Picking The Right Go-To-Market Motion & Strategy In 2024

Taylor Wells (00:00.87)
Hey everyone, welcome to the GTM News Show. I got Beth here today. Hey Beth.

Beth Yehaskel (00:05.139)
Hi.

Taylor Wells (00:06.99)
Great to have you. Thanks for coming on the show. So Beth and I, she actually did a course through Pavilion, winning by design revenue architecture this last year. And I was in it. It was awesome. I learned a ton. And she was gracious enough to, to come on the show to talk about some things that I learned that I think are really important, especially as we go into 2024, uh, really around go to market motions, go to market maturity.

what's changed, how to find your right go-to-market motion. Because what I've noticed a lot too is there's all these different either buzzwords or concepts, ideas like, hey, we should do community, we should do PLG, we should do ABM. And then there's also terms like go-to-market that have emerged as well. And so I'm trying to understand first what's right for you at the stage of your organization, maybe some history on...

go to market motions, and then kind of put it into context of where do these different strategies fit and all that fun stuff. So Beth has actually put together a slide of some graphs and some things she's gonna take us through. So Beth, if you wanna just maybe introduce yourself a little bit, a little background, and then maybe share your screen, and we can jump right in.

Beth Yehaskel (01:23.471)
Yeah, absolutely. Great to be here with you, Taylor. So yeah, I'm Beth Haskell, and I've been working in technology since 1999, so definitely for a minute, focused mainly on recurring revenue. But the last three plus years, I've been working with a company called Winning by Design, and they have really been spending time developing this concept of revenue architecture. And so...

I'm a revenue architect. I teach revenue architecture. And we really believe that going forward, this is going to be the mindset, the discipline that really helps companies navigate what has been a pretty weird time in the world of recurring revenue. So some of what I will share today is actually from the revenue architecture course, but with the focus on the go-to-market stuff that you just talked about. Sound good?

Taylor Wells (02:11.918)
Awesome. Let's do it.

Beth Yehaskel (02:14.143)
Okay, great. Now, one thing that is useful to know is where the term revenue architecture comes from, what it means actually, and it's really just kind of what it sounds like is being much more deliberate in how you architect your company to optimize revenue. And at the end of the day, that's it. We have a tendency to be somewhat reactive in what we do and

The idea is you don't have to be. There's different models, there are principles, there are things that can help guide your planning of building a successful company.

So let's talk about go to market. And I think the first thing to talk about is where we're at now and kind of how we got here. You know, you can see on the graph here, starting in 2012 through till today, for most of the last 10 years, we had what is often referred to as the golden age of SaaS. I mean, company, just unicorn after unicorn, amazing success, lots of exits, all of...

these incredible outcomes for occurring revenue companies. Then we had the pandemic, which was an interesting time because everybody who wasn't online jumped on at the same time in a way that they hadn't before. And it's pretty amazing actually that the internet, the cloud, all of the apps, everything supported, basically what was it overnight shift to everybody jumping online almost solely for work. And then it crashed. So why did it crash?

is hard to kind of wrap our heads around. And it's important to know why, because it connects really directly to the importance of this go-to-market thinking and how we approach it.

Beth Yehaskel (04:07.379)
One of the big things that led to this drop-off is that for a long time in those 10 years, we had this growth at any and all cost mentality. What I mean by that is everybody was going for high valuations, which were primarily based on growth rate, acquisition, so at the front end. So not so much to do with the recurring revenue part of recurring revenue companies, but more about the growth and the acquisition piece.

Also, money wasn't expensive. So rather than spend time on building really deliberate and efficient processes, you didn't have to. You could actually throw bodies at problems and buy more tools and it could cover over a lot of what at the end of the day are really inefficiencies. And all of those things, this growth at all costs and the spends and the focus on acquisition really kind of came to roost in end of 2021, beginning of 2022.

And where we find ourselves now is at a point where the companies that are gonna survive through all of this and come out really strong on the other end are gonna be the ones that prioritize sustainable growth. So that's what we're gonna talk a little bit more about.

