Maja Voje's Blog, page 9

Prioritizing for moonshots ☄️

Dear GTM Strategist, 

Einstein said that the definition of stupidity is doing the same things again and again and expecting different results. 

My message this week is that playing safe in GTM will not get you far. 

I get it—there are so many things to do, and it is easy to get caught up in the busy work. 

But if you want to unlock the next business milestone, “playing safe” will only get you that far. 

As you are making the final tweaks and prioritization for your Q2 GTM Strategy, ask yourself how many high-leverage opportunities you are pursuing in the next quarter. 

I like to call them moonshots. 

I first became interested in “moonshots” when I interviewed the previous Head of Growth at Foreo Sweden, Ignas Gee. For all the guys reading this: Foreo is a 9-figure e-commerce beauty brand and Ignas was their first marketer, aka GTM Strategist. The beauty industry is very competitive, and the survival rates for new brands are very low. Ignas explained that tweaking performance and email marketing only got them that far. Their philosophy of opening new markets has been: “Before we generate X million impressions, we will not even start selling. The market has to crave it before we launch.”

Here are some of Foreo’s moonshots:

Get to retailers such as Sephora and Duty-free shops (partners).

Get a mega influencer for their ads - they got Paris Hilton!

Convince tens of thousands of beauty influencers to post video reviews of their products.

If you are thinking if this is somehow vibrator-related, the answer is yes. They used to make sex toys before pivoting to beauty. I guess beauty provided a better product-market fit.

Remember, we are not talking about L’Oréal Paris. Foreo is a much smaller European player, and the founder and early product team were from Croatia. In GTM, we need leverage to create maximum advantage. We are operating on scarce resources and within a limited window of opportunities. 

#1: Think big - Usual hiding places of moonshot ideas

As the winning strategy is based on your strengths and competitors’ weaknesses, the best place to start thinking about moonshots are your strengths and proprietary resources.

According to entrepreneur and one of my favorite bro scientists Alex Hormozi, there are four levers of leverage to consider what is your proprietary advantage: 

Labor - Can you add more people or partners to create more and better products or launch the product faster? 

Capital - Can you invest more in marketing, sales, acquisitions, or R&D? 

Content - Can you create content/marketing assets that will continue to bring leads to your business and “work when you sleep”? 

Code - Can you algorithm the brain behind the operations to make the delivery cheaper, faster, and more effective for mass adoption?  

In my freelancing class, I like to use much bolder terminology: you can either have FU skill, FU network, or FU money to win big in business. 

Start digging deep. 

Like no one is watching. 

What is your superpower as a founder/professional? 

If you are a great networker - the best place for a moonshot would be partnerships or collaboration. 

If you are a great coder - you can build an amazing MVP in a weekend. 

If your charm on camera can only be beaten by Leonardo di Caprio - video content might be it. 

Now, think broader:  

Does your company have lots of resources that you can center for speed? 

Would onboarding new employees or outsourcing bring a competitive edge? 

Is product/R&D sitting on the next big thing in the market? 

Does marketing/sales know something about customers or the market that others do not? 

Is there a trend in your industry that others are sleeping on? 

Is there an existing network (community, influencer, media, event) that you could piggyback on? 

Write the moonshot ideas down. What would make a radical difference in your business and change its trajectory?

What would 10x or 100x it?  

Just start to think about it. 

#2: Reveal the moonshots! 

Let’s go through an example of a business that I am mentoring right now. 

It is a no-code AI fintech solution builder. Brilliant product people. They sell through prototypes. 

The business currently has 3 large regional clients (banks) and makes $33K a month (MRR). 

ARR is currently around $100K.

The question that we are tackling is: 

What would it take to make this a 1 million dollar business? 

Before you grab your phone and open the calculator, let’s agree that: 

“Business as usual” would be to add 27 more clients at existing pricing 

The sales process for the new client lasts 3-6 months per salesperson 

A salesperson can get 5-10 such clients a year - hypothetically, they could achieve this goal 

Before you say that this is good enough, consider: 

The window of opportunity for AI in their sector is not infinite - other players will come. We will be leaving the money on the table if we would be too slow. 

The sales cycle stats are from the founding team. A new salesperson would take 3-6 months to onboard properly and it is doubtful that they could prototype with a client during the meetings as the founding team does. 

The team is raising an investment and with only regional traction, they are unattractive to bigger investors that would give them more leverage and better conditions. 

We need a moonshot 🤩

Idea dump for moonshots: 

Raise prices: Negotiate a deal with global or innovation centers of these banks to 3-5x ARR per client, because the solution is expected to create 1.5x savings per branch. 

Go product-led: Launch a product-led alternative and get investments to grow it based on the existing business traction.

Get a kick-ass fintech advisor to your advisory board and utilize their social capital to close the deals faster.

Go to the most important banking conference in the region and present the solution there.

Microsoft as a partner. They use Azure as one of the infra options for Enterprises. 

EY & PwC partnership can get them faster to their portfolio clients

What else would you do? 

Here is the ultimate challenge of moonshots: they are WAY too risky that they would go through a normal “prioritization matrix”, but those projects can give you a massive competitive advantage. They are too good to miss and play safe by betting on “business as usual” in GTM. 

Actually, not just in GTM. Recently, Disney received a letter from some investors, recommending the company to make fewer sequels (which are safe bets) and to take more “shots on goal” to compete with Netflix.

🚫 ATTENTION: If you are working with the team, do not just tell them to think 10x 

When I was working as an interim Business Unit lead in a tech company and the big boss told us to “add a zero to our plans” it really backfired and paralyzed most senior leaders. 

The intention was great - he wanted us to “think ballsy”, but the result was low morale, the feeling of being trapped in these “ballsy projections,” and even disbelief that the team could achieve them. As a leader, create a space and environment where people feel free to express bold ideas without the fear of being accountable to execute them just yet. 

