From Zero to Growth: Go-to-Market Strategies that Help Startups Scale

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Today we have a very exciting topic we're going to be discussing.

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It's how you can grow through community, and we have the perfect marketing guru to help us talk through that.

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Garrett, welcome to the show.

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Thanks, eric, great to be here.

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Appreciate you having me.

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So why don't we start off by you sharing just a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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So why?

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don't we start off by you sharing just a little bit about who you are and what you do, you bet so.

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I am a former B2B software CMO who now does consulting full-time.

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So I work with early stage B2B companies to really help them grow.

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A lot of what I focus on is go-to-market strategy, so helping them figure out and understand who their customers are, how to do messaging and positioning that really resonates, how to pick the right channels to be able to find that audience.

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So, again, spent the last decade or so in mostly early stage B2B software companies and had some awesome experiences, one of which I'm excited to talk to you about today, but really enjoy now being able to work one-on-one with early stage companies and help them grow.

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Awesome, yeah, early stage companies going from zero to one is a very exciting challenge and it's not for the faint of heart, but we're ready to be inspired.

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So why don't we start off by you telling us a story about some of the best marketing that you've done in this area?

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telling us a story about some of the best marketing that you've done in this area.

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One of the best pieces of marketing I guess you could say campaigns.

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That was an extended campaign that I had a chance to be a part of was in my last full-time role, so let me give you a little context.

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So I was the CMO at an early stage HR software company and we sold HR software to mostly small businesses.

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Often there was a solo HR person at those companies.

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They were kind of the entire HR team doing all of it and our software kind of helped support them.

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So we had a small team, small budget, and we wanted to find a way to really engage that audience.

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One of the things we noticed is there was a lot of online search traffic for HR terms.

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Right, people were wanting to know, especially in these small businesses.

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They wanted to learn what all these terms mean in HR.

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Right, and we knew we could capitalize on that.

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But with our small team and limited budget we weren't.

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We didn't.

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We couldn't go after it fast enough, right, and so we got creative, we brainstormed and we couldn't go after it fast enough, right, and so we got creative, we brainstormed and we talked to some of our, our customers, and we really found you know a couple of things right Small business HR people, those solo HR practitioners.

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They wanted some sort of community because they were isolated in their company as the solo HR person.

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They wanted a way to connect with others and learn from others and also share their expertise.

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You know there's so many disciplines within HR and they they often were experts in one or two of them, but they wanted to learn from an expert that was, you know, expert in something else.

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And so, anyways, we we put all that together and we launched a free community for small business HR folks.

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We call it HR Mavericks, and the whole idea of the community was sharing your knowledge to help everyone get better.

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And so we did a lot of our own keyword research to identify the right terms.

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People could sign up and pick from our list of terms and then participate in multiple ways.

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They could write an article for our HR encyclopedia that we put up there.

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They could participate in a podcast episode or a panel discussion that we had, you know, with a handful of others and then help us create content to kind of share the knowledge.

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There was also a Slack community that was part of it and people got excited about being involved.

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So the cool part about this is, you know, we were able to engage this community, allow people to have that feeling of giving back much more quickly and affordably than if we would have tried to produce all that content on our own right.

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We ran some numbers at one point it was about the eighth of the cost of hiring a full-time writer, because really we just rewarded people with free access to the community and occasional gift cards and giveaways and everything else.

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So you know, we were able to more than 10 X traffic to our website, to this HR encyclopedia, just over the course of a little bit of over a year.

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We're able to build this big community of people who are really involved.

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I mean over a hundred thousand impressions on social media, you know at the time.

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So, anyways, had a lot of really great um results from it and it was a really fun campaign to work on.

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That was kind of a mashup of a few different things and obviously couldn't have done it without the awesome team that I had.

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We were a small but mighty team of just a few of us, but you know that team plus the community is what really made it successful.

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Yeah.

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That sounds like a really creative approach, because today it's probably harder than ever for startups to do a go-to-market, because a lot of the channels that people have relied on in the last 10, 20 years are evolving in ways that are probably not helpful to a lot of founders, in the sense of, like advertising is getting dramatically more expensive.

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Seo is very competitive, as an example, and so you know you can't just even if you have the money, you couldn't just throw it at it.

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So to find a way to be guerrilla, to grow through community, is it's pretty great right.

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Yeah, I mean it was amazing and again I can't take credit for it.

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You had someone on my team who really had the initial idea and we kind of ran with it and worked together and tweaked things and it ended up being just an awesome initiative.

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That's great.

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So let me ask you more broadly, when you're working with clients today about how to create a go-to-market plan for their startups, what are a couple of the key themes that you coach people on, of what you have to do to be ready to go to market and then start doing the marketing?