Taylor Wells (05:17.954)
Hmm. I love it. Thanks for setting the stage, Beth. And just a couple thoughts there. I've actually worked with a lot of service-based reoccurring revenue companies. And my observation working with also SaaS companies is, especially due to the profitability of SaaS and with the cost of requiring getting money to then grow, et cetera, was essentially zero. It created this interesting dynamic where we're going to be able to do a lot of things

On one hand, it's all about scalability, which actually, I think in the long run, created really poor experiences for buyers as well. So we created this really interesting environment where the folks on the service end, service recurring revenue, like service based companies, I think they have to be so focused on experience because it's so much about relationships, et cetera. They never lost that. But kind of another observation I've seen over the past couple of years is this, especially

Taylor Wells (06:15.538)
And that actually a lot of times creates horrible experiences. It creates a silo effect of no one's talking, just throw money at it. We don't really we're not matching buyers expectations. We're actually just trying to acquire customers as quickly as possible. And not only does that is that not sustainable if you're trying to be more cost effective, something I've learned a lot, especially from the service based businesses where it's like you just don't have the margins to throw money at it. And

Taylor Wells (06:43.902)
So it creates, yeah, once again, I think of that experience element. And when you're looking at go-to-market motions or when you're looking at different strategies, that sustainable part really is how do we match buyers' expectations? How do we tap into meeting buyers where they're at and also where your company's at and creating just a great experience, right, for them? And I think that's part, from my experience of seeing what is sustainable is really a lot about that experience part. So.

Just an observation, especially working from service-based companies, it's so interesting how SaaS has really paved the way for trying new things. I think we can learn. If you are a service-based recurring revenue, you can learn so much from SaaS companies because they're always like, it's any type of go-to-market motion, it's like they've created it, right? Because they have so much money, they can invest in so much teams to try new things. But on the flip side, sometimes we miss out on the experience, which I think we can learn from our...

our friends in service-based businesses. So just an observation to throw in there.

Beth Yehaskel (07:46.427)
I agree. You know, you're reminding me, there's a first principle of recurring revenue companies, whatever kind of recurring revenue company you're talking about, SaaS, recurring services, which is that recurring revenue is a result of recurring impact. So talking about that experience, it's like the only way that people are going to engage with you as a customer is if you can provide an impact that is a priority to their business, and then if you deliver on that impact and keep delivering on it.

that's how they're going to stay and grow with you. So if you think about it, rather than thinking about customer happiness or, you know, having the right sales pitch, those kind of things, really, it's got to be all about impact. Highlighting that impact, understanding if it's a priority, delivering on it, and continuing to deliver on it. So even when we think about these go-to-market motions and what I'm going to talk about with that, everything really needs to hover around that and be centralized around it.

if you're going to be successful, because that's what's going to get you customers, that's what's going to keep those customers.

Taylor Wells (08:51.514)
Oh, I love it. And I and I've used that phrase, obviously, that you all created many, many times with my clients and just in my work, because I think it does encapsulate it. And I think even from go to market motions, from sales and marketing, what I found is that reoccurring revenue, I think the impact almost has to be earlier on in the stages. And as we get into stages, like PLG, right, it's all about time to value, how do we provide that impact as quickly as possible? Content marketing thought leadership.

Taylor Wells (09:19.958)
that's providing a form of value, a form of impact before they even become a customer. And it's counterintuitive, right? It's this very selfless mindset, which folks that are listening to the show hear me talk a lot about, is the idea of giving first, providing impact without expectation. And that creates this flywheel, this ongoing. And it's like, how can you provide, whoever can provide impact the fastest? And...

Taylor Wells (09:47.178)
with a great experience, I think we'll win ultimately. We'll get the business right on the front end sustainably, but then also, like you said, keep that recurring impact to maintain that recurring revenue and whatnot. So, super cool.

Beth Yehaskel (10:00.499)
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, one thing you mentioned that I want to talk about a little bit more is that what the right thing for a company to do is, is going to be different depending on what stage they're at. So what you're looking at here is this growth curve and every recurring revenue company is going to follow this S curve it's called, right? So you start slow, you kind of

pick up, you move through the startup phase, validate a whole bunch of things like your product market fit. And then you move into scaling, where your growth speeds up, you get into this grown up mode. And eventually, once you start hitting your total available market, things are going to flatten out and then you need to either add products or acquire company things along those lines. The important thing here, though, is what stage you're at is going to mean that

you have to focus on different things. And the balance of cost of acquisition, for example, with dollars coming in, it's what the rate balance is, is gonna change depending on where you're at in this curve. So there's no one size fits all. And even for your own company, what you need to do to be successful and sustainable is gonna vary. So as we think about that curve, I mentioned the first thing is product market fit.

Right, but very early on as you're getting settled along this curve, you need to figure out what the right go to market fit is. Meaning, you know, certainly who your market is, but also what are the steps that you're going to take to do all the things we just talked about to identify impact, to get those right prospects in there, to have them get them over the line, trusting that you're going to help them achieve an impact that's a priority.