#3: Select 1-3 moonshots a quarter and commit to them

Here is a problem with moonshots.

People either do not do them or rely on them too much as if they would be Elon Musk. As a result, it could sink their businesses if moonshots do not land well.

“Go big or go home” is not a reality for most bootstrapped entrepreneurs. 

We have to keep the lights on and our payroll secure. 

Yet, “playing safe” and “doing business as normal” is the enemy of GTM greatness.  

Let’s agree to get the best out of both worlds. 

We will balance “responsibility” with “subversiveness”. 

You should limit the number of moonshot bets in your business to 1-3 a quarter and make constant and desirable efforts towards them. 

One of the best tactics comes from Sean Ellis, legendary author of Hacking Growth: 

“Spend 80-90% of your resources on what is confirmed to get you there and 10-20% on experiments that would really move the needle in business”. 

I love this train of thought. 

Imagine that your weekday has 40 work hours. 

(You and I both know that we do not shut off our brains after that but for the sake of simple math.) 

Let’s also acknowledge that a normal human can do 3-6 hours of deep work a day. 

These are not meetings, answering emails, busy work and moving the Jira tickets around. 

The deep work should produce assets, embrace creative thinking, focus on problem-solving and making continuous improvements toward moonshots. 

To set free 20% of your “bandwidth” for moonshots and have a fair chance to have a quantum jump in your business, the best practice is to devote one working day to deliberately working on moonshots. Some do it on weekends as their “pet project”, others can reserve a day a week or part of the morning/evening to do this deep work. 

What is crucial is that deep work does not happen in 30-minute slots between meetings or 15-minute breaks. The brain takes time to “get into it.” Each disruption that interrupts deep work takes a toll. 

Last but not least, the only way to get “Paris Hilton to influence your product” is to send an email. You will never know if Paris will promote your product if you do not try to ask her. 

The ultimate art of moonshots is to do one thing every day that “scares you”—to push deliberately towards the path of greatness and to saying no to “busy work”. Your responsibility as a GTM Strategist is to “think and act subversively”. No one won in business solely by playing safe and copying others. 

Think of working hard vs. working smart. When you focus on your moonshot, forget about all other amazing options that appear on the way and stay laser-focused on the plan.

So what will it be? 

What is the moonshot that you will pursue in Q2? 

Commit and do the work to enter H2 bigger, stronger, and better than ever! 

To the moon!

Maja Voje

P.S.: You can find tons of frameworks to plan your moonshots in my book GTM Strategist.

Stronger together: Everything you need to know about partnerships in GTM

Dear GTM Strategist! 

Ah, would it not be wonderful if someone else would do sales, development, and marketing instead of you?

It can happen. Welcome to the wonderful universe of partnerships. 

This is why I feel it is important to have this conversation right now: 

2024 has been very volatile for many businesses on my radar: 

E-commerce friends complained that the honeymoon period of Meta advertising is over with recent privacy settings changes.

B2B companies that rely on outreach and email marketing saw open rates from hell with the deliverability changes at email providers. 

Service providers complained that clients are becoming very conservative and careful when making new deals, and the sales cycles are much longer. 

And I was thinking: OK, if these are the challenges - what is the solution? 

I reverse-engineered my portfolio companies that are up for great Q1 results, and I was surprised to realize that most of my “winners” have strong communities, email lists, durable content engines, excellent business development skills, and wait for it …  

… here comes the secret ingredient:

They nurtured high-quality PARTNERSHIPS. 

Contrary to some people, I believe that partnerships can be built very early on as a core of your GTM strategy. 

Why? 

I have experienced the benefits of this again and again—not only for my company but also for clients that I like to call partners because we co-create and aim to have a long-term relationship. 

Case #1 - At OriginTrail, partnerships and co-creation of pilot projects with great companies and organizations, such as GS1, Oracle, BSI, Walmart, etc. were crucial to helping us secure USD 22.5 million in funding.

Case #2 - In my business, the LTV (lifetime value) of businesses acquired through partnerships is 3x higher than with other gigs. Trust brings trust.

Case #3 - This week, one of my favorite companies, EarthCare.ai, announced two exciting partnerships. They could give a masterclass on how to recognize and close great opportunities. They are proud alumni of TechStars Berlin accelerator. They were also admitted to the Audi accelerator program, and they got development support from Tretton37, a Swedish development company that works for Ikea and H&M. If you still think it is impossible to have a pre-product market fit partnership, please reconsider. 

Bravo team! 👏

So let’s explore one of the best and most undervalued growth levers from my Go-To-Market Strategist book. I invited a seasoned partnership expert Eleanor Thompson (prev. Microsoft & Softcat, now CEO at Branchworks) to co-create some sweet, sweet content for you. 

So let’s reveal the partnerships!

Partnerships - the most overlooked and undervalued element of GTM?

You did not ask me for a definition of a partnership, but I will give it anyway: 

“A partnership is a mutual commitment of two or more entities to achieve a common goal.” 

The common goal component is critical. Whenever you are thinking of partnerships, you should not be just like, “What is in it for me?” - but you should strategically select a complementary partner that has something that you do not have and needs something that you can deliver. 

Playing on your strengths and enemies' weaknesses is always the best way to win the go-to-market game, but when it comes to partners, your friends and allies, it is mission-critical to have their best interest at heart and mind all the time. 

Do not let your imposter syndrome play tricks on you. There are plenty of things that you can bring to the table as a go-to-market company:

More revenue for both partners - new sales opportunity 

Strong technology 

Status of an innovator 

New audiences and access to new markets 

A sweet joint press release that will jingle the corporate sustainability bells 

The best partnerships that I made in my career were based on the following: 

Getting someone else’s audience 

Co-developing a product/service together and creating new revenue as a joint venture 

Exchange knowledge and information to create new products 

But always based on reciprocity. Nobody likes a free rider. Embrace your strengths and you know what - just ask the potential partner: 

What can we do for you? 

