GTM Partners and the GTM OS

📝 Episode Summary

In this first episode of The Antidote, Alex is joined by Sangram Vajre, CEO of GTM Partners, bestselling author, father and founder. Sangram and the GTM Partners team’s mission is simple: to take the complexity out of go-to-market and over the years they have launched books and developed frameworks to help business leaders navigate complex market dynamics and efficiently make decisions. As someone who had to give up a lot to achieve a lot, Sangram reflects on this journey of success, the importance of doing meaningful work and finding your way back to yourself. 

🤓 What will I learn

✅ How the GTM OS concept and the MOVE framework can help leaders simplify the GTM process and make better decisions
✅ Why having an holistic and collaborative approach to GTM problems and solutions is key to achieve success
✅ What tactics to build your GTM playbook off of, to better connect with customers and buyers in a noisy digital landscape 
✅ How setting up propers expectations and boundaries is crucial to mainainting a healthy work-life balance

👀 Key Insights

1. New challenges, old tactics

The current go-to-market landscape is extremely dynamic and always changing. However, leaders tend to follow outdated or ineffective strategies blindly and strike to traditional metrics and benchmarks that may no longer be relevant. This can hinder adaptability and innovation, leading to suboptimal outcomes. 

“I think we are still paralyzed by what worked before and we're going to try to do the same thing, but everything about yesterday has changed. The metrics no longer remain are the same. The whole velocity of sales and how much pipeline you need has changed. So all those benchmarks that we build businesses around are no longer the same and people are still referring to those business to create their plans, create their go-to-market strategy.”

Sangram suggests business leaders reevaluate their strategies, embrace change, and adopt a more dynamic, human and personalized approach to go-to-market initiatives. By addressing these challenges and embracing simplicity, businesses can navigate complexities more effectively, drive sustainable growth and build more powerful connections with buyers and customers.

The go-to-market process needs to be simpler, specially in a time when the market shifts extremely fast. Leaders need to be able to make decisions even without having all the answers. Sangram shares how the GTM OS concept and the MOVE framework encourages organizations to adopt a unified approach to go-to-market initiatives, aligning marketing, sales, and customer success efforts towards common goals and objectives to drive sustainable growth and innovation.

“We found out that everybody was talking about the same four things. They were talking about how do you market, how are they gonna operate effectively to grow the business, how do we get all these different departments and functions to start working at a higher speed and pace. And then expansion, where do we expand? It really helped create this framework called MOVE, which is market operations, velocity and expansion as the thesis for every single company, no matter what the size is to grow.”

3. The common pitfalls of sales and marketing alignment

In order to achieve GTM success, teams everywhere to have an holistic and collaborative approach to problems and solutions. Pipeline and revenue targets are not an isolated marketing, sales or customer success problem. Likewise, to solve those problems effectively, leaders can’t rely soleyl on marketing, sales or customer success teams. 

“We try to solve problems as a siloed department. (...) We still are having sales and marketing alignment conversations. If we're still having that, that means the problem cannot be solved as functional. We have to solve as one team.”

Sangram highlights the most common challenges of sales and marketing alignment:

• Communication gaps
• Disagreements over lead quality and definitions
• Misalignment in key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics 
• Inefficient or disjointed use of technology tools and systems
• Lead handoff process and discrepancies in lead scoring, timing of follow-ups, or expectations regarding lead ownership

All these challenges can lead to misalignment in goals, priorities, and messaging, wasted time and resources and can hinder collaboration. Addressing them requires a proactive approach focused on fostering collaboration, alignment, and accountability between sales and marketing teams. This may involve implementing shared processes, establishing regular communication channels, fostering a culture of mutual respect and trust, and leveraging technology to streamline operations and enhance visibility into the customer journey.

▶️ Watch full episode on Youtube:

📖 Transcript

Alex Olley (00:01.44)

Hey Sangram, how are you man?

Sangram Vajre (00:03.35)

I'm excited, I'm ready to go!

Alex Olley (00:05.65)

Good stuff. Well, thank you for joining me on the antidote. I've been looking forward to this one for a very, very long time. Firstly, tell me man, what's been keeping you busy?