Quick time to first impact, all those kind of things. You need to understand pretty quickly what activities need to happen to achieve those goals as part of that go-to-market motion.

Beth Yehaskel (12:01.267)
And this stuff is hard. When we look along the growth curve, you can see these percentages here, and these are referred to the number of companies that successfully make it through each funding round. You can see how there's the A funding round, B, C, et cetera. And not many companies navigate successfully along this whole curve. It's not easy to do. There's so many different challenges and things to overcome. You know.

just endless lists of things that are hard. But that said, one of the things that we know is one of the most challenging things is getting the go-to-market right. And this is why. When we look at the companies that don't manage to successfully navigate that growth curve, a lot of where they go wrong is on execution. In the beginning when you're a startup, it's all about product and to some degree,

Beth Yehaskel (12:57.939)
You're just, you're figuring out, you're kind of winging it in terms of what's working with getting those prospects identified and getting them over the line to become customers and keep them, right? But it's really about the product. You have something that can deliver that impact or service, you know, to cite your comment regarding services. But as you mature and move from a startup mode into a scale up mode and then to a grownup mode, the importance of your go to market activities and motions

gets bigger and bigger. And if you are not prioritizing that, meaning investing in it, making the right decisions with it, setting the org up correctly, all of those things, then it's gonna be really hard to be successful.

Taylor Wells (13:41.202)
Interesting. I'm curious, especially with the shifts in the market and it feels like every go-to-market motion, there's obviously some that are better than others, especially depending on the stage of organization. But do you feel, have you seen any shift of even earlier on the startup, like that ratio of product to GTM even increasing, the ratio of investing more into GTM just with

The fact that every market, every channel is so much more saturated. Go to market's even harder than it ever is. We have less money, more competition. I don't know. I just feel like it's the companies I'm working with because almost all my clients are under that 10 million range. And go to market has been, you know, they can't just they can't just, you know, it just it's getting harder. There's no way to no doubt about it. And I think like I maybe five years ago, I could agree that this, you know, was 10 percent.

Taylor Wells (14:35.358)
of your startup phase could be in go to market or whatever that ratio is. Any thoughts there? Have you seen like, yeah.

Beth Yehaskel (14:41.819)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is less about, I think, especially in startup, like that percentage of time and emphasis on go to market, but how it's viewed is almost even the more important thing. And I'll actually use this to illustrate what I'm talking about. It's really common that we think about marketing and sales and customer success.

those organizations very often have their own leadership, they have their own metrics, they have their own tools, they have their own terminology, and maybe they're interacting okay together, maybe they're collaborating really well on some areas, but maybe not other ones. But regardless, the siloed thinking, I think is where the problem really comes in. And if you have a startup where people are...

moving really fast and wearing 10 different hats and a lot of things are going on and you're going into it with this silent mindset, it can be really easy to end up looking up $5 million later and realizing that the marketing processes that you created, there might be some good things going on in there, but they're not actually mapping to the sales processes that well, which may not be mapping to the customer success processes that well. So you might have go-to-market teams and they might

things, but the system of them and the way that they collaborate together tends to be where I think a lot of companies fall down. Because it's just old habits, right? We think about these things in that way.

Taylor Wells (16:16.126)
Yeah, well said. And yeah, I agree that it seems that, and yeah, I think it's our mindset of like, industrialization of sales almost. It's this American way really of industrializing everything, like a little assembly line. And there's a lot of good to that, no doubt from an efficiency standpoint, but we lose out on creating a cohesive process that makes sense from the buyer's perspective, great experience, sustainable, et cetera. And then

Taylor Wells (16:44.974)
Yeah, it just ultimately there's flaws like we've talked about. I'm curious who owns this because it seems like marketing seems to be. Well, it's funny because a lot of CROs that I work with or know, you know, come from a sales background. You know, they I see a lot of them owning or claiming the GTM term. It's really interesting. I think they're marketing themselves really well for the CROs out there that I work with or know. But marketing, I think a lot of times are.

Taylor Wells (17:13.778)
are usually marketing teams are involved in all these areas. Then I also hear some folks are like the CEO needs to own it. Yeah, and it's curious your thoughts, especially, I mean, obviously each stage of the org is different. But is it every department needs to be thinking this way? Right. How do we all work this together or who's stepping outside of these departments to really make sure all these three things are working in harmony?

