S7E4 -  Why Your SaaS GTM Isn’t Working And How to Fix It with Operational Discipline with Garrath Robinson

I like the coal marketing, the recon team. Marketing is thought they're getting away in the land, giving you an idea what the terrain looks like, identifying the highest value opportunities, the highest value targets, and getting that field level intel, and then relaying that intel, and communicating that with the sales team. Your sales team is your strategic strike force, your strategic task force that goes out and acts on that battle plan. A lot of times, companies are actually running multiple motions at once. They don't realize it, but they are. They might say they're founder-led, but behind the walls of the organization, and it's very much cold out-continued, where they think they're outbound-led, but what you find is, well, you guys are running more demos, you're more of a PLG company, but you're still running a cold out-continued motion. People get emotionally attached to what's already being done, because it really comes down to the behavioral dynamics of what he wants to really take. Everybody loves to take ownership. When things are going well, nobody wants to take ownership with things are going bad. (upbeat music) Today, we will be discussing why most go-to-market motions feel, but more importantly, how can you fix yours with operational discipline? My guest today is Gared Rubbenson, a former combat veteran, turned Crote Architech, and the creator of the strike operating system. Strike is a go-to-market operating system used by startups and global enterprises to engineer Crote with speed and precision. Whether you're trying to align sales and marketing, fix your broken go-to-market, or just want to have technical blueprint to scale, this episode will be packed with go-to-market insight. Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Gared. - Hey, great to be on with you, Jorn. - Cool, we're gonna dive right in. Do you have a big horror story you can share with the listeners when it comes to go-to-market? - What's interesting you asked that, because the reason I started with my partner is, I was being a little facetious. I've had a lot of great experiences in my career. I've been blessed to be around some great leadership teams. I've been blessed to help market and take to market great products, great services. And you almost become a little bit punch drunk around how things are actually done, because when you're in an organization, everything becomes a seamless way of executing where, you know what you're doing on Monday, Tuesday, weekly, monthly, and quarterly execution feels simple and easy. You become punch drunk to how things actually work in the real world, because that's the exception of the rule. It wasn't until I got into a company that was the complete opposite. I found myself pulling my hair. We constantly get in our own way. It was a Swedish AI company. I was leading go-to-market into the North American market. We found it difficult to find traction, because we were trying to replicate our success in Europe and the North American market. And being one of the only Americans on a team, I was used to horizontal structures. I've been in marketing operations rules where after 60 days, my marketing CMO or director came to me and it's like, hey, we just want you to fully own this. You don't have to ask for permission. If you think it's what's best for the business, we won't you dispere head that. And then coming into a culture where it was very much top down, I remember like a week or two in I'm scheduling meetings with the sales team. And getting a call from my CMO, why are you meeting with sales? I'm like, less my job to figure out their pain points so we can help serve them best. So we can be that spirit for sales. And it was very much like, well, we meet with sales and give you the information that you need to, you need to, we'll tell you exactly what to do. What was the shut up and do of your total culture? And I saw how this played out over, you know, almost 24 months. When I first got there, there was so much energy in the business with new team members and people switching on new roles within 12 months. It was almost like being in a mental health facility where everybody was depressed. Nobody really knew what they were owning. Nobody really knew what they were accountable for. A lot of meetings kind of ended on the finger reporting. I almost ended up as a go-to-market therapist for the team. More than actually leading go-to-market. And as miserable as I had gotten in that role, at the time, I didn't understand how important that experience was. When I decided to lead that company and start derindle, I took 60 days off to get my mind right. I just meet with some friends, have conversations, talk through that experience. And talking through that experience, I realized there's a story here that nobody talks about. It gave me the juxtaposition of how things go. When you do things the right way, you have some operational agency and command throughout the organization. When you have a middle-out leadership structure. And here's what happens when you have a top-down leadership structure where that leadership might not really care to get the opinions or the input or that field level intelligence of their frontline teams. I realized that was actually the best experience of my career. You get a little bit of conch-drunk on being at these companies, some of these companies, and things are going really well and everything is smoother than easy. This was like getting punched in the face. And everything you knew about how good a market should be executed was almost like done in reverse. So it gave me the ability to have this lens, this bifocal lens of, well, here's