Sangram Vajre (00:14.78)

Well, my son is 13, he's a teenager and he plays tennis a lot. So we have been doing tournaments all over the place. So the weekends are more busy than weekdays, believe it or not.

Alex Olley (00:25.78)

Mmm, okay, so son tennis probably like carting him around being his personal uber driver

Sangram Vajre (00:32.50)

All day long and The funny thing is I used to be able to beat him in tennis and now I literally have to stand in a corner And tell him like all right, you're gonna hit it to me I can hit anywhere, but you cannot hit you know anywhere else because I cannot get to the ball obviously

Alex Olley (00:47.03)

Oh, it's reached that point. Oh man, that's going to happen to me one day. Well, look man, let's go into it really. Look, I believe that everyone's trying to solve a big challenge. Here we call it the antidote. So what's a big challenge or what's a mission that you're on to solve at the moment?

Sangram Vajre (01:05.41)

As a company, our mission is to make go-to-market simple. Like that's the big mission that we are trying to solve. And what we mean when we say simple, it's not easy. You're not trying to make it like, oh, it's easy. We all recognize it's extremely hard. It's extremely complex if you want to make it, but it still could be simplified. And the simplification is really, you don't have to have all the answers, but you've got to be able to figure out a way to get 80% there.

And if you are 80% there, you understand what that is, then you can make your call, you can make a decision and go. You don't have to be perfect, you don't have a perfect framework, you don't have the perfect answer, but there gotta be a way for companies and people to, especially go to market leaders, to figure out what direction do I go? Like you think about people are just like, oh, the board says go PLG, so everybody's going PLG. All right, and there's no really process and thought or put around it other than that, well, that seems to be the name of the game for the week. Or somebody would say, well, you know what? You need to go and do events. So people are sponsoring all these events and then they really don't have a process and thought put behind it. So we wanna make it simple where people can understand, we wanna help them get 80% of the way through our frameworks and ideas. And hopefully that will make it simple to make the most important decisions for them to drive their business forward.

Alex Olley (02:24.80)

Nice man. Well, look, for everyone listening or watching, I'm, we are at Reach Jessica, one of your customers. And so I've seen these frameworks. I think people need to hear a bit more about these, man, because when you showed me the way that you think about, I think it's the GTM OS, I was like, oh, here we go. We've got some pillars that we can use now. Like, let's talk a little bit more about that. How did you come up with that framework?

Sangram Vajre (02:31.37)

Well, so me, Brian, Brian is my co-founder in the book, Lindsay, and all of us initially were looking at the Sears decisions, demand waterfall. And we're trying to say, well, can we make go to market simple with the demand waterfall? Well, we can't because it only focused on MQLs and only marketing elements of it. And the world has changed quite a bit. Like how do you, how do you find NRR in that demand waterfall. You can't, how do you look about community or PLG that didn't exist when demand waterfall was created. So we're like, all right, we can't do that. But it was great for a period of time, it's no longer useful to do it in the holistic way that we see the market moving. The second one was like Topo Double Funnel where you had the SDR and AE.

Well, everybody's kind of changing the way they go to market now. They're not hiring a bunch of SDRs and AEs to go to hit that number. So we were forced to have this question like, well, what framework is the market is going to use? What are we going to use if you want to build a new business? And there is really no framework that we could see and just apply.

And the book provided this move framework that we can talk about at a later point. But even then the move framework was around market, operations, velocity and expansion. That's what move stands for, market, operations, velocity and expansion. And even that, when we put it out there, a lot of people say, well, this is great. What do we do next? And they wanted a deeper framework. And that's what gave birth to this go-to-market operating system. As the word suggests, it's an operating system. It allows you to think through all the different parts of your go-to-market without being bogged down with a marketing problem or a sales problem or a CS problem. We implore everybody to think about every go-to-market challenges as a go-to-market problem and solve as a team, not as opposed to a solid function. So that's what go-to-market OS really and how it goes more.

Alex Olley (04:40.08)

Oh man, I love it. And I've been trying to get to where we're going with you guys for a long, long time. I historically, I found like a lot of the narrative came from at the board and what they wanted us to do. And that could throw us off a little bit. Where do you see people going wrong? When you talk about silos, why do you see that happening?