Beth Yehaskel (17:36.623)
It's a fantastic question. And I think this is part of the problem and what's gonna make it messy for the next bit while this gets worked out. Right now there hasn't traditionally been a role that's responsible for the whole system, right? When you think about the end-to-end system and Winning by Design uses the bow tie as the visual with the left side of the bow tie being.

the lead gen, lead development sales cycle center of the bow tie is closed one. And then the right of the bow tie is on boarding and adoption and renewal and expansion. And when you think about that bow tie and all the different departments within it, but then there's the bow tie itself, kind of the outline that goes around the whole thing and who does own that. Now, I think historically nobody has, which has been a big part of the problem. And

maybe in some cases you might have a CRO who truly gets the whole thing and not just the acquisition piece. And maybe they can. But I'm starting to see a shift where either a COO kind of role can be the one who's holding the system together and responsible for that. I'm seeing roles like Chief Transformation Officer or some titles like this that 10 Chief Growth Officer.

things that tend towards, it's almost a way to think about revenue architecture and who's responsible for the architecture of the system, right? And I think there's a lot of merit in that not being somebody who has only a sales background, only a marketing background, or only a customer success background, because there's so much baggage and assumptions and things that get carried from the way we have done it historically.

and you have to think about them as a system together, not stack ranks where one's more important than the other. It's how they work in conjunction.

Taylor Wells (19:28.514)
Thanks for sharing. Yeah, that's interesting. I do see roles out there, GTM, even VP of GTM or VP of growth. The growth, I think is probably, like you said, really common where it's, and it's cool because I think there is folks that are listening to this, whether you're in sales or marketing or whatnot or CS, thinking about yourselves as this unbiased advocate for growth, right? And a sustainable, great experience. And I think for me personally,

Taylor Wells (19:58.494)
even though I come back from a marketing background, my greatest success has always been when I've ultimately learned how to work with other departments, understand other departments, and tie in other departments' efforts into what I'm doing. And so figuring out how it's like, hey, because sometimes it's like maybe expansion is like our number one go-to-market focus for next year, right, to get more revenue. And who cares about NetNew logo? And if you're just focused on sales or just focused on marketing, you might miss that opportunity. And even DemandGen,

Taylor Wells (20:28.334)
could be just getting more referrals from customers, customer advocacy, or getting customers to expand or upsell or whatnot. And so I think that really stepping back and thinking about, and product too, thinking about how the product is working or not working or how can the product be improved or a lot of times in go-to-market too. And I think in the coming year, we're gonna have more topics around like competitive advantage and competitive differentiation, pricing, all these things that

Taylor Wells (20:58.158)
no real one department really owns, but that every department influences and really are some of the things that like make or break your go to market. And how, yeah, so I think in general, it's like, how do we step back? And I love I love this graph of how do all these things work well together? And who cares if it's like we invest more in CS versus marketing? And I think that you as a leader,

Taylor Wells (21:22.758)
You know, in any organization, it's like, how do you find your wins? Because especially in this market, you got to like if you want to grow sustainably, you got to look for the things that are maybe outside the box. Right. And think about approach a problem in a very like you can't just go pick up a book off the shelf and be like, here's the model I'm going to do that we did 10 years ago, especially for early stage companies, because it's I guarantee you it's going to be it's not going to get you the same result. Number one. And so thinking outside the box, I think is super helpful.

Beth Yehaskel (21:53.267)
I think to piggyback on that a little bit more too, once you do figure it out, then you're gonna be at a different point in the curve and you gotta do something different. So you're never done really, which is both exciting and perhaps a little bit, a little like Sisyphus at times. But when you think about who owns that go-to-market motion, that horizontal thought of it all and the system of it.

Beth Yehaskel (22:20.975)
It also is going to vary the balance of it as you move along this curve. What type of company are you in the first place? Are you services? Are you PLG? Are you enterprise? But then what stage are you at? And all these things are going to come into play. So having some role responsible for understanding this stuff, like the curve and where you need to be and what that right balance is for you is going to be really important as we go forward. And hopefully, leaders in.

with expertise in the various parts of go-to-market can learn this too. I think that's going to be really important that everybody starts embracing this kind of mindset. But yeah, not easy stuff.

Taylor Wells (23:04.878)
No, yeah, and even into the integration of that, because you could have one person that owns it, but everyone can benefit because they'll bring their own perspective and filter it through this revenue architecture, right? I think that's really important where it's like, hey, how does marketing fit into it? Because I think it can't be a top-down approach, right? Where it's like the CEO or even the VP of growth or whoever or, you know, chief growth officer owns it.

