Insight from a $1.3B acquisition and 7 startups
The 4 key considerations for aligning product and GTM strategy to drive growth
Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow - read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.
Insight from a $1.3B acquisition and 7 startups
The most successful companies understand that product and go-to-market strategy must be deeply interconnected.
Too often, businesses treat these as separate domains—one focused on development, the other on selling. But sustainable growth requires a cohesive approach, where every decision about the product is made with its market fit, buyer journey, and expansion potential in mind.
Scott Gifis has led the growth of seven startups, including serving as President at AdRoll and as President and COO of Frame.io, where he helped drive the company's $1.3B acquisition by Adobe.
Drawing from his extensive experience, Scott breaks down four key strategies to successfully align product and go-to-market execution for scalable growth.
The 4 key considerations for aligning product and GTM strategy to drive growth
1. Your product is the foundation of your GTM strategy
The biggest mistake companies make is thinking they can simply add a go-to-market (GTM) strategy to a product that wasn’t designed with it in mind. Instead, leaders need to plan from the start how customers will find, use, and grow with their product.
Key questions to ask:
Who is your buyer? Is the person using your product the same one making the purchase decision? If not, a product-led growth (PLG) strategy may not be the right fit.
Can your product grow on its own? Some products, like Twilio, naturally expand as customers use them more. If yours doesn’t, you’ll need a different approach to scaling.
What is your customer's journey? Think about how they first find your product, how they start using it, and what keeps them coming back. If your product is complex, a strong customer success team can make all the difference.
Your GTM strategy should complement your product’s natural strengths, not work against them. If your product isn’t designed for a certain growth motion, forcing it will lead to inefficiencies.
2. Pricing and packaging is the link between product and growth
Packaging and pricing are more than just setting a price – they define how customers perceive and use your product, influencing adoption and retention. Many companies overthink pricing or delay key decisions. Pricing is not set in stone, it should change as your business and customers’ needs evolve. It’s packaging, not just pricing, that needs to align with specific customer profiles. The right packaging helps define what features the product builds to win different customer segments and informs the GTM strategy. Pricing, in turn, follows from packaging decisions.
Best practices for smart pricing:
Know your customer – Create your packaging around on who is buying your product and how their needs change over time. This helps inform your product strategy and your GTM strategy around these packages with end customers in mind.
Offer value at every level – HubSpot is a great example: It adds new features as businesses grow, making it easy for customers to upgrade naturally.
Make it easy to understand – Complicated pricing can turn customers away. Keep it clear and match how they like to buy.
Don’t block key features – If integrations make your product more useful, don’t limit them. Instead, charge for extra.
3. Align the entire business around the customer lifecycle
Too many companies focus on internal functions (marketing, sales, CS) instead of aligning everyone around the customer’s lifecycle. Without a unified approach, marketing generates leads that sales can’t convert, product teams miss key adoption signals, and growth stalls at predictable revenue plateaus.
How to fix this:
Map every internal team’s KPIs to customer lifecycle success – If sales, marketing, and product aren’t working towards the same customer outcomes, friction will stall growth.
Clarify the difference between customer lifecycle and customer journey – The lifecycle is the overall relationship between customer and company, while the journey is how they experience the product and purchase process.
Unify goals across teams – Every department should share a clear understanding of entry and exit criteria at each stage of the customer journey.
Leverage cross-functional insights – Marketing, product, and sales must work in tandem. Product signals (e.g. feature usage, activation data) should inform sales outreach and marketing efforts.
Define failure criteria – It’s easy to measure success, but companies often fail to predefine when to abandon an initiative. Set clear failure benchmarks to cut ineffective programs early.
4. Building the right teams and tools for growth
Great strategies fail without the right people and operational alignment. Many startups make critical hiring mistakes, such as hiring too conservatively (one person instead of two) or prioritizing “experience” over grit and adaptability.
Team building cheat codes:
Never hire just one – Whether it's sales reps or product managers, a single hire lacks comparison points. Invest in at least two people to create benchmarks and knowledge-sharing.
Hire for the problem today, not three years from now – A common mistake is hiring someone for a future vision instead of solving immediate needs. Prioritize what will drive the next 12-18 months of growth.
Look for T-shaped players—people with deep expertise in one area but cross-functional ability to collaborate across departments. These are the force multipliers who drive outsized impact.
Invest in customer success over SDRs – A strong CS function improves retention and expansion more than outbound prospecting ever will. Onboarding is the highest-ROI investment you can make.
Make revenue operations a strategic priority – GTM ops and finance must work from a single model of truth. If finance and sales teams present different revenue data, operational inefficiencies will slow growth.
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👂 More for your eardrums
Rob Giglio is the Chief Customer Officer at Canva, where he oversees Canva’s sales and go-to-market functions. Rob brings to Canva over 20 years of industry experience leading and executing global marketing and sales initiatives.
Rob joins Canva from HubSpot, where he was also Chief Customer Officer, and before that, he was the Chief Marketing Officer at Docusign. Prior to Docusign, Rob spent over ten years at Adobe, leading the global sales and go-to-market teams for their Digital Media Business Unit and holding responsibility for over $7B in revenue.
GTM 130: Scaling to Billions: How DocuSign, HubSpot & Canva Built Winning GTM Strategies
Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”
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🗓️ GTM industry events
Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:
Spryng by Wynter: March 24-26, 2025 (Austin, TX)
Pavilion CMO Summit: April 17, 2025 (Atlanta, GA)
SaaStr Annual: May 13-15 (San Francisco, CA)
Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Dallas, TX)
GTMfund 2025 events TBA (global)
90% of Startups fail, even raising $20M. Not following GTS strictly from the beginning (product ideation) has consequences.