I’ve taken a lot of products to market, and I’ve worked with hundreds of startups. I’ve seen countless failures, numerous pivots, and several successes. In my experience, the failures and pivots have one thing in common: they get Go-to-Market (GTM) wrong.
Jenn Steele is an entrepreneur, CEO, and founder with a solid track record in the fields of marketing technology and startups. With over a decade of executive experience, Jenn has consistently demonstrated strategic leadership and go-to-market skills that have led to outstanding outcomes. After successfully turning around and selling Kissmetrics in 2023, she is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of martech startup SoundGTM.
So often, we believe that the hard part of founding a successful company is getting the product, offering, or service completely nailed.
Wrong.
You can have the world’s best gizmo fixer, but no one will buy it if they don’t know about it. Or if there’s something almost as good but cheaper. Or if they don’t even realize that gizmos can be fixed.
I’ve taken a lot of products to market, and I’ve worked with hundreds of startups. I’ve seen countless failures, numerous pivots, and several successes. In my experience, the failures and pivots have one thing in common: they get Go-to-Market (GTM) wrong.
Here are seven of the most common errors founders make when they try to take their product to market:
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered this, I’d never need to fundraise again. The founders who do this tend to be developers and product folks who haven’t had purchasing power in a company, often thinking that marketing is easy and salespeople mostly just like to drink and golf. (Spoiler alert: this is inaccurate…most of the time)
Build a recognizable brand. If you don’t have the resources for a marketing team, there are many fractional options available. Find the “who” and promote your product via channels they are likely to use. I’ll talk more about this in number four.
Fundamentally, if no one knows your product exists, it won’t sell. End of story.
I joined the company as the 90th employee at HubSpot in the very early days. At that point, we had around 2500 customers and a product that, frankly, sucked. It would break while folks were onboarding, and we quickly learned how to redirect conversations with customers when things got dreadfully slow.
As I write this, HubSpot’s current market cap is over $40 billion.
HubSpot didn’t succeed because their product was imperfect – but getting a product into customers’ hands allowed them to truly understand the customer and build the powerhouse (and still imperfect) platform that so many of us use today.
Ongoing customer feedback is a part of the process. So stop tweaking and go sell!
I look at a lot of pitch decks. They all list Google AdWords as a marketing tactic they plan to use.
When I ask why they’re going to pursue that channel, they say, “Well, it’s a best practice.”
Hint: Being a best practice is very different from being a best practice FOR YOU.
Other times, investors push founders to pursue particular marketing tactics because they worked for their brother’s son-in-law’s nephew. Is it a good tactic? Sometimes, yes, but they don’t know because they haven’t thought about it.
So before following a “best practice,” even if it comes from Mark Zuckerberg himself, make sure it’s a good fit for your company before wasting your time and money.
Speaking of critical thinking and pursuing the right GTM tactics, how do you figure out which activities DO make sense? You start with the “who.”
Who is your buyer? Where do they get their information? How do they make decisions? How do they like to talk about the problem your product solves?
Until you can answer those questions, you’re wasting every GTM dollar you’re spending.
After all, if you’re buying LinkedIn ads and your prospects aren’t on LinkedIn, that’s a lot of money for useless, unqualified leads.
If you’re sponsoring the wrong conference, you may as well just take a few five-figure sums and light them on fire.
If your salespeople are taking the wrong people golfing or to dinner, all you get are salespeople with a better handicap and a larger waistline but no quota attainment.
Once upon a time, I worked at an early-stage startup that refused to negotiate their (rather high) pricing. They were selling to companies that usually negotiated contracts of that size.
And guess what? They struggled to attain their goals.
Here’s the deal: When you’re early enough not to know your product-market fit, or you don’t have any real case studies or results, the only way to sell your product is to be generous.
So stop stressing about leaving money on the table (because, of course, you will) or being taken advantage of by a good negotiator (because, of course, you will). What’s important is that you learn how companies buy products like yours and that you start getting traction.
And if those first few customers are still using your product at a ridiculously low price 10 years from now? Congratulations, you’ve built something awesome.
Back when I ran marketing at startups, I had several founders hire me and ask me to “create a category.”
Thankfully, I only had to do that once after HubSpot. Turns out that all the others were already IN categories – categories they could eventually dominate.
To put it simply, if you try to create a category, you add at least six months to your sales cycle.
There likely isn’t a budget for something new, so you have to wait for the resources to create it.
Without a category, you have to convince customers that they have the problems that your product solves. No one is asking ChatGPT or Google about problems they don’t know exist. If you insist that you’re in a new category, it’s a huge uphill battle. However, if you’re truly innovating, it’s worth the effort.
That said if you’re trying to create a category because it’s ”cool,” but there’s already a category for what you do, you just look dumb. And people don’t buy from dumb companies.
I get it. As founders, we’re accustomed to getting everything done ourselves. However, trying to switch from product development to customer support to GTM all in the same afternoon guarantees that your GTM will be poorly executed.
Founders are also so close to our product that we tend to want to sell ALL the features and sell it the way we think about it. Showing too many features gets in the way of truly customer-centering GTM efforts such that they succeed.
So, ask for help. Read things. Talk to other founders. Join accelerators that specialize in GTM. I mean, I’m a GTM expert and still need a lot of help. GTM is a team sport; there are too many moving pieces to do it otherwise.
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