Building a B2B GTM Engine

23 min readMar 19, 2023

This guide helps you build and scale a business-to-business go-to-market (GTM) capability.

Once product-market fit has been established, winning the market is the next big challenge for any company. Despite the importance of a robust GTM capability, most leaders tend to underestimate its significance or think about it too late; many believe they can build a cool product and then throw it over to sales to sell. Your ability to bring a product to market can’t be an afterthought.

Building a GTM capability and process to take the market requires systems thinking. Imagine GTM as an engine. The various gears in a GTM engine work together like various technical architecture micro-services: they complement and reinforce one another to form a system that allows for reliable performance and rapid innovation on behalf of customers.

The spark that drives your engine is your company vision — your dream and true north. This vision creates a shared sense of purpose throughout your company and with your customers and community. Storytelling with vivid examples of a better world imbues deep meaning into the product you build and helps shape a holistic GTM strategy.

Customers demand exceptional experiences, and organizations that shape customer interactions to create differentiated experiences win. Those that don’t will inevitably die. Creating these experiences requires a company-wide commitment to building and optimizing a well-oiled GTM engine that turns customers into advocates. The main gears in a world-class B2B GTM engine include marketing, partnerships, sales, success, support, and an internal operating system.

This page provides a high-level overview of these gears. Each gear is explained in greater depth in subsequent pages. This guide is comprehensive but not exhaustive; it describes key points of leverage: the essential elements to nail, then scale. Recommendations are written with a certain level of organizational size and complexity in mind, although the same principles apply to most (B2B) companies.

Marketing is the starter gear that makes prospects aware of your company and product and initiates the GTM motion.

Brand Marketing is essential to break through the clutter, effectively position and differentiate a company, raise brand and product awareness, and ultimately drive business value. Storytelling and clarity on company mission, brand purpose, and product value bring your brand to life and make marketing richer and more meaningful. Sustained momentum creates a sense of inevitability to category creation and leadership.
Product Marketing is everything required to explain and sell the product after prospects are aware of your company. Remarkable product experiences are central to every iconic brand and company; product marketing brings these experiences to life by emphasizing “why” (an anthemic raison d’être), “what” (great features and functionality), and “how” (delightfully designed, polished experiences).
Growth Marketing attracts and delights future customers. This is a long game of building and nurturing relationships with the right audiences. To do this well, one needs a clear, nuanced, quantitative understanding of how growth happens and how cohorts engage with your product and perform over time. These two foundational elements allow for systematic and rapid experimentation by optimizing five main levers ー “the 5Ps of growth marketing.”
Partnerships can turbo-charge your growth by expanding your customer value proposition and reducing time to market in three main ways: 1) Establishing positive brand associations with relevant communities to increase brand awareness and drive qualified traffic. 2) Extending reach to new segments and markets through co-marketing and channel sales programs.

Sales is the power gear in the engine. Finding “GTM” Fit involves creating a sense of urgency, picking and optimizing the right sales model, and building a repeatable sales playbook. Understanding this, along with enabling processes and modern tools, help accelerate sales velocity.

Customer Success is the relentless focus on ensuring that your customers achieve the best possible outcome using your product or service. In this way, it’s the performance gear where your product either delivers or it doesn’t. It’s about earning loyalty, and it’s central to a “land, expand, explode” motion. Customer success teams help reduce churn by minimizing time-to-value through proper activation and product usage in the first ~45–90 days. Effective success teams also create data-driven influence “heat” maps and usage dashboards to guide expansion. Success efforts are complemented with remarkable Customer Support experiences to help customers when things don’t go as planned.

An Internal Operating System drives scale through internal systems that integrate data and tools into a single view of the customer and provide an objective view of your customer-facing execution. This system serves as the connective tissue that unifies cross-functional teams around the most significant problems to solve and opportunities to capture. It enables an objective view of performance so you can tune your engine over time.