What would make this partnership a success for you? 

Once you establish a common ground and commitments in terms of resources, everything gets much easier.

The key to effective partner activation

Here is the glue of any GREAT partnerships that I have ever established or initiated: TRUST. 

How do you react when things go south? 

Do you keep your promises?

Are you accountable? 

Are you transparent? 

Will you disappear? 

As simple as this sounds, think about the best friendships and relationships you have. The core principles are the same, aren’t they? 

First, we have a sniff test. Do we like each other? Do we share the vision? Can we work together? 

The second is shoulder-to-shoulder. If we commit to doing something, will it be done? Will you follow up, be proactive in communication, and find solutions instead of problems?

Last but not least, are we in it for the long term? Sure, we can do business together once, and I will pay you a “10-30% provision” of the new business that you help to win. But are we in it to win it together in the long term? 

Like friendships and marriage, most candidates will not pass every stage.
In practice, up to 10% of partners account for more than 90% of revenue created through this channel. Less can be more, but if you can do a “long tail” and carry out a partnership program as part of your GTM strategy—go, go, go. 

Whatever revenue you create through partnerships is likely to be more than if you did not have this channel active. So why not? 

Everyone will teach and preach how to do content, paid, and sales, but a handful of experts have something applicable to say about partnerships—not “paper partnerships” but those that actually create value and revenue. 

Based on GTM Partners' research, 66% of GTM companies utilize partnerships as one of their go-to-market motions. If you do not, what on Earth are you waiting for? Run a pilot with the most suitable candidate. There is nothing or little to lose. 

8 types of partnerships 

Not everything evolves around money. Ideally, it leads to money, a great reputation, and higher-leverage opportunities in the long term. Partnerships bring so much more value to the table than pure transactions. 

Like friends, partners come in many different shapes and sizes. The key is to achieve a consensus on what is in it for both parties and be serious about pursuing this mission. Quality triumphs over quantity any time when it comes to partnerships. 

The easiest way is to start with promo partnerships - “pay as you go” - however, this is not always the case. You can co-create with a client or a partner even before you go to market. Here are some ideas:

What will you choose? 

Engagement is the key - do not be lazy like I was 🙈

When I talk about developing partnerships, I have a confession to make. 

I know that I am not perfect, and I try my very best, but my emails, WhatsApp, LinkedIn messages, and Messenger are a complete mess. 

Sometimes I miss an email for 3 weeks to 3 months. 

This is terrible for possibility for close and I needed to get my s*** in order.

This is why I chose folk CRM to systematize my business development and partnership efforts because the starring system ⭐ on Gmail was no longer a viable option. 

Here, you can see how I manage my partnerships in folk:

In practice, there are no shortcuts when it comes to partnerships.

My best-intended advice is to run your go-to-market partnerships as a CRM. You are accountable for: 

Monitoring potential partners

Booking a meeting with them 

(IMPORTANT) Follow up after the meetings 

Send reminders 

Agree on a pilot and how to measure the success 

Make a pilot collaboration a success 

Present results and pitch new ideas. 

Choose your Moby Dick.

Do your own research. 

Find your way in. 

Never let go. 

It is not over till you say so. 

Are you with me? 

Stronger together! 

Your turn: 

Listen to the GTM Strategist Podcast episode with Eleanor Thompson (Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube)

Take folk CRM for a spin and sync the data to manage the partnerships, investment and sales opportunities with ease and responsibility: www.folk.app  

Create a list of your ideal partners and create personal pitches for them 

Set your partnership goal for Q2: how many partners do you want to acquire and what does success look like to you? How will you measure it? 

My turn: 

Partnerships are wonderfully explained in my Go-To-Market Strategist book. I have interviewed Jaïr Halevi from Miro for the book, we have worked together to establish partnerships with VCs and startups in Europe for his Startup program. 

Support my CRM efforts by taking folk CRM for a spin. Thanks for supporting my content, folk app!  www.folk.app ❤️

If you have not read my book GTM Strategist yet, March is a wonderful time to do it. 

Ladies, I wish you all a happy International Women's Day tomorrow 💐

What if the product is not a problem?

Dear GTM Strategist!

This week we are playing with the hypothesis that the product might be safe and sound. 

The only thing that prevents you from the glory and success you deserve might be your ability to pitch it to customers. 

I get it. You know so much about your problem and product space. 

You would like to tell it all. 

The problem is - it can be overwhelming for the customer because they have limited attention spans, and mostly - they care about themselves, not about you. 

If you get feedback like:

little to no interest, 

suboptimal conversion rates,

lots of price negotiations, and

“I could get it cheaper elsewhere”…

…then you might have a positioning problem. 

But do not worry too much. It is solvable. 

In this Substack, we will go through 3 steps by positioning expert Andrej Peršolja, which will help you win the minds and hearts of customers. 

Let’s do this. 

#1 SCORE THE COMPETITION

You never compete in isolation. If there is a lot of hype and brand awareness for your competitor, you should really choose your battles and learn where you can stand out. 

This is how you do it: 

Map your alternative solutions - what are other ways that customers solve the problem? 

Figure how your clients evaluate software - what matters to them? Not to you - to them. 

Write your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)'s personal ambitions - what are they personally hoping to achieve and get from this? Is it to make them look cool, make your money? 

Evaluate your competition based on these criteria for every need with 0-5 and calculate averages. 

Now make sense out of it: 

Every need that has 4-5 in it is taken. Red ocean alert, go away. The need is satisfied; you can’t compete there. 

Every need that has 0-1 might be a perfect need that is unsatisfied or isn’t a need at all. Perhaps the clients simply don’t care about it. Remember, where there is no competition, there is usually no market. 

Every need with a score of 2-3 is a good place to compete. You have a fighting chance there. 