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Yeah, it's a great question and I'm so glad you asked.

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When I think about go-to-market strategy, especially for early stage B2B companies, there's really four core foundations that make up your go-to-market strategy and they're pretty intuitive.

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As I described these, you're probably just going to nod and say, yeah, of course, but I think that the hard part is actually understanding and being aligned with your team on these four core foundations, and that's really the key to building an effective go-to-market strategy.

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So I guess I'll preface, before I share these two, with saying you know, go-to-market strategy really is just your plan for how you reach, sell to and satisfy the right audience with whatever you're offering.

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Right, could be a product, could be a service, whatever it is right, but the goals there are happy customers that produce good revenue right, and so it has to be a collective team effort.

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So, going back to kind of those core foundations, there's really are four.

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So the first is your audience.

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Do you really truly understand who your best fit customers are, who you should focus on?

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Most early stage companies focus on too many.

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Right, you start by selling to anyone and everyone who will give you money, but eventually you have to bring that back together.

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You have to focus to really build momentum.

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And so your audience is number one.

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Number two is what you're offering, and so, as you identify the right segment to focus on, it can help you hone in the right solution to offer them.

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They might not care about everything you offer all of your services or all of your features, right.

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They might only care about a portion of that.

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Figuring out how to price and package it is also crucial.

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So that's number two.

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Number three is really your messaging and positioning, especially for your website and like your sales pitch for in the B2B environment, right.

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And so knowing how to clearly communicate the value and describe what you do so someone gets it and it really resonates with them is key.

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And then number four is figuring out those acquisition channels that you should focus on.

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Too many early stage companies approach, you know, marketing and sales.

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New customer acquisition is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, just doing random acts of marketing.

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And really, when you start with that audience, that customer, in mind, then it really helps.

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You know exactly which channels you should focus on and go deep in.

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Yeah, I agree those are four great foundations for people to think about, like, okay, we're ready to start taking this out there and getting customers on it.

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Is there anything that people have to do before they even do those four things, though?

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Yeah, that's a great question.

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I think that there's really like three stages that most companies go through, and so stage one is really about selling to learn, or often people refer to it as finding product market fit.

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What you're really trying to do in the earliest stages is sell to customers who will give you money and help them be successful with your product or service, and I think that that's actually the most important thing to really do.

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Phase two is where you start to really invest more in marketing and that's where those core foundations come into play.

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But phase one is really about just learning what works, and the best way to learn is by selling and fulfilling, helping customers be successful and satisfied.

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So that's really, I think, the key of where you get started.

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If you're not nowhere to start, just start reaching out to people who you could sell to and try pitching it, because the process of doing that you'll learn who's the right audience, you'll learn what's the right messaging, you'll know what the right offer is and how to find those people.

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So really I think that's the very first step, is it just comes down to a lot of hustle and sometimes founder magic, if you will.

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You just got to start selling and satisfying customers, and through that process you learn what works.

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I love it.

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That's the first step to being, I think, customer obsessed is just to get out there and start talking to people about it and being open to people's feedback.

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I have learned this lesson many times over myself is, when you're going out, if you're talking to people who are not your ideal customer profile and trying to get feedback from them, that's often the best way to just get lost in the woods forever.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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It's a great way to learn right?

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You know like sometimes you have you need to have those like failure pitches to learn.

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Man, this is not the right audience or this is not the right way to to describe what I do, right.

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Yeah, and so I think, a lot of talking to the ideal customers, coming up with the ideal messaging and positioning, like you were saying, a lot of the customers will tell you what that messaging and positioning should be.

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If you show it to them, you get their feedback and even use their words in it Sometimes.

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I think that's the best way, because when people love it, they'll tell you and they'll tell you what the user story is.

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They'll tell you this is why I love it, because I used to do this, this and this and it was so painful.

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And now with this, you know I can do it like this.

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And a lot of times they'll say if you could only do this one extra thing for me, that would make it a grand slam.

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And I think that's the sort of like feedback founders really can do great with right.

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Yeah, absolutely, and I think, just to build on that, eric, one of the more tangible ways that I've found that to be successful is really good go-to-market strategy is about replicating successful customer like a customer case study, right, like that's what your sales pitch is.

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Hey, let me tell you about this client I worked with.

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This is the problem that they face.

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These are your alternatives that they considered, this is what we did for them and these are the results that we got and, as you can see there, the response to the person you're talking to, as you kind of walk them through, that it'll either really resonate or they'll be able to say, well, my situation is a little bit different because of this or that, and that gives you really good insight on how to hone in that messaging right.