Marketing: Starter Gear

Marketing is the “starter gear” of the engine. Brand, product, and growth marketing work together to drive this gear and create a strong foundation for symbiotic marketing-sales interactions and high sales velocity.

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing amplifies great product experiences through storytelling that brings depth and emotion to make a brand richer and marketing more meaningful. Doing so boosts brand awareness, helping your company achieve goals including product or regional expansion, or extending your appeal to new customer segments and decision-makers. Brand marketing also reinforces clarity and consistency through a brand identity that connects your company’s purpose and value to your ideal customers. The ultimate goal is to achieve resonance with customers such that they become your advocates. If anyone has ever gotten a tattoo of your brand, you’ve achieved very high brand resonance.

External communication plays a vital role in brand building. Maintaining a steady drumbeat of momentum ー product launches, additions to your team, partnership announcements, contributions to your community, among others ー is critical. In the early days, momentum helps establish credibility and relevance. As you hit your stride, momentum creates a sense of inevitability that your company will deliver on its mission, create an exciting category, and become an enduring company.

Product Marketing

Product marketing explains and sells the product after prospects become aware of your brand and actively consider and evaluate your product. There are three layers to this: “why” (an anthemic raison d’être), “what” (benefits and features), and “how” (delightfully designed, polished experiences).

“Why” is essential. Having an anthemic raison d’être for your product establishes the context and inspires your team. Slack’s “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” memo is a stellar example of getting this right. Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s Co-Founder & CEO, brilliantly articulates that Slack is selling organization transformation; that is their product’s “why,” the job they’re hired to do. The tone was consistent with an emerging challenger brand with a personal, playful, and memorable voice.
“What” includes the product features that bring your product promise to life by delivering clear benefits that solve real problems. Ideally, you imagine your ideal future customer and tell a story about their life with your product. It’s also helpful to express benefits in jargon-free language and link features to these benefits. Examples:
Slack: Work more easily with everyone → Channels, Slack Connect, messaging, video & voice calls
Asana: See who’s doing what and when → list view, timeline, boards
Twilio: From first interaction to lasting connection → Marketing (text & email marketing, lead alerts, call tracking), Customer Service (account security, IVR, chatbots), Operations (account notifications, appointment reminders)
“How” is the customer’s experience with your product. Everyone expects products to bring them joy. This is true for consumer and workplace tools and products alike. Companies that create differentiated experiences will win. Product and Marketing must partner to ensure the entire customer journey ー from initial intent to usage and renewal ー is thoughtfully designed and optimized over time.

fRetention matters above all else. Start with retention (% of customers active/paying after X days) and work backward. You can’t be successful if customers don’t stick around. Unless you have retention, your growth efforts will be wasted or sub-optimal. Is your product experience a part of their workflow or habit? Have customers experienced a lightbulb moment where they understand the core value of your product? Have you successfully set your customers up for success?

The first mile of a software product is typically an afterthought. Onboarding customers is not sexy. However, it’s important because every new customer is activated and onboarded. The last mile of acquisition is the first mile of product. It’s essential to get this right since almost all churn happens within 90 days. An effective onboarding process communicates your core product action and ensures customers experience an “aha” moment as soon as possible. This is sometimes referred to as “time-to-value.”

Stripe is an excellent example of a company that has sweated the details of documentation and onboarding and combined that with a clear understanding of their core action (transactions processed) and time-to-value (add seven lines of code and get started in minutes). As your product and company evolve, it’s challenging to maintain “a beginners’ mind” to continually develop, refine, and optimize developer and user journeys. Onboarding is not the action to “set and forget!” Activation and onboarding work are evergreen activities. Set a monthly reminder to sign up for your product as a new customer. Better yet, sit silently beside a brand new customer as they onboard.

Customers should feel that the product gets better the more they use it. For example, data gleaned from usage enables meaningful personalization or makes a key feature (e.g., search) more robust. Customers should also feel that the more they use the product, the more they have to lose if they stopped using the product. Perhaps your product becomes integral to their workflow or their identity. A skilled marketer can clearly and concisely communicate product benefits and consistently reinforce the value of remaining a loyal customer and advocate.

