Happy Friday you welcome day of sunshine ☀️,
I hope you had a good week.
There is not much news on my end to share with you, so I’d say we go straight to…
...Today's topics
📈 Marketing Strategy:
Go-To-Market Strategies for B2B SaaS
🧰 Tools of the Trade:
Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers
⛑️ Reflections from the Trenches:
The Value of Reading
📈 Marketing Strategy
Go-To-Market Strategies for B2B SaaS
In a recent newsletter from Lenny Rachitsky (it's paid, so can't link to the full article), he analyzed the GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies.
I really want to share them with you, because I get this question so often and taking well-informed decisions on how to go to market impacts the success of a business to a great degree. So here we go:
The Three Go-To-Market Criteria
In the article he goes into detail between three major decisions that every B2B SaaS company has to make when they strategize how they want to go to market:
What market segment to go after
Very Small Business (VSB)
Small and Midsize Businesses (SMB)
Mid-market (10M - 1B in revenue)
Enterprise (1B+ revenue)
Who to go after within the organization
Top-down: Founders, VP of x, Head of y, etc.
Bottom-up: Internal tools engineers, IC designers, etc.
How to get to them
Product-led: A self-serve product that users discover through SEO, ads, or referrals
Sales-led: A gated product that users discover through outbound sales
5 Takeaways of Lenny's GTM Analysis
When you look at the table in the image below, you see Lenny went into quite some effort to analyze these 30 companies along all of the five criteria outlined above. The main findings and surprising facts I found are the following:
100% of product-led companies end up adding a sales team, if not going sales-led completely
Everyone moves upmarket—few go the other direction
Almost everyone starts by going after VSBs or SMBs (aka startups)
Everyone targets one (and max three) personas within an organization
Sales-led companies often add a bottom-up self-serve product, primarily to drive lead gen
And here is the graphic that he put together for us (click on the image to make it larger):
In Closing
I know that these questions come a lot for most marketing leaders and it is sometimes hard to distinguish what the right move is. Just by knowing the criteria outlined above you will at least have a framework of how to think about your future GTM decisions.
And again, if you want to get more in-depth articles like this from Lenny, you can subscribe here.
🧰 Tools of the Trade:
Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers
💬 Teams and communities matter.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, humans can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”— Margaret Mead
👨🎓 Marketing & Leadership Education
Customer Research Guide for B2B SaaS - A step-by-step guide to better B2B SaaS customer research
The Momentum Canyon: From Traction to Growth - How momentum needs to build and be sustained to get past the traction phase as a startup. Brilliant analysis.
🤩 Brands and (digital) Products that caught my eye
RemNote - A note tool for networked thought. Similar to Roam Research.
DGMG Swipefile - A great selection of marketing campaign inspiration.
Type Studio - Super easy online tool to add subtitles to your video.
📚 Interesting reads
The Global Chessboard - How geography influences the tides of history.
Small Teams - A list of impressive things accomplished by very small teams. Also this one is outside of startups.
⛑️ Reflections From the Trenches
The Value of Reading
This quote on the value of books is too good not to share with you:
"If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.
Books are paper ships, to all the worlds, to ancient Egypt, outer space, eternity, into the childhood of your favorite musician, and — the most precious stunning journey of all — into your own heart, your own family, your own history and future and body.
Out of these flat almost two-dimensional boxes of paper will spring mountains, lions, concerts, galaxies, heroes. You will meet people who have been all but destroyed, who have risen up and will bring you with them. Books and stories are medicine, plaster casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits. And in reading, you will laugh harder than you ever imagined laughing, and this will be magic, heaven, and salvation. I promise."
I could not imagine myself a life without books. The person I would be if hadn't peeked into the brains of so many people with different opinions, ideas and adventures to tell.
'Books are paper ships to all the worlds', so let's keep exploring :)
That's it for this week.
Talk soon,
Sandro