's talk from earlier for those that saw it we had this really nice flywheel where we had users come into the product and a lot of times they were from Enterprise Brands and when I joined we were

basically trying to close all of these leads as leads and it was a huge failure we could not convert them why because we weren't helping them to learn the product and to get the most value out of the product the product was already inherently viral right it had this great sort of flywheel that could be you got value from the product by sharing it with others so the goal was how do we maximize the value of that that person and by the way during the onboarding experience is when companies are going to sort of build that lasting impression of you is when

they're most likely to refer you to somebody else at no fraud 80% of our leads are customer referrals right it's because we overinvestment onboarding to make that a magical experience for customers and so you really want to make sure of that and I think that in most cases especially if you have any kind of self- serve uh or sort of easy to discover Motion in your product heavily invest in the Cs motion make onboarding the priority and

sdrs uh you know listen everybody's got a different different perspective but I think it's a really dangerous motion and we've we've sort of automated away a lot of the activities in in ways that are really detrimental um the last thing you know the the second to last thing is you know I talk about product first go to market leadership and go to market first product leadership these folks you I don't think you can be you know the old tried andrue sort of sales leader is gone you have to be excellent at

understanding the product the the sort of experience the technology the way people use it to be a good goto market leader and you have to be great at understanding go to market to be a good product leader in today's day and age in my opinion and so when you're thinking about these things it's so important that those two groups are working so tightly together that it's almost indistinguishable when they talk about their strategy and their approach um and then the last one was actually automation does not equal efficiency and so this goes back to I

think a lot of folks and and have over rotated into this day and age of Automation and and scaling everything up one of the companies I I ran the mid-market business for crio back in the day we broke the internet you're welcome and then um you know companies like Outreach which is a great product in business frankly like broke email right because because automation is like like a disease like like a drug right if you're if you're in a bad place automating it isn't going to make it

better it's just you're just going to do bad things a lot more times over right so be really careful and thoughtful software doesn't solve problems right you have to you have to figure out the problem first you have to figure out the right process the right experience the right flow then you automate it then you scale it then you drive efficiency for it so just be careful as you're as you're kind of going through this whole motion you don't over rotate into into these things that sound really flashy and great but um they don't actually

solve the problem so uh that is my very fast set of cheat codes hopefully that was helpful and I appreciate you all listening [Applause]