Growth marketing is a natural complement to brand and product marketing ー and involves attracting and delighting your future customers.

Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is a natural complement to brand and product marketing ー and involves attracting and delighting your future customers. It requires a nuanced, quantitative, and shared understanding of how growth happens from original intent through activation, usage, retention, and enlisting others.

Growth marketing starts with an understanding of how input/intent metrics drive outputs. The goal is to create an equation for your business that maps inputs to outputs. A growth map is one way to visualize this equation that allows teams to coalesce around facts, not opinions.

This work helps inform your “north star metric” ー the one input metric that matters above all ー and understand how this may evolve throughout your customers’ lifecycle and over time. Another way to think of your north star metric is the core action of your product. For example, nights booked (Airbnb), messages sent (Slack), notes taken (Evernote). It provides clarity and helps prioritize potential experiments and investments.

Beyond the growth map, cohort analysis is an essential complement to understand engagement. Specifically, you want to measure “growth” (size of each cohort), “engagement” (ratio of users in each cohort completing the core action of each product, e.g., messages sent), and “retention” (cohort performance over time).

Understanding how growth happens and how cohorts perform allows for rapid and systematic experimentation and precise and continuous measurement. Creating and maintaining a solid data infrastructure (raw data, pipeline) and robust set of tools unlocks great growth teams. With this foundation in place, there are five optimization levers ー the 5 Ps of growth marketing.

The 5 P’s of Growth Marketing

Pricing & Packaging is one of the most powerful — yet under-appreciated — levers. Understanding and optimizing pricing and packaging run the gamut. It presents many experimentation opportunities: price elasticity, the role of promotions and trials, how to bundle and package various features into compelling benefits, and how to evolve this by market, vertical, and segment over time and more. That said, pricing is hard to change. It’s a classic Type 1 — i.e., non-reversible — decision, and one must be very careful making it. Great pricing encourages easy adoption and aligns how you capture value with what customers perceive as most valuable. Slack’s “fair billing” pricing (i.e., billing only active users) is a great pricing example: informed by the “north star metric” (sending >2,000 messages), it encourages broad early adoption and smooths the expansion to other teams.
Partnerships can make your partners an extension of the marketing team. Co-marketing with partners supports the benefits of broader, integrated product experiences and can help you reach new audiences. Integrations with partners’ products can make your core product stickier. Creative partnerships enable you to piggyback off of the success of other platforms. For example, SEO and well-designed landing pages that include partners’ brands and products deliver meaningful referral traffic. Slack (AppDirectory) and Atlassian (Marketplace) drive outsized organic traffic and stickiness in their core product solutions by building a robust ecosystem of partners.
People. Enlisting your customers and community can amplify your efforts. Organic growth through word-of-mouth has always been the holy grail. Once product-market fit helps unleash your community. Referral programs are excellent sources of qualified traffic. Dropbox famously fuelled its early growth by including a simple, straightforward, and compelling offer (free storage) as part of the onboarding process. Intentional design helps. The most potent product experiences enable customers to create virtuous loops in the product as they engage with it. For example, Pinterest creates a powerful loop when a user discovers a pin, sends it to a friend, who then joins Pinterest, finds pins, and so on. Community engagement can take many forms: conferences, research, access to beta programs and team members, certifications, online forums, etc. These efforts are not about you. Stay focused on why people are attracted: to be informed, inspired, or entertained.
Point of View / Perspective. Content marketing helps shape conversations relevant to your customers and community. The goal is to establish your company as the authority on what matters to your customers and guide prospects with high-intent to consider what you offer. A well-written blog with fresh content is an excellent place to start. Podcasts are another ideal medium, though they require more significant effort and investment. New entrant, Clubhouse, removes much of the friction of podcasts and holds great promise. You don’t need to “manufacture” issues; instead, you need to listen to what’s on your community’s mind and offer a compelling and engaging point of view. Social channels (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) offer reach and the ability to engage one-on-one or one-to-many. TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, and Medium can also be robust platforms and sources of referral traffic.
Platforms. Marketing platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Amazon, and Twitter are useful sources of qualified leads. These platforms prime your GTM engine. Maximize organic traffic (e.g., SEO) and connect high-intent prospects to the right marketing action. B2B customers take time to make significant, complex decisions. You want to avoid paying for leads more than once. Aim to capture an email or mobile phone number to educate and nurture engagement through your owned and operated channels (e.g., webinars, blogs, newsletters, events), and ideally, product trial and usage.