the path you can go down if you continue to operate this way. But then here's this better path if you're willing to kind of evolve and adapt to the way a modern business needs to operate. - Nice, that's a really nice story. And you're gonna find out after months and an experience like this, how you need to do things sometimes. So I think it's a good experience to have, even though it's probably wasn't the best one. It's a good one to have at the beginning of your career. So you can do things right later on. - Absolutely. - We're gonna dive deeper into what went wrong there, but also how you're doing things now. I wanna start at the basics, 'cause we're gonna talk about go-to-market, we have SaaS founders who are just starting out. So if we just really go basic, basic, what defines for you go-to-market motion? Like what is it? What are the common types? Can you explain me your own words? - If go-to-market motion is it just about strategy? The way I like to look at it is it's the way that your company is going to translate the potential that you have within your product to basically turn that into revenue and retention. And that ultimately happens through real people with real stakes a hand in the real world. And I mentioned the real world for a specific reason because I think sometimes we get to cut up and visionary focus and strategy and how we're going to execute. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to how you actually execute. And I think that's the biggest problem to solve. And today's go-to-market, go-to-market has evolved is it's no longer about five years ago. You could have got away with just running the same playbook as everybody else. Now you need to have a differentiated way of how you get in front of your customers, how you convey your value, and ultimately how you sustain that relationship over time. - Do you use terminology like founder-led, sales-led, partner-led, outbound-led? How do you look at that? - It's interesting because I think we're almost seeing a convergence of those different motions. At the end of the day, it's not so much a focus on, you know, whether you're going to be founder-led, whether you're going to be sales-led, 'cause what you will, you fight a lot of times as companies are actually running multiple motions at once. They might say they're founder-led, but behind the walls of the organization, and it's very much cold-outbound-led. Where they think they're outbound-led, but what you find is, well, you guys are running more demos. You're more of a PLG company, but you're still running a cold-out-bound motion. So I think a lot of times you find that most teams think they're doing one thing, but they're actually doing another, and you end up in this situation where, you know, you just have kind of a fragmented set of tactics, but there's really no operational backbone to sustain consistently executing on there. - Yeah. - Nice. - Well, that's dive deeper. So first, we're gonna dive into the failure stem success. When we look at a failure pattern, the why go to market often breaks down or simply fills. What are some of the top reasons, I guess I mean, you already mentioned top-down leadership, not getting the information needed, what are some other reasons it fills? - I look at it to the lens of operational command. That's how I look at Go to Marbley. I started on the strategic space, designing customer lifecycle journeys for banks and credit unions, so working with Chase, working with JP Morgan, working with Royal Bank of Canada. And, you know, I used to look at through this strategic lens, but I learned that if we don't have operational command, if we don't have some layer of enforcement, and these sound like dirty words in corporate America, and almost militaristic, but when I talk about operational command, I look at it like this. Like, a lot of companies, they're tracking signals, but they don't really know which signals they should be acting on. What are their highest value signals, and how do we act on that as a unified team? They lack a tempo in the business. We don't have a heartbeat, and you end up in a situation where execution comes in these peaks and valleys, you'll really have a sustainable mod. When I talk about sustainable growth, I look at it as sustainable execution, right? Because the sustainable growth, so to speak, will come if you can actually sustainably execute as a company. Then you have your traditional disconnect when it comes to priorities, where marketing and sales are kind of running their own motions, and there's not a lot of collaboration, there's not a lot of communication, and ultimately there's a lack of trust, and there's a lack of fidelity between those teams, and the information that you have visibility into. Another interesting one is. is the fear of stopping. We put all of our time and effort into building this campaign, getting it prepped, getting it launched, but then it comes out of the gates, where are 30 days in, where are 60 days in. There's no real traction there, but yet it's almost as if everybody is emotionally attached to some of these bad ideas. So having criteria in place for, hey, we launched this campaign, we wanna get 30 MQLs or 100 MQLs from it over the next 90 days. Worth 30 days in, we're 60 days in, we've got 20. Okay, is this really the best use of our resources? Probably not. You could easily kill that campaign, maybe have a backup in place or have criteria in place for how we're gonna shift the resources to better opportunities, higher value, opportunities for the business. So I think a lot of times people get emotionally attached to what's already being done, because it really comes down to the behavioral dynamics of nobody wants to really take. Everybody loves to