The GTM Newsletter

beating your competition in a down-market

Back in action like we never left. 

Welcome to the new and improved GTM weekly newsletter.  

It’s been awhile 👋

Now that I’m no longer pulling double duty, and I’m solely focusing on the GTMfund, I’ve committed to writing this again each week. 

We’re switching up the format a little bit and each week will be focused on a centralized theme.

You’ll hear my opinion as well as thoughts from some of the best GTM execs, VCs, and founders.  

At GTMfund we’re incredibly lucky to have 250+ c-suite/VP level operators from some of the fastest growing companies on the planet like Salesforce, Okta, Mulesoft, Zoom, Procore, Snowflake, ServiceNow and Segment.  

Max Altschuler and I talk a little more about our mission in our newest GTM Podcast episode (oh yea, we launched a podcast too).

Each week you’ll hear opinions from people who have been there, done that - often times from zero to IPO. 

This newsletter is for anyone looking to grow and scale their technology business. 

Let’s get into it. 

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Beating Your Competition 🥊

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As budgets tighten across the technology landscape, winning is more important than ever.  Many of us are fighting for the same budgets and if you’re lucky to get a seat at the table: you better make sure you come out on top. 

There’s a common notion to “run your own race” and “put your head down and execute” but as the games in tech become increasingly zero-sum and resources are more scarce than ever due to the pending recession (that we may already be in) - what do the best of the best do to increase their odds of success? 

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"Accepting I lost to do-nothing is an excuse that indicates institutional rot.  What really happened is the economic buyer chose another project that positioned greater value in a faster timeline with less risk.  Business, by its nature, never does nothin."

 - former CMO at IBM, Facilitator at Force Management and LP in GTMfund, Russell Scherwin.   

Said differently, your biggest competition, especially in a world with financial tightening, is often not from your direct competitors but from competing initiatives.   

Follow Russell Sherchwin for more here. 

📈 How to take action: 

• Take a step back and view the market as a whole. What is the overarching problem that you’re solving for? Who else is indirectly solving that same problem? 

• It may be in an adjacent category but they are going after the same dollars as you. Instead of solely focusing on the differentiation between you and your direct competition, zoom out and map out everyone competing for the same budget. Then put together a category-level compete playbook.  

• Given a finite budget, why should they solve ‘x’ problem before ‘y’ problem?  Ie. in sales tech, although enablement tools and engagement tools solve fundamentally different problems, the CFO will lump them into the same spend and only green light one.  

• In war times, your competitive landscape grows larger and you need to win the category conversation before getting a chance to go head to head. 

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This next one comes directly from Kyle Norton, former Head of Revenue at Shopify Canada and now SVP Sales at Owner.com: 

“Most of the advice and conversation about this economic climate I've seen is about how to sell differently to 'a company' and how 'a company's' buying habits might change in this environment but I think that misses a bigger change.

Buyers (see: Humans) at these organizations will experience a shift towards self-preservation, risk aversion and fear in this climate. In order to overcome a more conservative buyer/buying committee, sellers need to be ready to more heavily tip the scales of "perceived pain of change vs perceived pain of staying the same" or risk losing deals to status quo.

To enhance "the perceived pain of staying the same," it's mastery of the basics: territory planning to focus on high fit customers, intelligent discovery and sharp value creation and loss framing. Not much changes here but the stakes are higher so hone your skills and enable your teams on the foundations.

A bigger change is needed in how we reduce “the perceived pain of change.” This is a frequently overlooked part of the buying journey and sales craft. If you do a poor job illustrating how a buyer will go from today’s problem state to tomorrow’s paradise (care of your solution) then they will assume it’s harder than it might be and likely stand pat.

Instead, we need to give them confidence in the path to paradise.”

Follow Kyle Norton for more here.  

📈 How to take action: 

• Map out and review the onboarding journey in detail and make the buyer feel comfortable with each step - bonus points if you can start or complete some of those steps before the Close (Behavioral Momentum Theory)

• Co-create the launch plan and make your buyer an author (Endowment Effect)

• Introduce them to the onboarding and CS teams that they’ll be working with to give them confidence in the team supporting this scary transition.

• Use customer references even when you’re not sure they’re needed.

• Stay multi-threaded and help your buyer build organizational consensus so they don’t feel like they’re ‘out on a limb’.

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Andy Mowat, former VP GTM Ops at CultureAmp, now GEO of Gated has a bit of a different take on competing.  

He promotes switching your compete lens from outward to inward.  If you can create raving fans, your competition can never touch them. Plus they’ll act as your army on the competitive landscape that can advocate for you behind closed doors when you’re not even on the battlefield. 

“Customers are your most powerful advocates.  Leveraging our passionate customers at Culture Amp we grew ARR by more then 10x in 4 years.  

I define Customer Advocacy as engaging your customers to turn them into champions for your product and brand. Whether your company is B2B or B2C, catalyzing your customers’ passion helps inform your roadmap, boost your brand, attract new customers and accelerate their time to decision.” 

Andy shares his Customer Advocacy Playbook below. 

📈 How to take action: 

• Build a product people love

• Engage your users in your vision of the world 

• Spark moments of joy

• Ask users to become advocates

• Make the first step to advocacy EASY (don’t start with G2)

• Make it easy for your advocates to share your message

• Engage your advocates with community 

• Open your community beyond your users

• Have a portfolio of ways your advocates can help 

• Reward your advocates

• Help your advocates on their journey 

• Give equity to your top advocates

Follow Andy here and read his full detailed playbook here. 

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More for your eyeballs 👀

1. This interesting tweet thread on the state of VC from Jon Sakoda:

Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda

(1/5) The VC industry has the highest level of dry powder after a record breaking fundraising season and a summer slowdown in deal pace. There is ~$290 B in dry powder available for startups in VC funds - when will the funding floodgates open?

2. PLG this, PLG that - you can’t go two Zoom calls without hearing about Product Led Growth.  Bessemer recently released an in-depth roadmap on all the technology powering the PLG movement, it’s a great read: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/roadmap-software-powering-the-plg-era

3. You’re probably heard the buzz around the AI generated podcast episode between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs but if you haven’t actually listened to it yet, it’s an eerie insight into how quickly artificial intelligence is developing:

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More for your eardrums 👂

I went deep on how to beat your competition with the legendary Mark Cranney, former founding Operating Partner at a16z and Advisor/Board member to some of the hottest emerging tech companies: 

“Process triumphs heroics”

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Start-ups to watch 🚀

SecurityPal, the leading consolidated solution for companies to solve their security review challenges, emerged from stealth mode and announced a $21 million Series A - keep your eyes on them.

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Hottest GTM job of the week 🔥

Mid-Market AE at Noibu, full job description here. 

See more top GTM jobs here.

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Thanks for rocking with us until the end - we’ll see you at the same time, next week. 

The next theme we’ll be wrestling with is: using community to create raving fans. 

We’ve got some A++ operators on deck to break it all down. 

See you then. 

Barker. 

✌️