Taylor Wells (23:33.578)
but actually thinking about like everyone. And I wish everyone was taught on this, right? Everyone can go to Marker, even the whole company, because it's just like it's kind of the fundamentals of and that way you can be like, OK, so how do I influence and the bow tie? How do I make sure I am, you know, and especially people on the front lines that are like doing the day in day out. So I think it's really important that like I've learned a lot from obviously the course that you all did and whether you're a leader or not a leader. I think it's super helpful to go deep on these things because.

Taylor Wells (24:02.81)
once again, it gives you a perspective to like get outside of your own little bubble, right? We all have like confirmation bias. We all have, uh, I'll have our own agendas or things that we think are important. And how do we get outside of that? So.

Beth Yehaskel (24:15.079)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and building on that too, when you think this that you're looking at now is the go-to-market model. So one of six models that the revenue architecture course that you mentioned teaches. And a couple of things that are important when you think about what the right go-to-market motion is for your organization is, it's not just in relation to annual contract value, though that's important. Like how high touch do you need to be when it comes to

the various aspects of identifying, prioritizing impact, delivering on it, so on and so forth. There has to be some kind of mapping to the ACV coming in and the number of deals per year. But it also is really important that you think about it in relation to each other, which again, is kind of where things have fallen down in some cases. If you look at this model and you can see, obviously the marketing sales CS

Beth Yehaskel (25:14.267)
activities are grouped together in a very specific way, where you have targeted marketing and named accounts for the sales team and, you know, one to few account ownership for CSMs, perhaps, and those should all be in line. Far more often what we see in organizations is they might have a targeted marketing strategy, but a two-stage sales motion, and maybe they only have a help desk. And so there's this misalignment between the parts of the go-to-market.

And this is where that siloed versus horizontal thing comes into play. It's not just about making sure you're doing the right things based on the contract value for the customer, but also in relationship to the activities of your teammates around who are functioning in other parts of that go-to-market motion.

Taylor Wells (26:03.758)
Hmm. I love it. This is this slide right here is actually I think what stood out to me the most in the entire course. And you have some other ones that relate to this and I've probably shared this slide. I mean, with lots of people just because I think it's it encapsulates a bunch of different concepts. I mean, number one, like you mentioned, how do all these different motions work together? Right. You have your marketing, you have your sales and your CS. And how do they all complement each other? But it also strikes me. I love for you maybe share a little bit more about.

When you're in the growth curve, how does the growth curve fit into this? Because I remember you talking a lot about, hey, if you're in an early stage company, you know, you probably shouldn't be trying to do a PLG and a named accounts enterprise. You know, you know, you know, 500 K deals trying to do both motions. Any let's start there, actually. Let's start about like maybe as it relates to the growth curve. How do these play and do you start with one at a time? Can you try one and do a little bit of both or?

Taylor Wells (27:03.83)
Yeah, what's your thoughts there? And then we can go a little bit deeper.

Beth Yehaskel (27:07.691)
That's a great point because this is a really common error that we see. So let's take your example. You were saying, let's say it's a, you know, a $5 million startup company and there's a PLG product and there's an SMB product and they have a few enterprise customers. So they also have, you know, an enterprise motion as well. So it's three different things. So if you go back, if we look at the growth curve once again.

If you're trying to do all of those three things, they're likely not move in exact parallel. You might find product market fit for one before another one. You might figure out your go-to-market motions for one ahead of the other two. And so the pace at which each of your three segments, products moves along this curve is gonna be different. And it is really hard to

travel three paths at the same time and do it effectively. So time and time again, what we see is companies that are at the top of most portfolio companies for investment firms and things like that are the ones that do one at a time. So as tempting as it might be to say yes to everything, companies that focus on, let's say they start as a PLG product, great, do that, get it right, move along the curve. And then once you are along the curve,

following the steps that we know lead to success with it. Once you get that stabilized, then be intentional and architect the launch of a second one based on data. And again, you have to go through the same steps for the second one and make sure again, that the alignment of those go-to-market activities for each one makes sense in relationship to the ACV for that segment and the marketing sales and CS activities that are happening to support

each of those segments.

Taylor Wells (29:04.282)
Thanks for sharing. That's so interesting, I think, especially at really stage companies. I think maybe it's this... Well, first, they haven't figured out what works, right? We talked about under 10 million, it's figuring out like the go-to-market fit. And most folks have like... Especially to get to like 3 to 5 million, it's kind of... Most growth I've seen is pretty haphazard. It's like, okay, we've tried this, we did this, and it's just... It's an accumulation of a bunch of different things they've tried.