Partnerships: Turbo Gear

Partnerships can turbo-charge your growth by expanding the customer value proposition and reducing time to market. There are three main types of partnerships: integrations, brand associations, and joint distribution.

Integrations with complementary products can unlock additional value for your customers. These are sometimes called “whole product” partnerships that increase revenue with a more robust solution and reduce time to market. Examples:
Shopify partnering with Stripe to facilitate payments on its platform.
Okta partnering with Palo Alto Networks to layer authentication and deliver remote access to an internal network.
Cloudflare partnering with DataDog to make analyzing Cloudflare logs and metrics easy.

Think about the most significant partnerships that help you address more of your customers’ problems. These integrations tend to reduce churn and deliver significant SEO benefits as you draft off other brands and platforms’ success.

Brand Association between two brands with relevant communities can increase brand awareness and drive qualified traffic for both brands. Imagine you’re a company like Brex that targets startups. Forming a partnership with accelerators like Y Combinator or TechStars would allow you to offer compelling benefits to garner outsized mindshare and drive highly qualified leads. You might also consider affiliations with other communities like SaaStr (business software), Startup Grind (startups), ShopTalk (e-commerce), or RockHealth (life sciences).
Distribution allows you to tap partners’ brand, customer base, and reach. Co-marketing and channel/reseller programs extend reach by gaining access to additional segments and markets. Co-marketing is an effective way to cross-promote complementary products and services and improve sales efficiency. Beyond logos, case studies, and special offers on websites, robust co-marketing programs involve data and list-sharing to understand intent further earlier in the buying cycle and launch creative programs that attract attention and volume. Channel partners help sell your product or service in segments or markets where you lack capability or presence. While there are many different approaches, the main benefits are built-in trust, speed, and efficiency from your channel partners’ established relationships. There are potential challenges, including brand risk, channel conflict, and margin compression.

Sales: Power Gear

Brand, product, and growth marketing and effective partnership programs help drive your power gear: sales. There are three steps to building robust sales:

Finding GTM fit
Accelerating sales velocity
Enabling sales processes and tools

Finding GTM Fit

Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm coined the term “go-to-market fit.” Finding GTM Fit requires excellence at finding urgency, picking and optimizing the “right” sales model, and building a repeatable sales playbook.

Find urgency. Who is your buyer (company, industry, title) — also known as the ideal customer profile (ICP)? Why do they have a sense of urgency now (pain, use cases, adapting to pandemic)? What is the macro trend or wave that shapes your prospects’ needs? How do they make significant purchasing decisions? How best to find them? The answers to these questions inform whom to target with scarce outbound efforts and prioritize inbound leads. Quality is more important than quantity here. Most teams waste time on prospects who don’t fit the ideal profile. Your target segment should feel uncomfortably small at first. Leads are generated through warm introductions, associations, conferences, and lead lists (e.g., Clearbit, LinkedIn).
Decide on the “right” sales model. Once leads are identified and qualified, it’s crucial to settle on a sales model that matches how your target customer decides to buy products like yours. There are three main models: sales-led (your traditional “enterprise,” high-touch model to win committee decisions), marketing-led (low-touch that brings together a buyer and decider), and product-led (zero-touch where the initial buyer is the decider. Think: Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian, Zoom).
Build a repeatable sales playbook. The physics of the customer journey informs a playbook to find and win customers consistently. A great playbook answers four key questions: what are the steps in the customer journey? What’s the “lightbulb moment?” What is said/done at each stage? How does the rest of the company support each stage?