This is how you can learn where the client’s needs are met. It is your perfect place to compete. 

#2 FINDING WHAT MAKES YOU DIFFERENT

“Why should they buy from us?”

You can compete on price or differentiation. 

The price isn’t where you want to compete. 

It is the race to the bottom.

Here is how to differentiate: 

Map all your assets (features, team abilities, skills, knowledge,...)

Mark every asset as a qualifier or a differentiator:

A qualifier is something that allows you to play the game. It’s the market standard. It’s what’s expected of you. It is your ticket to the game. You have to have this. 

A differentiator is something that’s unique to you. What do you have that no one else has? You can build your whole business around a good differentiator. 

#3 HOW TO FIND YOUR VALUE PROP

Now let’s make our ideal customer care for the product. This is how to create an irresistible value proposition for your ICP: 

Choose a differentiated asset from framework #2.

Create a value proposition for that asset.

Get at least 5 people who don’t know what to do and give them the value proposition.

Analyze how they react. Are they intrigued? Do they want to know more? Does the value proposition lead to them discussing how your solution would work for your business?

If so, the value proposition works.

If not, iterate. Change the messaging or pick another differentiated asset.

Andrej gave us a wonderful way to test our value proposition in our podcast - you write LinkedIn invites. If more than 40% of the invites are accepted, you are onto something good. 

Then you develop a conversation with these people. If 10% of them decide to hop on a call with you, congrats again - you have a solid basis for your offer. 

Learn more about this in the latest episode of the GTM Strategist Podcast:

Your Turn: 

DIY: You can download Andrej’s positioning framework here https://miro.com/miroverse/startup-positioning-framework-template/ 

Done with you: Want feedback on your positioning? Apply for a positioning roast. Andrej and I will choose 3 cases and give you feedback on February 29th, 2024, at 18:00 CET at our office hours 👇 

Apply Here

My turn: 

“Positioning, Messaging and Branding” is one of the most celebrated chapters in my GTM Strategist book. If you haven’t read it yet, go, go, go - it is amazing! 

If you have some feedback on this Substack or would simply like to chat, here is the link to my free office hours, when I am “all yours” for an hour, and I can really help you with your business. 

Sounds good?
Let’s go! 

Remember, positioning always happens. No matter if we believe in it or not, clients and prospects will always form opinions about us and our product. 

The only question is, do you want to be in control of it? 

I think you should be. 

Every growth is founder-led first

Dear GTM Strategist, 

Are you sales-shy? 

Don’t be - because it is damaging your business. 

One of the founders that I mentor - Nikola, a technical cofounder in the AI space - said it best: 

“Yes, I do not like sales, but I learned how to do it anyway because I want to hire more developers, finish the product faster, and seize the window of opportunity in our market.” 

This is the best mindset ever. 

And guess what Nikola did next - he did not hire a “networking coach” or attend cringe classes on how to build a sales system. 

No, Nikola opened his phonebook, saw that he has a colleague working in a local bank, and sold their first pilot, which is expected to create $1.5 million in savings this year. What a stud 🙌 

The secret ingredient of every early-stage sales success: problem-solving. 

All that you need to do in early-stage sales is: 

Understand who is making a decision, and what matters to them (criteria).

Convince them how you can solve the problem cheaper, better, faster.

Get your foot in the door with a pilot deal.

It gets more complicated, but let’s first rewire our brains a little to warm up for our sales discussion.

Rewire your mindset: Sales = Problem Solving

Let’s face it, 95% of founders and product people hate sales. 

Here is what we do not hate: solving problems.

This is why we are in business in the first place. 

How do you solve a problem?

Learn more by talking to people who have the problem you’re solving (discovery interviews).

Come up with an effective MVP solution for their problem (solution and offer design).

Circle back to people who have the problem and ask them to take your solution for a spin (testing).

If that was a success, your job becomes to generate evidence that you can do this repeatedly - find more people with the same problem. 

Then it becomes your holy duty to do sales because if you do not, your ICP will continue to suffer from this problem. 

Become the best salesperson in your company (because there is no other choice) 

Let’s face it, there is no one else but you to do it. 

I crafted this process diagram of founder-led sales based on my business's best practices.

It goes like this:

Learn more about the problems that your ICP has - interviews, phone calls, Q&As, sales calls, mingling at events, and scanning what they are complaining about on social media and online communities. 

Develop an offer for a solution that your ICP has and present it in a PDF, at a meeting, or using Miro board + Loom.

Craft the target list of 10 people who can benefit from the offer and have a willingness to pay for it. 

Walk them through and listen to their feedback carefully. Correct an offer if you have to and circle back to them. In my experience, you can easily sell to at least 3-5 of those people.

Do well for them and get their testimonials/recommendations to build social proof and trust for your solution.

Now magnitude up! Find more people like them and do not forget to ask your early customers for referrals. Who else would benefit from the solution? 

This is not difficult to do. 

You just have to do it. 

This week I interviewed the outreach legend Guillaume Moubeche. His most famous product is lemlist. Guillaume founded Lempire and went from 0 to a $150M valuation in 3.5 years bootstrapped. He provided many useful examples of how to convincingly get new leads to your ecosystem by doing outreach, building relationships, giving back to communities, and building in public. 

This is how you build trust and access to the target audience.

Watch the video on YouTube:

If you prefer to listen on the go, find the GTM Strategist Podcast in your favorite podcast app.

I hope you liked this post!

I was very inspired to write it because everyone else is talking about ABSs, ABMs, SQLs, PQLs and whatnots - but I genuinely believe that sales is all about building trust, goodwill and relationships in the early stages.

Want to chat with me?

I was so inspired by your active participation at our Userpilot GTM Webinar - over 500 people registered, 176 attended, and the engagement was through the roof. Many thought that Q&A was even better than the presentation. 