Taylor Wells (29:33.07)
Probably stopped started again and just it's a it's pretty haphazard and part of that's just natural in some ways I think is you're trying a lot of different things. You're trying to fear. You don't really know what works you're trying to take you know, every opportunity you can to get new clients and So and that's kind of natural and you probably don't have the resources to really scale out one full Motion and you don't want to risk it all going into like, you know, hey, let's build a big

you know, sales team or let's, you know, do all these different conferences or whatever it is, you kind of have to like do a bunch of small things to kind of get to the end goal. So part of that's natural. But the other part of it is, you know, super tempting, like you said, did you like just go after, you know, try to like, hey, let's try this, let's try that. And because a lot of these motions sometimes, you know, go to market motions are easy to spin up. I'm saying that, you know, hyperbolically in a way, but they you can.

Taylor Wells (30:30.122)
you can try something pretty quickly. And it's so tempting to try it, right. And then but what I found is just like with anything, it takes time, right. They like find success. And like we talk about sales cycles. Well, there's also a marketing cycle, right. Where it's like it just takes time for brand awareness, whatever you're doing to kind of get a snowball effect. And so they never really they never really actually end up figuring out what works fully because they just try a bunch of small things.

Taylor Wells (30:59.314)
And then they don't, you know, the time delay and things like that. But then also they are spread too thin. Right. So it's just, it's so weird. I mean, I think it's your early stage. I feel for companies, the ones I work with, the ones that I don't work with it. And I have worked with is just it's challenging. It's really hard to figure out. And it's a lot you're risking a lot. Right. Sometimes don't have a lot of time. You don't have your.

Taylor Wells (31:25.098)
You have only a certain amount of runway. You're it's a lot. You're so much you're risking. And as you mentioned, most companies fail, obviously, or don't get to the next round and whatnot. And I guess my question would be, how would you? Yeah, is it picking like one picking one of these go to market motions to 10 million and then kind of reevaluate after that? Or how do you how do you prioritize? Is it mostly just looking at?

your ACV and like, okay, if our ACV is under 5, 5k, then we should focus on community and PLG. Yeah, I just any takeaways are like, how can folks especially early stage? I think that's where it's the most conflicted. Yeah, any best practices or things you've seen that how to evaluate which route to go?

Beth Yehaskel (32:15.655)
Yeah, I think there's a few things. And first of all, this is why having like a good board, good advisors, you know, people that can, you can lean on to talk through this stuff. This is why it's so important. And data, as early as you can get your data situation under control, so you can actually use data that you're gathering to make decisions, super important. When it comes to the number of, we'll call them segments for the sake of ease, how many segments to launch, product segments?

versions of product, whatever. The general rule of thumb that we like to say is up until 10 million, only focus on one. Once you get to about 20 million, two, don't launch a third until you're 50 million or beyond. There's always exceptions, but generally speaking, that's about where we see the break points for when you're ready to launch another one. And you're right, it's so tempting. It can be so hard because

there's a few things going on in human behavior. One is that sometimes it feels like you're diluting risk by doing more things because you're covering more bases. Like if this doesn't work, we got these other two things going on. But you're actually shooting yourself in the foot with that because you're not gonna do any of them well and you're gonna not have a strong set of activities or customers for any of them.

The other thing that can be really hard when you're a startup too, and this is a scenario of soon play out a lot of times is let's say you have an SMB product, for example, and then one of your SMB sellers manages to land a huge deal or is about to, let's say, and you have a client that says, I'll sign a $2 million contract for you. If you build X, Y, and Z features for me and you know, we go two things can happen. One is

Beth Yehaskel (34:10.911)
Well, first of all, let's just establish it's hard to say no when you're a startup to a $2 million contract. But if you do, you are potentially seeding control of your roadmap to this one customer who now has, you know, it's your biggest customer. Also, it's easy to then, if you do sign that contract, say, oh, now we have an enterprise product also. So we started with SMB, but we signed this contract. So clearly now we have an enterprise motion. So now we can go and

We can promote a couple of our SMB sellers to be enterprise sellers and we're off and running. But if you stop and think about it for a minute, enterprise selling is a much different motion than SMB selling just skills, what's involved, all of that kind of thing. But beyond that, just think about the product. If you have a product that's built to support SMB customers, the needs of that product could be far different than if you want to support enterprise customers. There might be a need for

different security measures. GDPR might come into play in a way it didn't before. You might need admin panel and like roles built into the product. There's a lot of different things. So you can't just suddenly have an enterprise product because you call it that. There's a whole bunch of other things that need to happen. And there's so much going on when you're a startup and just stepping back to get that perspective and making sure you're making the right decisions is important coming back to...

advisors and boards and making sure that you have people you can talk through with. That's going to be super important because it's hard when you're in it, you know.