Sangram Vajre (04:56.93)

Well, the worst question that ever asked in the go-to-market world is, if I put a dollar in, can you give me $3 back? And what are you going to do for that? Well, the reason it's the worst question is because you're asking it to the wrong audience. When you ask to a marketing person, that person is going to say, oh yeah, I'm going to run more ads, more demand gen, more events, whatever. If you ask to the salesperson, that person is going to say, I'm going to hire more sales, SDR, partner, whatever it might be.

So every single person is looking at it from their lens. And in that case, they might think that that's the best thing to do. And they're not wrong, but they're not looking at it as a business. So the problem is every single one of us have been trained to be Navy SEALs in our own lane of genius. And the problem is if you are looking at your business from a marketing only angle, you're going to look at it from a marketing only angle, and you're going to try to solve it from that perspective. 

And if I've learned anything from my experience at PowerDot and Salesforce and Terminus and not building good market partners, a lot of times a sales problem could be solved by changing the product, making different versions of the product or making it light or change the positioning, maybe going in a new category. So it could be solved for marketing. So sales problem at the surface, it may look like, oh, sales is not closing more deals. So fire them and get new people. That never solves the problem.

So that's the key problem. I feel what, where we get it wrong is we solve problems or try to solve problems as siloed department. And you know, as much as anybody else, Alex, that when was the last time anybody has solved sales and marketing problems? We still are having sales and marketing alignment conversations. If we're still having that, that means the problem cannot be solved as functional. We have to solve as one team. 

Alex Olley (06:49.94)

Yeah, I love that man. Yeah, I mean, I speak to people all the time and they're like, no, sales and marketing alignment, it's not a thing anymore, everyone's nailed that. I think like less than 10% of people have nailed that. So let's talk about Move a little bit. It's fascinating book. Like how did that come about? Writing a book's not easy. Maybe you talk to people about, there might be some people listening going, I wanna write a book one day. You've written multiple books. So how do you go about writing a book and let's talk about Move a little bit.

Sangram Vajre (07:05.53)

Yeah, so quite frankly, the first book, Accountless Marketing, was written in 2015. And I wrote that because at that time, that was a new category that's getting built. And we wanted to make sure that we were able to own the narrative around it. And there wasn't any book written on it, like actual published book on it. So.

As a startup guy, we didn't have millions of dollars in funding in the early days. We didn't know how do we break through the market. So this was a way to base the market. Like nobody had really done that level book for any of their products or services in B2B until that point. And that's maybe something for everybody to think about is like, how do you break through and do us writing a book was a breakthrough. I never intended to be an author that was, I just wanted to build a company.

But writing a book was a way for us to make sure that we're getting keynotes at different places. We own the narrative for it. As soon as you're a published author, especially by Wiley, we obviously got a lot of notoriety and people would come to us and ask like, well, how do you solve this problem? So in the backend, we're building the product. So that's how the first book really came about in 2015. And then three years later, I realized implementing hundreds and thousands of companies to have ABM, we realized that, well,

It has changed. It's no longer about acquisition, which is what I thought it was all about in 2015. It has moved on from pipeline acceleration and expansion. So we wrote the book, ABM is B2B because I don't want to go down the history. You saying that, oh, this guy came up with ABM and then it's gone. Like I wanted to put a period at the end of it. So it literally wrote ABM is B2B period because it's what it was. And we had customer stories in it. 

And then three years later, almost, as I started to look outside and say, well, what is the next thing that's happening? And I started to see this in 2019 pre COVID really, I started to see this shift in the marketplace around how companies are going to market and go to market. The term has always been there, but nobody could define it. Nobody could tell me who's the right owner is.

I started to see some metric shift. I didn't really know what was going on. So I just went on a journey to interview a tremendous amount of people who I believe could help me understand that. So that include Brian Halligan at that time, the CEO of HubSpot, Mark Roberge to Jill Raleigh, all the people that you and I probably know well, Jeffrey Moore, Christopher Lockett. And it really helped me to just understand, be a student of it. And I found some fascinating things. I had a list of 50 questions, Alex, and I was like, I'm gonna ask all these 50. Within the seventh or eighth interview, and we had about 51 people we interviewed for this one. So within the seventh and eighth interview, we found out that everybody was talking about the same four things. It was fascinating to me. They were talking about how do you market, and regardless of the size of the company, they were trying to always figure out what your market segment looked like, and that was a key part of it.