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I love the replication idea.

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That's really great.

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I love the replication idea.

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That's really great.

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What are some more efficient tips for growth when you're at the earlier stages, when you don't just have a lot of money to throw at it?

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I think the key thing is just to focus right Again.

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In the earliest stages it's about selling and fulfilling and that helps you know, give you more confidence in as you move into that second phase of where to start spending money.

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To grow right, selling is a one-to-one activity.

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A lot of times it can just be manual, grunt work.

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It's cheap, but it takes some time and that's what you invest in.

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And then, once you have sold successfully and have satisfied customers, then you know how to do marketing, which is more one-to-many right.

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You replicate that best fit customer that you've already found.

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So simplify, focus, focus on the stuff that is most crucial, which is just selling and fulfilling.

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Now that we're just about wrapping up 2024 and going into 2025, what marketing channels do you think are performing the best and what do you see in store for next year, cause it seems like a lot of results across marketing channels are evolving.

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What are your thoughts?

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Yeah, it's such a great question.

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I'm so glad you asked it because I think that in order to know which marketing channels to focus on, you have to start with your customer.

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You have to start with that best fit customer and figure out what channels they turn to when searching for solutions like you offer.

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And I say that and it sounds so obvious, but very few companies actually do that right.

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A lot of times we take a channel first approach and we think about where are our competitors and where do I need to be?

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And I need to be everywhere and I need to do SEO and I need to do be on LinkedIn and I need to do this or that.

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But really, when it comes down to it, if you talk to a handful of your best fit customers, you quickly identify the channels where you need to focus.

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Let me give you an example.

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I worked with a client a little while back and they were a small B2B agency, so they sold services to businesses and they were investing a lot in SEO and trying to drive organic traffic to their website.

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So in interviewing some of their customers, we found out that everyone that we talked to never searches on Google for solutions like theirs.

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It was unique.

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I think most businesses like assume that that's the case and it's true, but this segment that they were serving rarely did that.

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Instead, there were a couple of other sources they went to you know partners that they worked with.

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They'd go to them for referrals or some other trusted sources that they'd go to, and so that was one of the ways that we identified hey, you used all this money.

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You've been investing in Google.

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Let's reinvest it in making sure that these partner relationships and these other sources you're showing up there consistently.

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So, again, it really just starts with your customers, and I think it's different for every business in terms of what works best.

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Yeah, I think more than ever, some people are saying maybe I won't look it up on Google, maybe I'll look it up on TikTok or Instagram or in ChatGPT, and so I think looking to where people are looking for information as a starting point is a good shout, and fundamentally, a lot of the sales and marketing efforts come back to the company's website right, and that's really the front door of the business.

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These days.

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That's where a lot of the magic happens.

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What sort of advice do you give clients about having websites that that convert?

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I actually believe that one of the best ways to get your team aligned on what your go-to-market strategy is again, we've talked about go-to-market strategy some today and the different components of it, but the best way to do that is by updating your website.

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The act of actually updating your website forces you to think through who is our audience that we really want to target?

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How do we pitch our offering?

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How do we message that clearly to them right?

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How do we price and package?

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And then, ultimately, how do we drive more traffic to that website across these channels?

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And so I think that the key thing is making sure that you know, as you go through a process of updating your website, that it's clear and that you bring in different perspectives across your team, and so that you get people aligned on that process, it doesn't have to be overly complicated.

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There are a lot of really good websites that are just one page websites, right, and you can totally do that.

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There are best practices for what to include and how to tell the story right.

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So you have all those different components, and so you know I've actually done a lot of research in that space.

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I work with a lot of clients on their websites, and so if anyone's listening and is interested in that, I have a couple of resources I can share with you.

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That kind of walks through the different components of what you should include on your website.

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So feel free to reach out to me.

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But yeah, I would say your website is a key piece in helping you get aligned on what that go-to-market strategy is across your team.

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More so than ever, probably.

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I think people now are more open than ever before to let me just go look it up online instead of calling, instead of going to check out things in person.

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People will expect that it'll be there, and it'll be there in a compelling way.

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So I think that's a great place to start, and I love the idea using that to focus the message when you're really sitting through and thinking through with the team.

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If you can't communicate it clearly on the website, you probably can't communicate it clearly in a call right Exactly, exactly, yep.

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You probably can't communicate it clearly in a call right Exactly, exactly, yep, awesome.

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Well, I will link to your website and your LinkedIn so people can get in touch if they'd like to learn more about any of these areas, and thanks so much for being on the show today and sharing your story and your insights.

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We appreciate it.

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Thanks so much, Eric.

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Thanks for having me.