Building a Repeatable Sales Playbook

A repeatable sales playbook starts with initial outreach — typically by email — to prospects, emphasizing relevance to your targeted decision-makers’ needs and pain. Initially, prospects don’t care about how great your product is, and they certainly don’t care about your product features (“speeds and feeds”) or vague promises to save time and money. The goal is to catch their attention. The best way to do this is to teach them something, to share information that might offer them an advantage. The best salespeople challenge prospects. My incredible team at Google showed Walmart’s CMO a dashboard highlighting how Amazon was eating their lunch — by market and product category. We showed him that 5% of the consumer electronics category shifted online each year and that Amazon was scooping up close to 50% of that revenue. That got his attention and the first meeting in Bentonville. The same team also educated Macy’s leadership team on how, when, and why consumers bought mattresses, starting with extensive online research. The common denominator? Get creative. Do the work.

Persistence pays off. Subsequent follow-ups are part of the playbook and should be additive to initial outreach, not just nagging or “bumping back to the top of your inbox.” Again, try to personalize and humanize your outreach. Experiment with different approaches that help you stand out. Then measure and optimize three critical metrics for your email: open rate, click-through rate, and response rate.

Once you secure a meeting, pre-call preparation is vital. You’ve worked hard and creatively to get to this meeting. Don’t waste this precious opportunity. Research leads and prospects, then translate insights into a pre-call document identifying what elements of your value proposition are likely most resonant. It would help if you also understood how the company positions itself and recent press — positive and negative — as potential fuel for your solution.

Prepare what you will say during the meeting. Most meetings follow a predictable rhythm and flow. Outline key talking points and flow for discussion, highlighting who says what, when. This can be scripted out, although it’s essential not to sound scripted or “salesy.”

Objection handling is an essential and typically predictable part of any meaningful sales discussion. Create an inventory of objections. Ask t questions to tease out their objections. Home in on the 2–3 that really matter, and have excellent objection handling on these.

The “Wow” or “lightbulb” moment is usually the demo. This is your chance to flip the proverbial light-switch — when you clearly show how the product addresses your customers’ pain. It’s best to use the prospect’s actual data, if possible, to make your solution more meaningful and tangible. Great sales reps can convince the decision-maker at this point and move to close them.

The close is essential. You have to ask for the sale. Make a specific proposal, next steps, timing, and then follow up until the deal is closed.

Accelerating Sales Velocity

With a repeatable sales playbook, you can experiment to accelerate your sales velocity. This can be expressed in a formula:

Sales Velocity = (# * $ * %) / T
# = number of leads, $ = average contract value, %= conversion rate, T = time to convert

Predictive models score prospects based on online behavior (e.g., searches, installation of a software development kit (SDKs) from competitors, upvotes, comments, etc.) and company characteristics (e.g., size, location, etc.). This prospect score represents an estimated value of a particular user segment/cohort before they visit your website. Predicted value informs acquisition spending by segment and the best way to handle each lead.

High quality leads with a high propensity to convert should be handled with as little friction as possible, ideally with excellent documentation and well-tuned user flow and first-mile experience. Sales teams naturally gravitate towards these leads, even though marketing automation and self-service are likely the best choices. A better use for sales teams is providing a near-real-time response to high quality leads with a lower propensity to convert (or a longer sales cycle) or focusing on getting more business earlier (e.g., high average contract value with more seats or higher tier product/usage).