The second part was how are they gonna operate effectively and efficiently to grow the business? No matter if it's a startup or a publicly traded company like HubSpot, they were always thinking about operations in a way, they were always talking about velocity, not just velocity of sales hitting the quota, but how do I get a marketer to hit demand gen? How do you get the CS person to, customer success person to start taking on more customers quickly?

How do we get all these different departments and functions to start working at a higher speed and pace? So that's where velocity was born. And then expansion, which was really, it was fascinating to me. And this came from an interview with Scott Dorsey, who was the CEO of Exact Target when they got acquired by Salesforce. And he's like, he's always thinking about, where do we expand? In North America or EMEA? Or buy a new product, acquire a new company or invest in the existing company or do we partner and create agency models or do we actually hire a whole bunch of sales teams and go partner led? What do we do? So it really helped create this framework called MOVE, which is market operations, velocity and expansion as the thesis for every single company, no matter what the size is to grow. And that became the name of the book and that's how it came about. 

Alex Olley (11:33.498)

Wow, man, that's wild. I can't believe, is that book number four then, or was that three? That's the third book. How do you, I mean, I'm curious. How do you be a founder, run a business, and actually find the time to write the book?

Sangram Vajre (11:38.83)

That's our third book.

Oh, I never wrote any of these books. Like point blank, I would, like I've told everybody, I never wrote any of those books. So the way the first book and all books have happened is I would do the interviews, get a core thesis around it, put a deck together with an outline of what it needs to have, record every single thing that we're talking about. So I knew at the end of six months, what...the concept is, what the outline needs to be, what the framework is gonna be with each book. I'm a framework guy, so each book has a framework and a maturity curve, so I knew what the outline needs to be for a book that I wanna write. And then once I'm 100% there, then I will literally hire somebody for a week and literally spend a whole week with them and having, they listen to everything. I tell them that I could think about it. There are questions, we would go through it, but for a week.

The first book it took us and took me to understand the process about nine months. But the last book move, believe it or not, it took me six months to interview me and Brian to all these interviews we did. And it took us one week of four hours a day with a writer to give and unload all of our knowledge, the deck, the research we have done. And then that guy went and spent a month and a half to come back to us with a version that we started editing. And then that's how we got the book done.

Alex Olley (13:04.35)

No way, that is mad. Well, congrats to you for getting the process down. Maybe I'll try it one day.

Sangram Vajre (13:09.13)

Well, I mean, the thing about that one is we it goes back to making it simple. It's it's the is it perfect? No. Is it 80% of the way? Yeah. I mean, it's really the thesis for everything in life. I feel like is like, you know, if we try to make it perfect, Brian and I had my co-author with so many times, man, we got to include product in this. We need to include this and we have to make decisions. We're not going to do that. Maybe that's the next book. And like, just have these conversations of like, you know, this is code freeze, if you're a developer, you can say that. Or we are launching this, we're gonna ship it. So we have to make those decisions and those are hard decisions. That's what it's all about is to make it simple so that we can at least have the first thing out there and see where it goes.

Alex Olley (13:53.93)

Mate, I love that. Well, I hope some of the reach deskers are listening because I always say the same, I say don't try and ace the exam and get 100%, get 80%, 80%. So you've just validated what I've been saying for years. Okay, mate, well, let's move on to the get personal section. Now, you've written three books. You've been what? You've been CMO of PowerDot, you got acquired by Salesforce, you founded Terminus, and now CEO of GoToMarketPartners, Wall Street Journal, bestselling author. I mean, the list kind of goes on.

So many, many people look at you and go, wow, that guy's unbelievably successful. What did you have to do to get to where you are today?

Sangram Vajre (14:34.30)

Well, in third, second year of building Terminus when it was going up, I almost got divorced. And we had our family and like not sure what was going on. And it took a truly an act of God and a true recognition of our faith journey that led us to come back to the roots of it.

So, none of this is, neither of this is overnight, or none of this is without scars and hard things. And I've been very open about all of it. And my marriage got saved and...