This is why I will try to continue this content stream. To help you meet each other and unlock new business opportunities, I decided to have open Office Hours every Thursday at 18:00 CET for a month as an experiment.

You are welcome to register for a Zoom meeting here & ask whatever questions you would like, for example: 

How to do growth, marketing in sales?

How to run a consulting business?

How to grow products?

How to build your team? 

Whatever you need - I am here for you. 

Do things that do not scale before you can scale. 

Hope to see you all at our meetups every Thursday at 18:00! ✌️

Maja

Are you leaving too much money on the table?

Dear GTM Strategist! 

I love to think of pricing as the only element of the marketing mix that makes money, and others spend it. 

As a savvy business person, I am sure that you are as excited as I am about this post, which will be dedicated to pricing. 

This is how I see pricing - it is a unit of value exchange that the product creates for the target audience. It is our job to capture some of this value to build sustainable business models. 

Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? 

Then why, oh why, do many go-to-market companies treat pricing as a “set it and forget it” task and hesitate to change prices even though their products (=value added) got much better and everything else got more expensive? 

The answer is loss aversion. 

We are afraid that we are going to be rejected. 

Or lost something that we consider to be already ours. 

Here is the worst example of it: 

I mentored an analytics company - Supreme Product. One of their first customers was a Fortune 500 company from the US - well, one of the top 5 Fortune 500 companies. 

Yet, this team set up the most devastating pricing for them - a fixed fee of $10,000 a year. 

In theory, this could be a wonderful use case and a foot in the door to many other lucrative deals. 

But what it did for the team was to suffocate their product roadmap. They got so dependent on the client that they nearly turned to their internal agency. There was no way out. The deal was signed for a year and was a dumped game. 

Everyone has a pricing horror story or two to share. In my 20s, I accidentally sold a full-stack marketing service to a US client. I thought $1500 was a lot of money - it really was not, after they put me “in charge of their sales” and called me at freaking 2 am in the morning on WhatsApp because they did not like the creatives in the newsletter.  

You win some, you lose some.
As long as you are learning, you are winning. 

So let’s hop in the nitty gritty of pricing and get better at it together. 

Lesson 1: The Holy Grail of pricing is the Value Metric

A value metric is a quantifiable measurement used to determine and measure the value exchanged. It is a specific unit of measurement that aligns with the customer's perceived value and reflects the benefit or usage of the product. It makes it fair for a user.  

Best-in-class companies use value metrics in their pricing. I did a study of the best examples and even verified some cases with product managers and growth leaders there.

Here are some great examples of value metrics:

Lesson 2: You can test pricing before your product is even built 

To test the willingness to pay, you do not always have to run some fancy surveys. You can just go out and talk to your prospects, or better yet - presell to them. Most of the time, in GTM, if you are not a super-established company, the first attempt at price is a guessing game backed by competition, market, and customer research. You work from there onward. Instead of overthink pricing go out and do the job. 

In this week’s extremely valuable GTM Strategist Podcast with B2B SaaS Pricing Expert and best-selling author Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt, we touched upon all these methods and much more. He also shared his frameworks on how to inform clients that the product will become more expensive. A great episode. Take it for a spin.

Listen to the insightful episode here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Lesson 3: Pricing is “not set it and forget" it” job 

You set up a price, and the offer landed - now what? 

Time to get into the wild waters of price experimentation, buddy.

Paddle’s research says: 

If you increase monetization by 1%, you can see a 12 to 16% increase in revenue.

This is 4x the impact that you would have if you would optimize acquisition by 1%.

Your turn: 

Listen to this incredible episode with Ulrik to fuel your price-setting engine 

What could your value metric be? Comment or reply to this email to discuss it. 

We are working on a reading list for pricing with Denny Klisch. Here is our v0.1. You are welcome to pitch in with suggestions. ✌️

My turn: 

I want to hear back from you and your challenges with GTM strategies. I would be most grateful if you take this short survey which will take only 2 minutes of your time. Free gift at the end of the survey! 🎁

Take the Survey

I have a b-day this Sunday. My goal is to help 10,000 businesses with our take on science this year. Who could you recommend the GTM Strategist book to? Or just hit me a review. 

Last week, I had a great webinar with Userpilot. There were so many questions that we couldn’t cover everything, so I promised them to return for another session. So later on today, I have a Q&A with Userpilot. Join here!

And that is all for this week.
Thanks for reading. 

Next week, we will dive into an exciting world of sales, getting larger clients and account-based marketing (ABM). 

Buckle up and let’s go to market! 

Product-Market Fit is a Moving Target 🎯

Dear GTM Strategist!

This edition of our Substack is dedicated to the holy grail of go-to-market: finding Product-Market Fit (PMF) and successfully crossing the chasm, which over 95% of innovation will not. 

It is best to learn from those 5% who have gone through the journey. 

Let’s hear it from Enzo Avigo, CEO at June.so 

In the latest episode of the GTM Strategist Podcast, I interviewed Enzo Avigo. 🎙

Enzo previously worked as a Product Leader at Intercom, N26, and Zalando SE. 

He co-founded a next-generation analytics platform for B2B SaaS businesses June.so, which became a smashing success on Product Hunt and they were also admitted to Y-Combinator. 

Enzo has many interesting PMF lessons to share with you: 

In saturated categories such as analytics, martech, logistics and CRMs with long and complicated onboarding cycles, trust takes long to build. This is why it is essential to launch with a product that really delivers on customers’ expectations. To learn that, we need to do a lot of customer discovery and have analytics properly in place early on. 

He believes that proof of monetization is an integral part of PMF for most companies. Their most active early adopters were indie developers, while users who displayed a high willingness to pay were actually B2B SaaS businesses. This insight was very important for their positioning and growth. 

They won the first 100 users through recommendations within their circles, network such as Y Combinator, and with outbound. Only later on did they start using content marketing - social media and experiential platforms such as Product Hunt. To this day, June.so gets 20% of customers from LinkedIn. 