Understanding intent before a prospect visits your website informs outbound marketing. Outbound (e.g., email, chat, sending physical goods, etc.) works very well when reaching prospects with high intent. Building a system that surfaces intent and scores each lead allows personalized online journeys and experiences. It’s also possible to identify key decision-makers and enable sales teams to effectively reach out to high-value prospects in a personalized and timely manner. These initial conversations shouldn’t feel “salesy,” but like a genuine desire to understand their specific problem and reason for visiting your website. Don’t try to name your children on your first date; aim to understand and offer to be truly helpful. The goal is near-real-time outreach because reaching a decision-maker when they’re engaged and have revealed high intent. This single tactic typically increases sales conversion by almost 50%.

Optimizing lead flow requires clear accountability and dynamic lead routing. Once a lead is scored, and the optimal treatment is determined, it is assigned in Salesforce to a representative who is given 12–24 hours to initiate contact. If this doesn’t happen, then another representative should do so; alternatively, send an automated email/chat. Dynamically route more leads to high-performing reps and fewer leads to low-performing reps.

Once a customer has signed up, sales representatives should remain involved in the handoff to Customer Success. This handoff kicks off the activation that ensures customers experience your product’s magic as soon as possible.

Enabling Sales Processes and Modern Tools

There are several critical enabling sales tools and processes including,

A standardized system of action. Every sales team member must be master your repeatable playbook. Sales enablement platforms (e.g., Guru, Seismic, Hubspot) provide instant access to knowledge, messaging, and personalized content proved to be the most effective for any buyer interaction. This ensures consistency and accountability and allows measurement and optimization at each step of the sales playbook.
Sales compensation. Incentives for sales reps and their manager include territory definition, team, individual quotas, and compensation covering the initial sale, expansion, and renewal. Technology companies often try to “reinvent” things. Resist the urge to do so around sales incentives; the tried and true methods work. David Sacks has an excellent post on this, including the simple math to optimize sales compensation for your company. Here is a related post on quota calculations and a tool to model your growing sales organization.
Sales performance management. Beyond just measuring quota achievement, it’s essential to measure various inputs such as quantity and quality of prospect interactions. This helps objectively assess performance to incentivize high-performing sales reps and determine how to coach low-performing sales reps. This is an emerging category with dozens of companies and tools to consider. The best teams ingrain measurement and continuous improvement in their culture.
Voice of the customer. Listening to your customers helps optimize sales and success playbooks. Another key benefit is to integrate learning from sales and support into your product development process. Primary research and key sales insights prioritize where to spend product development calories to ensure happy current and future customers.

Customer Success & Support: Performance Gear

Customer Success and Support help you tune-up performance and find areas for expansion and growth while you’re on the road.

Customer Success: Land, Expand, Explode!

Customer love fuels excellent companies. Customer success is a vital way to earn that love with a scalable, repeatable, proactive process that ensures customers get the most out of your product. Managing churn all comes down to ensuring proper usage in the first 90 days. This involves a dedicated team with a clear and robust checklist of the things that the best accounts do. The more customers use products in the first 90 days, the less likely they are to churn; getting this right is the number-one driver of net retention.

A separate Expansion team can use data and dashboards to identify other opportunities to expand your product to additional teams within an existing customer. These dashboards also serve as early detection systems to alert your team to take proactive action and provide input to product roadmap decisions.

Beyond expansion, explosive growth requires every customer to have at least one champion who is a product expert and evangelist on your behalf. Once identified, the champion should receive the royal treatment: invited to join advisory panels, featured in case studies, provided early access to products, sent schwag, invited to meet your team. Internal champions are often overlooked but are essential to help you navigate your customers’ organization and ensure your message is landing in the right way with key decision-makers and influencers. Champions galvanize a community of end-users and act as a lubricant for any GTM engine.

Success is about proactively ensuring customers get the best product experience possible. Service is about the reactive response when things don’t go as smoothly as planned.

Customer Service/Operations: Turning a negative into a positive

Your company’s mission requires service to match the elegance of your product. While the service bar has been set very low by most companies, your goal is to reach leading hospitality and technology companies’ service levels. Indeed, striving for remarkable moments can be more achievable and more cost-effective than you might imagine.