Taylor Wells (35:39.452)
Hmm.

Taylor Wells (35:46.15)
Oh yeah. Yeah. And you're so, and also too, I think, you know, to your, to your example of the enterprise contract coming through, it's hard to know if like, Oh, maybe we should go enterprise. And you know, maybe, maybe SMB or PLG isn't, you know, these smaller ACVs isn't the direction we should go because we have, we have, we don't have the data. Right. And so any thoughts there on like, how do you obviously folks with experience, you know, working with an organization like winning by design,

Taylor Wells (36:12.566)
and maybe actually have some metrics here, some thoughts here, but any like early signals that you're on the right path.

Beth Yehaskel (36:19.559)
Yeah, this slide is my favorite slide probably from the whole course. Um, so this is the growth model that you're looking at. And we talked about how it shows the funding rounds, but the thing about this curve and this piece of it only goes up to IPO and a little bit beyond. The thing that I like about this is it sets out a very clear set of activities that need to happen at different points along this curve. Again, there's always exceptions, but generally speaking.

following this set of activities can really put you on a solid path. And you'll notice that the first one is establishing the right revenue model for your product, but immediately is making sure that you pull the founder out of the sales motion or if it's PLG out of fixing bugs and doing that kind of thing. But pretty early on is this concept of getting your data model in place.

You can't be making data-driven decisions if you don't have data you can trust, period. So making sure that you have that in place early is gonna be really important to making sure that you're making good decisions. And as anyone who's tried to fix their data later on in the journey knows, it's never gonna get easier. It's only gonna get harder and more complex. So the sooner startups can do that, I think the better. And then once you have that

you know, spending the time to get that go to market model, right, the motions that are appropriate for your needs and how they relate to each other, making sure the processes are repeatable. There's this concept of a growth formula, it's a tool that you can use to help sort of plan out how spending dollars in certain areas might impact you longer term. So all this to say that there's different things there's

guidelines for what to focus on at different parts of this curve as you go. So, yeah, this to me is an invaluable tool.

Taylor Wells (38:24.318)
That's super helpful. And I love even the metrics under the go to market fit and product market fit, those different things of looking at. Um, yeah, even the metrics and things like that. Any thoughts on the data model? Um, don't mean to digress too much. And, um, I know we're short on time, so we can, we can wrap it up here pretty soon, but, um, I'm just curious in the data model, especially early stage companies. When they probably don't have a ton of historical data, number one, um, and benchmark data, I feel like is, um,

less and less helpful, just because of, I mean, it depends on the benchmark and depends on so many different things, but it's lacking context. It's lacking that the rapid changes we've had in the past couple of years and the continued challenges we've had and go to market and, uh, return on the investments, et cetera. But what's your thoughts on any best practices, anything that comes to mind as far as how to think about data when you're an early stage company, um, before you have it, obviously, if you, you know, if you're starting to get data,

organize it well and start collecting it and investing in making sure you collect it well. But let's say you don't have it or you're just a year or two in, what are your thoughts on using benchmark data or any early signals of things you can look for to make sure you have the data to make the decisions?

Beth Yehaskel (39:43.411)
Yeah, I think the important thing is having a data model that goes across the whole bow tie. There's definitely a tendency to focus on marketing and like top of funnel data points and less other data, especially early on. So have somebody who has ownership for the data model across the whole bow tie. Make sure that you spend time getting clear on what the definitions are internally. So if somebody says MQL, what does that mean at your company?

Beth Yehaskel (40:13.403)
And then like you said, making sure that there are systems that can capture all of this and that people have good data hygiene in their roles. It's part of the job. So first of all, that this kind of ties back to the whole who owns the health of the system. I'm a big fan of rev ops teams that sort of support the whole bow tie equally and having them own the data model.

So having that in place, and then you don't need to necessarily be benchmarking early, early on. There's some signals about checking out your CAC to LTV ratio. You're gonna have a higher cost of acquisition when you're earlier on, because you're trying to figure out what works. So that's okay. But as you move forward, you wanna start getting to a healthier balance of cost of acquisition versus lifetime value.

There's a bunch of other best practices, rule of 40, all these different kinds of benchmarks you can use. But at the end of the day, you want to benchmark against yourself. And you can't do that if you don't have the data model in the first place. So if you just get that in place and keep it updated and trustworthy, you'll be far ahead of a lot of companies just by doing that.