And much more. 

I am so pumped to share an interview with Enzo with you. 

Enzo is also an early-stage startup and product management opinion leader on LinkedIn - check him out. He shared his content creation and building in public process with you. 

PMF is not a linear process. It is a cycle. 

Based on Lenny Rachitsky's research, the median time from an idea to feeling product-market fit is roughly 2 years. 

There are signals you can observe beforehand, but it takes time and iterations. 

There are very few shortcuts. 

Often, early-stage companies here in Europe build their products almost in isolation and then hire marketing agencies to secure early traction. 

“When it does not work out, it is easy to pull out the “there was no product-market fit” card. We first need to create awareness.” 

Bullshit. If there is a burning pain and need for the product - and there almost always is a segment that has it - you just need to find it, nail the positioning/messaging, the business model/offer, and the channel to reach them. Oh, and make sure that your product delivers a great added value to it. 

That takes iterations, and it is mostly you who have the best chance to ensure that all the learnings are properly captured and implemented in the next iterations. 

How about when things are broken, and you feel like the cycle is cursed? 

Start fixing it. 

My optimistic belief is that any product deserves a fair fighting chance and that there is an audience for anything. Our job is to find it. 

(Also, for most teams, it is much more expensive to change products than messaging.)

When you are examining the lack of PMF, here is a little cheat sheet that can help you choose your battles and prioritize experiments. Rule of thumb: 

If you cannot even get people to the website or to the calls, you have a targeting/channel/messaging problem. Good news - these problems can be fixed.

If you can get the people on the calls or website, you might have the wrong offer, or you have attracted the wrong people. 

Not before you actually have an activation/retention change in the product can you dive in there. You need to give a product a fighting chance before whining “no product-market fit.”

En garde! 

PMF is a mysterious animal with many moving particles. Almost no one understands it right from the start. 

Every discovery that you make on the journey to securing product-market fit takes you a little closer to the holy grail. Celebrate those milestones and be structured and strategic in your learnings. 

I very much believe in product vision and there are some things that we just will not do because it is not in our product DNA. Balancing the product vision and market feedback becomes an art of the founder that sets fundamentals for exceptional business and a strong brand. 

Enzo said: 

“One of our competitors gets a significant amount of leads with a 140+ page e-book on how to understand metrics. It is an extremely successful marketing tool for them, but we will never do it, because it is anti-June.so philosophy that analytics should be easy. We are building plug-and-play “Google Analytics” for products. Time to value has to be low, and 140+ page e-book is not on-vision for us.” 

Voila, another indication that the best GTM Strategy is proprietary. 

Back to work: 

Your turn: 

Use at least one measurement of Product-Market Fit and monitor it regularly

Enjoy the GTM Strategist Podcast with Enzo Avigo (links below) - it is one of my favorite episodes ever. He shares examples, is completely down to earth and gives smart tips on how to kick off your journey to PMF. Trust me, it is worth your time. 

My turn: 

This week we are closing the applications for the GTM Strategist Bootcamp B2B edition with Ognjen Bošković. We are very happy with the group and we will start on February 7th. If you would like to join, we can still squeeze a spot or two: https://encouraging-booth-c0f.notion.site/1d0d2b52f91447cba4019e11a30af545 

If you have not read or rated the GTM Strategist yet, that would be the best gift to me in February, which is my b-day month.

 

Let’s go to market!

Maja Voje

There is a secret behind all 400+ launches that I was a part of

The most dangerous animal in the go-to-market valley is a crocodile that eats 95% of innovations that fail to create a critical mass of adoption to cross the chasm. 🐊

The best way to escape the crocodile is to carefully choose your terrain to win (market and early adopters) and do what is mission-critical to create value for them (product), inform them that you get the job done for them (positioning, growth) and capture some of the value added (pricing) to secure your lifeline. 

Let’s face it: If you are a small team, it is unlikely that you can have a shoulder-to-shoulder encounter with industry giants who have more resources - budget and human resources. 

You need to carefully choose your terrain and attack swiftly and fiercely where you have a fair fighting chance. 

Usually, that is in an underserved niche. 

You win it by using a radical focus on serving your selected audience better than anyone else can. 

Do less, but do it very intentionally and obsessively. 

That applies to channels, audiences, offers, and selected growth levers. To implement this, you can use no-code tools like Userpilot.

Let’s start February with a case study of my recent mega-successful book launch. In its first week, it became a best-seller. 

My friends from Userpilot invited me to share most of these lessons at a joint webinar Go-to-Market Strategy Guide for B2B SaaS Companies

on February 1st at 17:00 CET. 

I will show you examples and specific data on how: 

To find an optimal target audience using experimentation and do better positioning to improve conversion to trials and waitlist 

How to work “within the price limits” in saturated categories while not leaving too much money on the table

Why vanity badges such as best-sellers are critical for creating leverage on platforms 

How to create an organic demand generation program that resulted in 1,000,000 organic impressions on LinkedIn and accounted for 70% of our sales

How do you ease your way to the market using growth loops and leverage?

Sounds good? 

Join us - click here.  

There will be plenty of time for your questions as well. 

🤔 “But Maja, I do not want to launch a book. 

We are a tech company.”

Darling, you have an even better fighting chance if I can do it with “a piece of paper” on a massively competitive marketplace such as Amazon. Since then, I have tested the same principles on 50+ SaaS companies, and they work like a charm.

Are you with me? 

Sign up today. 

It is free. 

Sign up here

You are not doing business in isolation

Dear GTM Strategist!

I was down because I lost a prospect. 

It was an interesting technology company that works in an integration space and makes 15 million a year. They wanted me to do a 2-day GTM workshop for them during the visit of their international colleagues from the Nordics. 