take ownership when things are going well, nobody wants to take ownership when things are going bad. And then, I think ultimately, this all comes full circle on itself, too. There's really no operating system, right? You have a strategic framework, you've got some robots in place, but it all feels a little disconnected, and there's no operating rhythm to the business. And so you end up in a situation where people are working really hard. Everything feels fragmented, nobody is in demand. Leadership teams are fighting back and forth with each other frontline and a little management, or fighting back and forth with each other. And there's no real focus or control with how we're actually operating using company. - I like how you take the military background into the company, making sure who's in command, what is happening and what is the next step, I guess, if it happens, right? 'Cause what you're being trained on. It's interesting because I never realized how much my military background would eventually play into my corporate career. I actually avoided it for a long time, but as I was building this company, I started to look back on my leadership experience in the military. I wasn't an NCO, I wasn't an officer, or anything like that, but I think about why our team was able to execute at a high level in combat, and that was because everybody at the frontline had some agency when it came to making critical decisions in real time. Like, here's what you focus on. Here's Plan A, B, and C. Developing that level of agency with frontline teams with your middle managers, even through the executive layer. You start to see people don't mind if something goes wayward, or doesn't go to plan, people will step up and take ownership in those instances because they know exactly what they own. It creates a culture where you're not afraid of rep or manned. It's not a culture of rep or manned for doing your job well, even though it is something that wouldn't work out or do it plan. It's a culture that celebrates, hey, you're developing that ability to really drive the business from your seat at the table. Yeah. In the end, you all have a goal in mind, and you want to get there and think they're not going to be perfect, but at least somebody can take responsibility for their part. They have ownership. Exactly. You mentioned the operating system. You created the strike framework, or I think you call it an operating system that founders can use to build a repeatable go-to-market motion. Can you explain the steps and then probably walk a bit deeper into every step for us? The way to look at strike is this evolved over 24 months. What I was trying to solve for is, hey, I've gotten certifications in some of these other go-to-market frameworks or some of these other DevOps frameworks and try implementing them. And what you find is it's not sustainable for most businesses. For me, the evolution was what modern go-to-market needs is a modular operating system based on the maturity level of the business resources, talent that you have in house, and being able to have a system in place that you're not so directly tied to, that you have to fully transform the business in order to move forward. But more so is something that gives you levers to pull based on what's happening in real time within the business. I look at strike as a doctrine more so than a strategic framework, a doctrine for how are we going to operate as a company? And ultimately, it's essentially how you engineer the conditions for success in the company and how that looks on a daily, weekly, and accordingly. Strike really stands for. And strike is made of the number one signal calibration. So this is really a focus on acting on what truly matters, on what truly drives the business forward, tempo establishment, again, coming back to that idea of how do we actually establish a heartbeat within the organization that we can consistently rely on, rhythm engineering, which is how do we create some synchronicity between sales, marketing, and customer success where it doesn't feel like this pregnant at ECHR where it doesn't feel like these teams are operating in silos. But they're moving together as one team, impact prioritization, which is killing the distractions that slow the business down and focusing on your highest leverage opportunities. Again, that drive the business forward, and I call it Kill Switch Discipline, which is what we just talked about a couple minutes ago, which is knowing when to quit, knowing when to hit the stop button and doing that quickly. So having criteria in place, we lost this campaign, just go to market motion. How do we quickly identify whether this is where we need to put our resources or would we decide, this isn't going to work, kill it off, and focus on building something else, or pushing resources into higher value, or higher leverage place for the business. For me, it's not just about having acronyms to roll out of framework. It's about getting you to a point where you can execute relentlessly to where there's no drift between those good or market teams. Nobody's relying on excuses. There's no thing reporting. And ultimately, if you think of it as like everybody being on the same boat or everybody being on the same bus, there's no passengers on that boat. Everybody has their place at the wheel. That's the lens I look at, go to market through, is how do we develop that operational command throughout the entire data market work? Yeah, so in the end, it's almost like creating your combat team that everybody has the same goal. Everybody knows exactly what to do. And I guess, knows what to do in which situation and what is being expected of them. This podcast episode is brought to you by my personal favorite SaaS event and