Taylor Wells (41:27.158)
Mm-hmm. Well said. I love the clear definitions because everyone has a different, you know, it's always like, hey, what should our SQL cost be? And it's like, well, what is your definition of SQL? And then they go pick up a number off the internet, and they're like, that should be it. And it's like, oh, well, first the context. I think that's also what's lacking in benchmarks. And that's where you're getting at even with your own data, right? There's just your type of product you have, the industry you're in, the growth stage you're at.

Taylor Wells (41:56.47)
your go-to-market motions, the current economic environment. There's all these factors that just play into it. And yeah, so I think there's, yeah, your own data is super helpful. I love that, getting it right, making sure you have clear definitions, really good advice, thank you.

Beth Yehaskel (42:13.971)
Yeah. So I think, oh yeah. So that was actually the last slide I have there, but for what it's worth, I think that some of the things that you showed, the graphics that I showed in the slides, there's six models that we teach in the revenue architecture course. So the data model, which is the bow tie and laying out that data is one of the six, but it showed the growth curve and the go-to-market model.

Beth Yehaskel (42:41.555)
But there's a lot more about each of these and it's great because you don't have to guess at a lot of things. We have enough knowledge after there being, you know, so many recurring revenue companies that succeeded and failed over the years that we know the patterns. We know what works. And so if you can learn those foundational things, you can be set up for success. And

Jackler just published a book as well that came out like last week or something. It's a very hefty textbook, but if you're interested in revenue architecture, it's absolutely worth the read.

Taylor Wells (43:17.778)
Awesome, yeah, definitely recommend everyone check those resources out. I still haven't got the textbook myself, but I need to get it just because yeah, the graphs are super helpful and you all have really, yeah, I remember first listening to Jaco like probably four or five years ago and like learning about Spiced and first you need to tell him he needs to bring back his music on his events because I miss his techno like he would and his smile. He has such great energy.

But I really appreciate all of the work you guys all done. I've learned a ton from even just watching your YouTube videos to taking the course to obviously our conversation. And is there anything in closing before we wrap up? As we move into 2024, obviously big takeaways from what I've heard is like making sure you kind of step out of each one of those functions, the go to market functions and have a clear perspective on bringing them all together.

Taylor Wells (44:14.794)
making sure you're doing the right things for what growth stage you're in, making sure you like focus on one go to market motion at a time. And in combination, what are the right go to market motions to write? If you're on PLG, then you should be doing these things. If you're enterprise, you should have named accounts. Anything else we didn't cover that you're just like in 2024, I really feel like go to market folks should be thinking about as a really sweet we talked about or even something outside of this that you've been pondering lately that you can.

We'll leave with the audience.

Beth Yehaskel (44:47.443)
I think the biggest thing is you're just laying out your strategic plan for 2024 is get your executive team on the same page. And certainly your C-suite, but even beyond that, I've been really encouraging companies to get a group of leaders who are helping steer the ship, so to speak, and put them all through the revenue architecture course. Get them all thinking about the business the right way and the system the right way. Because if everybody's coming at it from a different foundational understanding,

it's going to be hard. So getting that alignment, I think is really important. And then once you have that, whether you get help from somebody like Winning by Design, or you just build the expertise within your company, use the data, use the models, use this information to be able to prioritize because money is not cheap anymore. And you don't have the luxury of, you know, lots of time to experiment and learn and, you know, figure out what works and all of that. So

Use knowledge that you have access to make the right decisions now.

Taylor Wells (45:50.434)
Thanks, Beth. That's great. Really appreciate it. That's awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this great ideas and resources. How can folks follow you online and connect with you further?

Beth Yehaskel (46:02.387)
Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, Bethyah Haskell. And certainly, I post a lot. I love to have people comment back and challenge me on different things that I'm writing about. If you're interested in learning more about winning by design, I'm also an executive coach. You're welcome to book time with me on LinkedIn. There's a book time box on there.

Yeah, and otherwise you can check out the winning by design website for a whole lot more free content and more information about the course and the book and all those kind of things. So yeah, I would just encourage people to check out those things and I'm always available to chat.

Taylor Wells (46:39.942)
Beth thanks again for coming on really great connecting Yeah, folks. I'll put those links in the show notes so folks can check out all those resources Yeah, I can't recommend when you do I design more Highly than really any other organization when the in the recurring revenue go to market motions and learn a ton from you all so Keep up the good work. Thanks for trailblazing and all that fun stuff so perfect Did oh talk to you soon beth. Thanks so much. Bye

Beth Yehaskel (47:01.083)
Yeah, thanks, Taylor. Great conversation. Okay.