You know, our faith got much more stronger around what we believe, how we believe and how we raise our family, how I think about what's really, really important. All of those have just cemented as a result of it. But there was time, there was dark times in all of this where I'm like, well, what am I doing? Like, is this worth it? Is this the right direction? It sounds great as you as you rattle through that. It sounds like, oh, well, that's amazing. But if my family's not there, if my wife is not there, are not there, like that's meaningless. That's totally useless to go through. So I've gone through super dark times. My family has gone through super dark times in the process of it because when you're in the throes of building something that you're so passionate about and you want to just go do it and you can see the fruit of it in the marketplace, but if you don't have that fruit at home, you know, those are sour grapes. Like you can't taste it. You can't enjoy it. You can't see it.

And it's not about balance as much as anybody would say, because there is no such thing as balance. I feel it is more about setting expectations. I just nailed at setting proper expectations because I just didn't know what I was getting into and at what pace I'm going after it and what it will require of me and the family to do it. So once now that I know that and understand it before even I started this go-to-market partners, I had that conversation. All right, the next two years.

You know, but that's like it is gonna be different. It is gonna be I had a pretty You know last couple of years before good market partners I was winding an outer of terminus was much more open and time and all that stuff and now I'm back into the saddle and Saying you know what we need to make this thing and there's this excitement you have to focus You have to put in unreasonable hours all of it But if you can set expectations and do things differently like for example now

Friday night to Sunday after church, my phone is pretty much switched off. Like that's a deliberate change that I made in my life. But the rest of the week, I'm working hard. So it is there's certain things like that I never had boundaries around that I'm creating. So it didn't come across come out as just swinging in all angles. It was pretty dark time going through it.

Alex Olley (17:33.00)

Wow. Yeah. Well, look, I think I've been there. I've learned a lot. It sounds like boundaries, expectations is a big thing. Now you're on that journey again. You mentioned those two things, but is there anything else you're thinking about doing differently so that you can enjoy the ride a bit more?

 Sangram Vajre (17:44.61)

Well, so we as a company decided to not raise money because we realized that puts you in a role. Not raise money, so we kind of bootstrapping it. We're like, it's okay. We're not trying to go double, triple, triple. That's artificial goal and doesn't really happen for most companies. We happen to have that at Terminus and that was great, but that's not true for 99% of the companies in the world. So let's not raise money. Keep it bootstrapped. Do meaningful work in a way we are funding it the right way. So the work that we're doing, we're like, all right, this has to make sense. And the most important thing we're saying is internally is that we want to run this for a decade. Like that's the mindset that we want to have. I didn't have that mindset at Terminus. I was like, well, maybe three, four years, flip this and see, like I had that, that everybody's talking about, that's the way to do it. Now I don't have that mindset. My mindset is that, hey, let's build a profitable, efficient bootstrap business for next 10 years and do what is more really meaningful work of it, not just do another try to do another company just for the sake of doing it. So you know me enough to know I love creating frameworks. I love helping build different category elements around it. I love building a community and events, which is what we do with road shows and all those things. So I'm doing everything that I truly enjoy doing and I feel like God has blessed me to do it well and spending more time in our lane of genius. We have this thought, like we say this internally, what is our lane of genius? Everyone has it, every company has it, every individual has it. What is our lane of genius? And if we can spend again 80% of the time in that lane, and then 20% we're doing shoveling, digging hole, like all the stuff that you have to do as an early stage company, but 80% of the time, if you are in your lane of genius, that's a beautiful place to be.

Alex Olley (19:37.63)

Oh mate, I love that. I'm going to steal that too. Lane of genius. Nice man. Well, look, we're coming to towards the end Sangram. We're going to go on our quick fire round. So first question I'm going to ask you is if you can have a drink with anyone, whether dead or alive, anyone in the world, who would it be and why?

Sangram Vajre (19:54.57)

My dad, he passed away four years ago and I feel like he passed away in his sleep and I couldn't really spend time the last moments with him and stuff so I'll just spend time with him.

Alex Olley (20:05.65)

That's probably the best answer I think I've ever had. Let's move on to something very different then. Like we've spoken a lot about go-to-market partners. You see a lot right now. What do you think the dumbest thing that go-to-market professionals are doing right now and what could they do about it?