I put together a really nice personalized offer for them with selected case studies for their industry and tactical knowledge of ABM and LinkedIn, which would totally improve their sales process. 

Immediately got a reply from my champion in the company that she really liked the offer. 

But her boss said no. 

I felt like a piece of shit - but I gathered the courage and common sense to ask the champion if she could elaborate on why they did not take a deal. 

Dark thoughts came to my mind - was there someone who offered it cheaper, did they just fish for information and I wasted 3 hours for research and preparing this offer? 

The champion kindly provided the answer (so cool of her) 

“The offer was good, but our manager decided that she will host the workshop herself and the next day we will have fun team-building activities”. 

I had no idea how I felt about this answer. 

Am I competing against “fun team-building activities” now? Should I take a standup comedy class? 

Until I remembered a lesson from the GTM Strategist book:

“Sometimes you are competing against “doing nothing” or “that they will do it themselves”. 

Interesting. 

There was not an “evil competitor who won the business”; I lost it to “DIY + fun team-building activities.” They were my competitors for the budget. 

So this week, I want to take you on a trip of researching the competition arena and generating intelligence for smarter go-to-market moves in the future.

Sounds good? 

Let’s go! 

#1 Rule - Do not compare yourself with companies that are 10,000x larger than yourself

Whenever my designer/developer brings up Apple in our discussions, I roll my eyes a little:

“We are not Apple which made $383.29 billion last year.

Can you find us more relatable examples for our moodboards, please?”

Inspiration comes from all sorts of places - from music, giant companies, companies outside your industry - but these are aspirational competitors. They are great for vision boards, but terrible for business benchmark sheets.

You should come up with a list of direct and indirect competitors where: 

You actually have generated evidence that your buyers are comparing them against you - they are targeting the same segment.

They are up to 10-50x larger than you, which is a way more realistic comparison in terms of resources, focus, and positioning on the market (the legacy of brands).

It is really difficult to monitor 50 companies and get good insights from them all. For benchmarking, first focus on 3-10 direct competitors. Later on, you can expand your research. 

How to compare the competitors? 

Choose criteria that are actually relevant to your buyers. Understand how your customers are making the purchasing decisions and compare the players in the market. If you can, get their comparison sheets or at least do interviews with your clients, churned prospects, or industry experts such as consultants to understand that. 

Here is an example of the competitor comparison sheet: 

#2 Rule - Have a system in place to monitor your competition. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise 

In analysis, I usually follow the following aspects of my competitors: 

Ads 

Social media posts

Marketing and PR content 

Landing pages - changes in offers and CTAs 

Pricing pages - and changes there 

Sometimes I also analyze onboarding and conversion flows

I used to have calendar reminders every 3 months to go and do a bunch of screenshots for my swipe file. It took me an hour to organize this and get it to my experimentation backlog.

Until I discovered the Competitors App.

Here is how this analysis is done and delivered daily in my inbox so I always get new ideas and stay on top of what is going on in the industry:

#3 Rule - Use this knowledge to differentiate yourself

Forget desktop research - competitors that are running Google Ads or are indexed higher are rarely the ones that you end up competing with in your Ideal Customer Profiles’ (ICP) decision-making process. 

It is essential to understand what your buyer considers a competitive alternative. 

Not only do you have to do better than selected competitors, but you also have to develop unique value propositions against “doing nothing” and “let’s do it ourselves (DIY).”

GTM Strategist book collaborator and positioning expert Andrej Peršolja suggests this type of analysis:

Your turn: Get this knowledge to practice: 

Beginner: Do the competition analysis - if you are just starting with market research, use the general framework, but if you already know your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) options, use the competitive alternatives framework.

Advanced: Next time you lose a deal - ask why. If against a competitor, double down on understanding what a prospect found better in their offer and work on this intelligence. 

GTM Ninja: Ask your customers or colleagues in the industry to send you some comparison tables or offers from competitors. Study them and find out how you can do better. 

My turn: Choose at least 1 of 3 

Legend: Take Competitors App (https://competitors.app/) for a spin and run your analysis of marketing, pricing and SEO or your competitors like I’ve shown you in the video. They supported this Substack, so give them some love in return. They are a really cool startup team from the UK - let’s support them. ❤️ 

Scholar: Send me more examples of how you run the competitive analysis or other interesting frameworks that you use. I’d gladly feature you in the Substack.

Supporter: Recommend the GTM Strategist book to a colleague who will benefit from it, and make sure to review the book on Amazon or Goodreads after you have read it. 

Last chance to join GTM Strategist Bootcamp

90% of startups fail within a decade. It's a tough game, and in 2024 and beyond, it's only gonna get tougher because:

☑ There's never been more competition than today (e.g. in Martech, we went from 150 vendors in 2010 to 11,000 in 2023)

☑ The act of building is not a moat and it's never been easier to copy products (launching a startup costs $3,000 on average)

☑ Customer acquisition costs have more than doubled in the last 3 years (128% increase in SaaS)

☑ VC funding has dried out and we're moving to sustainable growth (thank god)

Go-to-market has always been a key element of success of a business (duh).

As Peter Drucker puts it:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”

Well, guess what - marketing (go-to-market) has become even more important today. It's really your last true competitive advantage.

If all this rings the alarm in your mind... You may be interested in the GTM Strategist B2B Bootcamp that Ognjen Bošković and I will be hosting in February.

It's based on my 6x Amazon bestseller, GTM Strategist, and consists of 4 key areas we'll go through to ensure 2024 is your best year ever (against all odds!):

✅ Week 1: Customer research & finding your ideal target segment

✅ Week 2: Positioning & messaging

✅ Week 3: Pricing, packaging & offering

✅ Week 4: Building a sustainable growth engine

Find more details here

We're putting our combined 15 years of experience (working with Google, Heineken, CXL, Convert, Miro, Amplitude and a dozen more brands) at your disposal for a full month (and some more after), and we'll make sure you get the best possible start of 2024 and end the year with unprecedented growth.