Optimizing your service model is a journey characterized by step-function improvement and constant catch-up to product and sales. Service models break with scale; it’s not unusual to reinvent the model every time you add a zero to average selling prices. Knowing this and preparing for it is critical, especially when it comes to hiring decisions. While difficult, it’s easier to move upmarket than it is to go down market. Once you move from an average contract value of $10,000 to your first $100,000 contract, your organization will figure out how to support this customer. The opposite is not true, making it hard to move downmarket. Staffing service teams with intelligent, resourceful, creative leaders will keep you ahead of the curve. Several well-run companies groom high-potential leaders in service roles early on — customer service gap surface where your engine is leaking oil. Service can be a strategic weapon and a high-ROI activity to ensure low churn/high cohort health.

Beyond the regular service channels of phone, chat, email, and website contact forms, social — especially Twitter — is an excellent channel for customer communication on support issues and customer feedback. Not only is Twitter a high-leverage way to support customers, but it also enables near-real-time human interaction, transparency, and a chance to strengthen your brand by resolving issues in memorable and fun ways.

Regardless of how you meet your customers’ service needs, it is essential to measure customer satisfaction (“transactional” CSAT), response, and resolution times, and invest in training, tools, analytics, and resourcing to exceed expectations consistently.

Customer service metrics are some of the many things that robust internal systems should track in an automated and seamless manner.

Internal Operating System

Thanks to the cloud, we now have data on virtually every customer interaction, and it’s possible to instrument and measure almost all aspects of a customer’s journey and product usage. Weaving together these data, tools, and processes are challenging but essential to scale your operations. Doing so ensures a single view of the customer and their journey with your company. It provides an objective view of how your product and organization perform and highlights actions needed to close experience gaps.

A robust internal operating system includes four features:

Customer Journey: Collecting data around prospect intent lead-scoring, customer decision-making processes, and paid and organic marketing activity. The centerpiece is a growth map that mirrors the equation of your business and links inputs to critical outputs. The goal is to instrument your customers’ journey across all engagement methods (e.g., website, email, chat) so that you understand why customers behave or feel a certain way. This also includes cohort data that track behavior over time.
Sales System of Action and Performance Measurement: Mapping and tracking each step of your sales playbook is essential to learning and optimizing over time. Your operating system includes a system of action ー CRM, email marketing and nurture platforms, content management systems ー and a centralized place to measure customer-facing employees and teams’ performance.
Personalization Engine: Personalization leads to higher engagement through feature recommendations and context-specific suggestions to get the most out of a product or community. Doing this consistently and at scale requires understanding usage at the individual, team, and company levels.
Product Experience: Uncover and measure how well your product is delivering vs. expectations and how likely customers recommend (e.g., Net Promoter Score). This also includes tracking technical product performance such as uptime, latency, crashes, and bugs.

An internal operating system is akin to the system and dashboards that Formula 1 racing crews use to capture and monitor performance. During a race, a car generates 1,500 data points per second. The crew translates these data into real-time dashboards that inform changes to race strategy and how to fine-tune the car’s engine and equipment. Your product and GTM engine generate signals that can help you adjust as you chase your dream.

In Summary

A modern and effective GTM engine powers all customer interactions and propels you closer to your vision. To build a robust engine, you must understand and leverage each one of its gears. By drilling in on marketing, partnerships, sales, success, support, and your internal operating system, you can build a machine capable of winning customers and delivering exceptional experiences that drive sustainable, long-term growth.

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Special thanks to several people whose perspectives, leadership and wisdom helped shape my thinking on building an effective GTM engine: Gary Briggs, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau, Jason Lemkin, Jonathan Metrick, David Sacks, Julian Shapiro, SzeJack Tan, Sarah Tavel, Bob Tinker, Brett Willms, and Kelly Wright. Thanks to my teammates and fellow GTM builders and mechanics, it’s been exhilarating to experiment together and build and scale some remarkable engines.

This is a living document, and I welcome feedback. Please add in comments or reach out to my on LinkedIn.