community, SaaS talk. The Europe event is taking place on the 14th and 15th of October in Dublin. And it's gonna be two full days of investor matchmaking, talked from other founders and meetings, lots of meetings. I think they even had over 15,000 prescheduled meetings last year. As a listener to the podcast, you are getting an exclusive 30% discount through the link in the show notes. And even better, if your company's already doing above 1 million AAR, you might even qualify for a completely free ticket while they last plus up to 400 euros towards travel expenses. So it can't get any better than that. These kind of tickets are gonna be limited, same with the free ones. So make sure you hit pause, hit the link, get your ticket and then come back to the podcast. You will see us in Dublin as well as we do have a booth on event. So make sure to get your ticket. If somebody wants to implement this, where do we start? Is it a document you fill out and you kinda then start filling it out together and you start agreeing on these six different things? - Yeah, so the strike is really perfect fit for any organization that hit that O-Shit face, right? Where it's like, we've been scratching our heads for a year. We've been scratching our heads for six months. Can't figure this out. It all comes back to that theme of, hey, we don't have true operational to man. We don't have a layered enforcement here of how we actually execute, how we actually operate as a company. It's very much kind of fractured and disjointed and there's no clear communication channels. Cultures where people really struggle to face the heart truths again, because there is a culture of reprimand. If things don't go to plan, somebody needs to own this and somebody gets reprimanded for it. This could be post product market fit, for instance, where we've got product market fit, but as we continue to scale, we feel like we're drowning in activities that aren't moving the needle forward or stuff where we are at the moment. Ultimately, when you find yourself in that instance, it's where you need the rhythm and the business. It's where you need command. It's where you need focus. That's where I look at strike is a doctrine for how we execute. That's backed up by a data layer to support how you're actually planning to execute. Again, so this comes back to modularity. It's not like, hey, we come and install this standardized data model in your CRM and it's just plug-in play. We look at how your team executes. We start on the sales side, getting your sales team to perform at a high level for agreeing out what works and then designing the system to support what's actually working. Versus saying, oh, your system is broken. We have a better system and now you're forcing your employees and your teams to execute it to the system. That is really designed for them. It's just designed for the masses. - So you started at sales and the first step you mentioned is signal collaboration. Know what to act on. The first place where you can identify what really matters. I mean, it's the sales side. So it's the first line of revenue you can get in. Maybe some advice here, like if people are listening and they want to do things for themselves, what do you look at when you're going to start at sales? - I think the big thing is, especially when you're building on a marketing team, you're building on a sales team. Not looking at marketing as the support function of of sales, but looking at marketing as an extension of sales. To a point where I like to call marketing the recon team, marketing is thought they're getting away of the land, give you an idea what the terrain looks like, identifying the highest value opportunities, the highest value targets, and getting that field level intel, and then relaying that intel and communicating that with the sales team. But marketing and sales have to be truly integrated, acting as one team, moving as one team in order for that to work. But what you find is if you kind of look at marketing as a support function, especially as the business goes through its maturity phases, marketing starts to evolve more into that support function. And this is why you have so many CEOs and CFOs where when it comes to the budget time and marketing or the CMO is struggling to actually communicate and create a story around marketing's impact on sales, well hey, we're just going to cut budget from marketing because what you're telling me doesn't really resonate with how the business is performing. And a lot of times marketing is acting on landing indicators. When you look at a lot of pipelines, you look at a lot of dashboards, it looks like real time signal, it looks like real time data. But behind that, below the surface, it's lagging indicators. When you get stuck in a loop of acting on lagging indicators, when you look at the overall market, you ultimately feel like you're constantly behind the a-fold. So in the end, how would you fix that align? Sales or marketing? Probably have to look at different metrics, not lagging indicators, but look at different things to really be able to figure out what is going on and how we're moving the needle. I was talking to somebody about this the other day. And this is where marketers really have to step up. It haven't been in marketing my whole career. And going from this legion and the man-gen mindset to more of a conversion catalyst mindset, how are we helping sales confer deals or opportunities in their revenue? How are we helping customers success retain, expand, nurture their relationships with existing clients or customers? And not so much of the good example of this is my partner went to in a bit, a huge event, money 2020. Thousands of people there. And the first thing he came back to me, he's like, "Hey, I've been walking the floor for two hours. 