You can book a quick call with me if you’re on the edge and want to know more about the program. Or if you’re ready, just send an email to grow@majavoje.com and I’ll follow up with the next steps.

Seats are limited and 75% of them are already sold out, so there's legit scarcity/urgency. 

Jump in and happy 2024!

Build it and they will come ... or?

Dear GTM Strategist! 

ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. (Reuters)

Such stories are outliers.

Most founders and growth strategists struggle with getting the first 100 beta users and 10 paying clients. 

“Build it and they will come” simply does not work. 

Entry barriers are lower than ever (no-code tools and AI), competition is fierce and the chances of becoming the next ChatGPT are slim as an amoeba. ​​🧫 

We have to actively promote our products and bring users to them to get data, insights and initial traction to set ourselves for success. It is unlikely that they will magically go viral. 

Whenever I see GTM Strategy written like this outside the e-commerce space, I get goosebumps: 

“We will work with 10 influencers and invest $2000 in Meta Ads to the first 200 buyers.” 

How to do better? 

🎯 Focus on what is mission critical: Do things that do not scale before you can scale them

I made a mistake once. 

(OK, more than once 😅)

But this one turned out to be a valuable lesson. 

Back in my 20ies, I was working in a marketing agency. A startup working on fitness tracking asked us to help them get their first 500 users and we did what we always did - ads! 

What a rookie mistake!! 🙈

When we started advertising, “Mainstream users” started pouring into the application, only to see that 7% of them finished the onboarding and merely 2.6% actually took an app for a spin - did a workout. 

What was so terribly wrong there? 

With broad social ads, we attracted users who wanted to lose weight but did not even exercise. We burned precious marketing budgets to achieve our KPI:

“Get us 500 registrations and keep your CPI - cost per install lower than $2.” 

This KPI led to suboptimal decisions.

Unfortunately, they wasted some of their precious resources, time and budgets, but this is the lesson that we learned: 

It was not about the lack of Product-Market-Fit (PMF) - the issue was that we wanted to skip the rule of the game - to first learn from Early Customers.

Your early customers will: 

Have high pain points - almost “shut and take my money” scenario;

Use MVPs, understand that they are not perfect yet and generously contribute feedback for you to learn from;

Happily refer the product to others, provide testimonials and help it grow. 

Bottom line: Your marketing for getting the first 100 users will look a lot different from what you will do when you are thinking about how to get the next 10,000 users. 

But where to find your first users?

Rule #1: Go where the audience is

Do not think of channels just yet. 

Instead of juggling through YouTube Shorts, Meta ads, LinkedIn organic and Discords, let’s first agree that there are 7 GTM motions. 

Not a 100% rule - but close enough: Early adopters are usually already discussing their burning pain points on social media or actively reading about it. This is a natural start not only for your research but also for your early marketing activities. 

GTM teams that nail their communities get hundreds of free registrations as a reward for their valuable contribution to the community. Emphasis: valuable contribution. It is a heavy investment, but it brings long-term dividends. 

The other really important GTM motion in the early stages is valuable content generation, aka Inbound. That takes even more work, but it is fantastic for positioning.  

Can you do it with other motions?

Sure, as long as you have validated that they are good candidates for you using these methods.

Now, let’s bring it all together. 

Rule #2: Make it Simple - 1 offer, 1 channel, 1 audience 

It is very simple, yet difficult to do. FOCUS. 

In GTM, we are operating on very scarce resources, and every waste is costly to us. 

Yet, we have to find a channel, which will predictably work for us. 

The biggest mistake we can make is to spread ourselves too thin. 

There is always some “latest and greatest channel” - thanks, Hubspot, for feeding my FOMO for more than a decade! ✌️

Take a deep breath, and don’t do it (just yet). 

You and I have to stay focused on what is mission-critical based on our knowledge of the audience. 

When I launched my best-selling book, the GTM Strategist, we had: 

1 Audience: Founders, Product and Growth Leaders responsible for GTM 

1 Offer: Online book for $10 & physical copy for $27 (get your copy here) 

1 Channel: LinkedIn organic, where we were creating demand for the launch 

This is it.

No YouTube shorts, no cold outreach, no paid ads. 

The launch was 100% organic. 

The simplicity of this plan allowed us to go all-in, reach over 1,000,000 people during the launch, and make it a smashing success. 

Now, we reinvest earnings into paid channels and building additional assets. 

There is time and space for everything.  

Your turn (answer in comments if you can): 

Listen to the latest GTM Strategist podcast episode with Alexander Estner (Apple Podcasts | Spotify). We discussed mental barriers, misconceptions, and tackled other GTM myths, such as “We do not have any competition” and “Free trial will fix everything”.

What is mission-critical for you now? If you are thinking of getting 500 beta testers, your plan will be different from raising sales to the enterprise for 10% in Q1 - stop worrying about “how to do marketing perfect” - first do what is mission critical. 

Which channels are right for your business? Have you asked your customers yet? Did you research what works well for your competitors? 

My turn: 

Do you have a cool story to share or a question? Ping me on LinkedIn.

Up for 350 more pages of Go-to-Market best practices? The GTM Strategist book has been out for two months now. Get your copy on Amazon or write to us at order@gtmstrategist.com to get your copy.

“Times have changed, and so have the strategies required to become successful with new products and services. I feel like Maja has been on the cutting edge of such changes and is well-positioned to share everything that only someone who has rolled up her sleeves would be able to do. This book is an MBA in itself that can save you uncountable hours and money on your next GTM phase.”

Pedro Clivati, Head of Growth at Growth at GrowthHackers, verified Amazon review.

I hope you enjoyed this one!

Hit heart on Substack ❤️ and send it to someone who could benefit from it.

Let’s go to market 🚀!

Maja

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