Sangram Vajre (20:22.57)

I think we are still paralyzed by what worked before and we're going to try to do the same thing, but everything about yesterday has changed. The metrics no longer remain are the same. The whole velocity of sales and how much pipeline you need has changed. So all those benchmarks that we build businesses around are no longer the same and people are still referring to those business to create their plans, create their go-to-market strategy.

And that is an Achilles heel. I think people would do better if they start saying that, all right, we need a new playbook. I think people need to just really, this is the time for a new playbook. If they don't see it and think through it that way, I think they're gonna waste a lot of money.

Alex Olley (21:04.22)

Okay, yeah, makes sense, man. What's the biggest mistake you think you've made in your career so far?

Sangram Vajre (21:12.72)

I feel it's more on how I went about doing certain things. For example, when I was a founder of Terminus, I tried to take over my co-founder's job. I tried to do things that were not right in the way they need to be, because it's just driven with results and growth and passion around that.

And so I've done some of the dumbest things of not recognizing the best friendships at that time. And the gifts that I was given off that, that has scarred really bad and it's still recovering from that. It still hasn't fully recovered from those things. And I think now that I'm doing it, again, I'm using all of those things as like, all right can't do anything, I can go back, apologize, and do that, I've done that, but I have to move on, and now God has given me another chance to do it right. Do it right.

Alex Olley (22:10.88)

Mate, what a great learning. You probably see a lot of companies out there at the moment that you keep an eye on. Do you see any companies that you think people should be keeping a watchful eye on that could be future game changes?

Sangram Vajre (22:22.27)

Yeah, well, people should look at Reachdesk. I'd say they're doing some good work. Yeah, you did not, you did not. There's also the company called The Juice, which is like, what they're doing is saying, hey, you have all this content out there in the world, but you have to download it and nobody likes to fill forms. So they scrape and get all that information in their site. And you just...

Alex Olley (22:26.74)

I did not pay you to say that.

Sangram Vajre (22:46.05)

…Fill the form once and you can start researching. So it's almost like the new Google of go to market and content and marketing and sales, especially marketing and sales is where they're focused on. So I feel like that's the kind of thinking, that's the kind of company is gonna change the game where they're like, well, the status quo is you have content on your website, people download it and you turn them into MQLs. That's status quo.

This is where the best of the best company marketers will go and look for new content. And if your content comes up on this, you actually will have a better chance of conversion. Now that's just a different playbook than that would be the best.

Alex Olley (23:19.84)

Wow, I had no idea. I'm gonna go and check them out. Thanks for that, man. Well, look, Sangam, it's been a real pleasure having you. I'm gonna ask you one final question, which is like, I know you've tried lots of different things over the many years. At Reach Desk, we think a lot about how do we connect deeper with prospects and customers? How do we help people break through the noise? What would your advice be to people listening to help them break through the noise and differentiate?

Sangram Vajre (23:43.326)

I feel for us when we would go to market, we just started the road shows. We just realized that there is nothing beats that one-to-one connection and time spent together. And we need to find different ways to do it. So if anybody's trying to sell in 2024 and say that, well, you know, we're gonna just be on Zoom calls and we're gonna try to sell through that. I think they're dreaming. They're dreaming big.

And instead, if you spend time with people, find ways to be there, not just at big events and stuff like that, just figure out a way to have face-to-face conversations. I think people have to get out there and do that. I think that's the part that I still think because of the COVID, people just had lapsed into, I would say almost lazy way of trying to build a business. And you have to get out there and set expectations like we need to be out there. We need to meet our customers.

We meet our future customers, we need to spend time with them, and 2024 is the year that people need to do that.

Alex Olley (24:41.798)

Oh mate, I love that. Sangram, thank you so much for joining me on the antidote today. This has been a real treat. Thanks everyone for listening. Sangram, where can people find you?

Sangram Vajre (24:51.226)

You know, I write something on LinkedIn every day. So that's been part of it. So people can follow me over there and they'll see all the things that we're doing and what do you want to share?

Alex Olley (25:00.086)

Nice for everyone listening and watching follow GoToMarketPartners, follow Sangram. He's given me a lot of great content over the years, which I'm very grateful for. I'm so grateful to have had you on here today. Thank you so much for joining me, mate.

Sangram Vajre (25:10.93)

Alex, always a pleasure. Thank you.