90% of the marketers here are literally just sitting in their booths, playing on their phones, waiting for and bound needs to come to them." That's an example of where like, "Hey, maybe you have a couple salespeople with you." It's not just sales job to walk the floor and have conversations. That's a very good point where marketing could be out on the floor having those conversations, generating interest, generating that demand, per se, and bringing those people back to sales, right? So again, it's more of that spirit of mentality versus support function mentality. And getting, I think the biggest shift in marketing that's happening right now, and that I don't see talked about a lot is, while brand is still a very important piece of marketing, too many marketers are still focused on the arts and craft of brand awareness of brand design, building awesome experiences in that light. But what many CEOs need and what many CFOs are looking for now is marketing to act like an operational function. Like, how are you actually helping the business operate at a high level and convert interest that awareness and that they're made into sustainable revenue? And I think that's the big shift that needs to happen with a lot of marketers in order for the business to properly evolve to the way modern business is done. - Yeah, because I think that's the number four of the operating system, right? Impact prioritization. So really focus on what moves the needle. What would you typically then put into that face? Is it then we need to have ask you, well, what is it contained? - That's a great question because it's really use case dependent, right? Because every team is different. It's easy to look at SaaS overall for instance and say, and we don't just work on SaaS, we work across, BenTech, we work across, GELV Tech, we serve a lot of different types of businesses, right? And it's easy to say, hey, you need to focus on SQLs, you need to focus on demo conversion rates. But a lot of times, like the issues that you see in the reports that you've seen that dashboards for a metrics, they're not operational issues as much as their political social dynamic issues within the organization. Where nobody's taking ownership, there's a lack of accountability, and then again, this lack of command. We've all seen this in the quarter where it's like, screw the ICT, we're not eating the results we want. We're just gonna fill the funnel with as many MQLs as we can and we're gonna play the numbers game and sales is gonna convert a bunch of those people. But then 12 months later, we're gonna see a high-term rate start to creep in because of that. That's a lagging indicator of what the real problem is. And so we have to come in and identify what the real issues are with how the marketing sales and CS teams are operating and identify where those break points for those failure points are in that go-to-market operating doctrine. And then we can provide almost like a doctor, right? We look at it to the lens of when we come into a company, we're diagnosing a patient. Our number one goal is to help you develop a health plan to get you to your highest state of health possible. So it has to be modular, it has to be unique to each business because there's some fundamentals that you can go and implement in any business and it's gonna help them. But I think the days of these prescriptive frameworks, I think they're starting to go away because each business is unique and with business being much more reliant on relationships and accelerating those relationships and staying engaged, it's gonna be unique to each market. It's gonna be unique to each customer base and perhaps each ICP as well. Every business is unique but you probably encounter the same problems. Whether some of the most common problems you see, I guess I can't maybe I guess some advice here, how our listeners avoid walking into the same problems. That's interesting because we talked about that a little bit beforehand and the sense that people become emotionally attached to what currently works. And this is across all business sizes, all business maturity levels. People become so emotionally attached to, well it's always worked this way. They think that they're ready to evolve the business but they don't have the patience to evolve for business. And they're thinking, hey, this is gonna be a 90-gay transformation. This is why I get upset when other consulting rev-ops consulting groups are gonna market consulting groups. Talk about these 90-day acceleration plans. It doesn't work like that. You might see some lift in 90 days but really you're looking at a six to 12 month cycle of truly evolving business because you're asking a lot of people to adapt the way they work, communicate the way they collaborate and ultimately how they take ownership and their day-to-day rule. That's not a 90-day process. And I think we've had a full decade where there's been a lot of promising and a lot of underdelivery when it comes to that. And so I think what we look for when we're working with a client is when we're asking them questions it's not just about how we're gonna help you in your business. We're trying to evaluate like, can we trust you to evolve and adapt? Like you need to or are you gonna get impatient at day 90 or at day 120 and say, this isn't working for us, we're gonna scratch it and we're gonna go back to what we're doing. That happens in a lot of cases. I talked to a lot of CRO, CMOs, et cetera. And a lot of times there's this theme of what we've gone through consulting agency after consulting agency or freelance, or freelance, and they could just never figure it out. After you talk to hundreds of CROs, you start to realize like, okay, either I believe this and 99% of consultants and agencies are just really bad at what they do or there's a misinterpretation and miscommunication on expectations of what it's going to take to actually evolve the business. And I come to, hey, I think most people are great at what they do. We all bring a different level of value and experiences to the table. But ultimately, the business and the leadership has to be willing to evolve and that tends to be the hardest sticking point. And I think number two, again, developing a culture of trust with your employees where you're giving them that agency where they can make those critical decisions in real time and know that, hey, this doesn't work out like I believe it to. Look, what we're really asking here is people to rely on their gut instincts. And with AI being adopted and the conversation around AI, we've totally forgot about the fact that gut instincts place such a large role in the success of a business because this is where your frontline employees, here's a good example. I was working for a data center company. And they were working for a company market to me. And I did everything to learn about who our end users were, who the buyers were, et cetera. Now remember, we were coming out with this March Madness campaign and we had a nice landing page. We had these beautiful emails, the whole nine yards. And after I got to know our customers really well, I'm thinking these guys are software engineers. These guys are like tech nerds. They don't care about all this flashy shit. They just want to know what they're going to get out of it. So I call my marketing director the night and the campaign goes live and I say, I want to A/V test this campaign. And I don't want to do like subject lines. I actually want to do a plain text email versus this beautiful HTML email that we build. We had a conversation around it. He sent why. And it was basically on my gut instincts. He said, okay, listen, tested to 5,000, all right, 'cause this was going out to a list of almost 50,000 people. Tested up to 5,000 contacts. We'll see how it performs. If that email works, then let's rock it. I was given that agency to rely on my gut instincts. Guess what? I came up with a plain text email that the open rate was the difference between the HTML open rate was like 22 to 25 percent. The plain text email open rate and conversion rate ended up being about 45 percent. We converted 15 percent of those contacts into meetings from the people that opened. This was a campaign that they'd been running for about four or five years year after year. The previous high on pipeline in revenue was $3 million. This generated $4.8 million in pipeline and close $2.7 million in revenue. People are like, "Oh my God, this is amazing. This is the best it's ever performed." Literally nothing in the CRN would have told me this. This was literally relying on my gut instincts saying, "These people just want to know what they're getting out of it. They don't need all the bells and whistles." And that's not to tube my own corn. And if anything, this tube my leadership's horn at the time of giving me that agency to hey, this might not work out like we plan. But if it does, that this is a high leverage play that gets us an outsized impact compared to what we've done in the past. I like it. This is an example where you're changing something in the marketing campaign which has instant impact rights. You need six to nine months, maybe even 12 months, time to change the business. I see a lot of struggle with companies here like even for myself, right? If I wanted to set up a new operating system, I don't know if I have the patience to really go through such a long process to figure out if it's going to work or not. If I do that, I guess my perspective. Yeah, especially if you're a founder or startup stage AACABC company, it's a lot harder because that net revenue generation has an outsized impact on the business. If you're a late stage company, you're an enterprise company, you have the revenue to backfill and wait for that transformation to really stick and take place. So I think you have to figure out a way with each client we work with. It's a very unique process. This is why we don't do out of the boxed installs. We do very much bespoke solution design because of that very reason of everybody has a different to permit. Sometimes you need proof of concept with a founder. Let's do 25% of this, develop that proof of concept and that trust together. And once we have that established, now you have trust with us that we're leading you in the right direction. We can go full transformation mode at that point. And so again, it's all about understanding. Again, this is not necessarily about the technicals. Strike is very little about the technicals. It's much more about subbehaviorals. It's much more about changing the perception around how we think about executing go to market, how we think about enforcing some kind of operating doctrine within the organization and having clear standards for how that doctrine is enforced. Nice. When we're going to talk about go to market strategy or the company who implemented strike, how would a good go to market motion look like? Could you give a best practice example where we could learn from how should we be doing it the right way? Yeah, getting out of the tools and tech and having a keen understanding of your people, their capabilities, what they actually enjoy doing and having a sense of awareness of the fundamentals in business or not sexy. They're just not. There's nothing sexy about them. But also understanding that, okay, we have these fundamentals within the business. I know what I'm doing on Monday, right? Going back to the example I used that one of my past companies, I know what I'm doing on Monday, I know I'm doing Tuesday. That could become a little boring in monotonous, but that makes up, you know, that level of monotonous makes up like the 80% where the Pareto Pervisible really applies. It's like 80% of that work is going to be boring, but it's going to be the 20% highest leverage opportunity or operations that drive the business. From a foundational perspective, we have to identify how are we going to execute as a company. Now, if you're an early stage founder, you're an early stage company. This can quickly turn into, well, hey, you wear 12 hats. As the business matures, if I'm wearing 12 hats, what do I actually own? What am I actually accountable for? This is where we see startups really start to slow down and really start to kind of reverse hit reverse and their growth trajectory is because those questions never get identified. The strategy probably works. The strategy is probably perfectly fine. It's rarely that. It's really changing the perception of how the business is going to grow through these different maturity levels and that always happens at the people there. You have great people. As the business evolves, we need to give them the tools, resources, and agency to start making critical to business decisions and start owning two to three outcomes versus trying to own 10 or 12. If I would ask you to summarize your best advice on go-to-market motion strategy in one sentence, what should that be? Discipline will outperform dollars. What I mean by that is your go-to-market strategy at the core of your go-to-market strategy is your promise to your customer of how you're going to execute, how you're going to deliver, how you're going to support, and how you're going to sustain that relationship. That requires focus and discipline. So without that, you don't have any focus and discipline in the company or in the organization around that mission, around that vision, what starts to happen. Things fall apart. You lose focus on the customer side and to make up for a high-trone rate or low adoption rate, which start to make up for that by sales volume. We lose a total grasp on what drives the business. I think in today's environment where everybody wants to get to a million, everybody wants to get to 10 million, etc. A lot of times you see that erosion of that focus on the customer and more so about the vanity metrics, as we call them, of how much revenue are we doing, or hey, if I have a quarter of an investor's, the focus becomes on impressing them and skewing the numbers in a way that shows we're doing really well when below the surface, you're not discipline over dollars. I love it. If we're going to look at the future, you mentioned AI a little bit, not sure if that's going to be your answer, but what should founders should prepare for the next, let's say, to the three years? Fundamentals, they're not sexy, but even in the era of AI, they're going to matter more than ever. Your ability to get in front of your customers and really develop a relationship there is going to matter more than ever. I can't tell you how many CROs, CMO, exactly as I've talked to where we're having a coffee chat, and it's just like, I will literally not answer a cold email. I will literally not answer one of these generic, templated, cold DMs. Everybody sees it. Everybody does. That's not what people want. What they really want is somebody who shows that they actually give a shit about helping them solve their problems. A lot of times, that's not done through an ebook, that's not done through a PDF, that's not done through a webinar. It's doing the nitty-gritty, dirty work of enabling your sales team to actually develop those relationships in a real way, not necessarily through automated emails like, hey, John, just check, like, we all see through that. We're getting back to the era where it's like, hey, go meet with your client face to face, go meet with your prospect face to face, ask them how they're doing, even in their personal life. Show them that you understand that there's nuances to their role outside of work that could be impacting their work. How can I help you solve for all that? How would this tool or this service or the solution actually help alleviate some of that pain to where you can better focus on performing at work? We've lost so much side of that because, and I look back at my career, starting off in marketing automation, going to marketing operations, et cetera, you've seen this proliferation of the relationship. Everybody talks about sales as relationships, but now those relationships are a bunch of clay tables with automated emails that everybody gets. And while those are great, clay is a great tool. We have to get away from that mindset. We have to get back to, you can't necessarily in a large work, you can't necessarily develop all these one-to-one relationships, but we have to actually show people we care. And we're not just running templated playbooks. As a founder, this is the nitty gritty work of getting everything off the ground in developing those one-to-one relationships because those will scale. Regardless of what you see only then with instantly and smartly and outbound campaigns, those one-to-one relationships will eventually scale. And for founders, it's no longer about how quickly you can get to a million ARR. It's about the social capital you've built in your market. Nice. We are going to talk about the revenue stages though. So it is going to be about social capital, but I'm going to ask you super specific questions on how to get to a certain revenue stage. Talking about the nitty gritty, going from zero to 10k, Monday recurrent revenue, what kind of advice would you give us as founder here? Talk to your market. Talk to your buyers, not just the people using your product. You know, figure out what's happening in real time. Figure out what perceptions are changing in real time. And don't just get into this, again, don't just get into this place where you're seeing signals in Apollo, you're seeing signals in play, and you're just trying to automate those relationships, you're trying to automate that. That you're trying to really what you're doing there is eroding your gut instincts. And so I think the focus needs to be on how do we develop one-to-one relationships and understanding that after 12 or 18 months those one-to-one relationships will really scale your business and focusing on getting one motion to work really well versus trying to have outbound and bound PLG going like all these different tactics and all these different motions that eventually just bog down your time, your energy and your resources. Focus on nailing the one thing it's going to work for your business. Get to a good spot for you and then build out from there. Nice let's assume we paused 10k MR and I know we're going to make a huge jump we're going to grow towards 10 million AR. What kind of advice would you give Sasrown is here? The biggest piece of advice especially as you scale past 1 million you start to get that 5 to 10 million range. This is where founders ultimately become the roadblock in the business. You know your job is no longer just about sales and relationships. It really comes down to creating the systems, enforcing a rhythm and really having commanded the business and at the same time delegating that execution and getting out of the way and letting your people do what they do best. And I think when you look at it that way it's not about just owning the vision of the business at that point it's about owning the tempo of the business and putting the right things in place to where you're developing a leadership culture that starts at the middle out and not the top down where everything relies on you. Nice let me try to summarize so if we take it all the way to the beginning go to market motion it's basically translating the potential of product into revenue. It is going to matter how you execute. Have a differentiated way to be in front of your customers you can have different motions at the same time. When we talk about the failing go to market motion don't become punch drunk as you mentioned it getting too comfortable not having an operational command. Which signals do you need to act on lacking a tempo not having a lot of collaboration no trust in your organization and if you are going to make changes you need to take the time to evolve to actually change the business. If you're thinking about strike it's a modular operating system it's good for companies who face the shit face as you called it it's going to help you operate as a company and get everybody on the same boat no excuses no finger pointing. When we talk about the steps step one signal collaboration know what to act on what really matters step two tempo establishment create a sustainable fast repeatable go to market rhythm then you have step three rhythm engineering align your organization's timing and priorities step four impact prioritization ruthless focus on what moves the needle five kill switch discipline know when to stop pivot or shut down to go to market experiment completely step six execute in relentlessly drive the plan forward every day across all teams. If you are a marketing make sure you always keep reminding yourself how are we helping seals to close deals how are we helping CES to retain and expand. Don't always look at the data keep trusting your gut instinct and act on that and have full understanding of your people as well know their capabilities. Your quote discipline will outperform dollar keep focusing on the fundamentals and your customers and not always on the data as you mentioned when we look about 10k mr talk to your market and buyers don't automate relationships focus on one motion ideally 10 million AR don't be the roadblock has a founder of the 5 million delegate and get out of the way yeah yeah I can't say the better myself man I mean these are all all your words so for for grad because you get it if people want to get in contact with you what would be the best way or if they want to learn more about strike how can they do so yeah first you can find me at linkedin garyth robinson g a r r a t h I know that's a little different than the Welsh spelling so garyth robinson on linkedin and then you can find us at durrendel.com d u r i n d a l dot com cool we're gonna add links to both of them in the show notes so people can just click on that and not make the spelling mistake cool well for people listening on Spotify make sure to leave us a review it's just gonna help us to boost the algorithms we're gonna also add a poll to this podcast so let me know what you thought of this episode and again we're gonna add the link to linkedin profile garyth and durrendel.com to the show notes so you can find out more thanks again for coming on garyth hey thank you for having me on this was a great conversation truly enjoyed it nice thank you for watching this show of the grory of bdb sas podcast you made it till the end so i think we can assume you like this content if you did give us a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you like this content feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show if you have a specific guest in mind if you have a specific topic you want us to cover reach out to me on linkedin more than happy to take a look at it if you want to know more about garyth is i feel free to reach out as well but for now have a great day and good luck growing your btb sas