How your GTM motion impacts your marketing strategy and org chart
Marketing teams should operate (really) differently at self-serve, hybrid, and sales-led B2B startups
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Marketing at a B2B company with a self-serve motion compared to a sales-led motion is a different job–almost as different as B2C and B2B. Given this, your marketing strategy, tactics, and team need to be 100% aligned with your GTM motion. But all too often, founders—and even marketers—don’t understand the impacts of a self-serve, sales-led, or hybrid motion on marketing plans.
Here are some obvious signs your product and GTM teams are not aligned with your GTM motion:
You’re following the playbook of your favorite fast-growing startup, but your company has a different GTM motion, audience, price point, etc. and is at a different stage.
You have more SDRs than marketers with a predominantly self-serve motion.
You have both “request demo” and “sign up” CTAs on your website, but you don’t know which audience segments you’re trying to send to which conversion flow.
Your marketing team is spending half their time on outbound and sales enablement while a majority of your customers are closing via your self-serve signup flow.
Your marketing team is spending tons of time and money driving prospects to your website when you do not have a free version and all of your competitors do.
In this newsletter…
This newsletter breaks down everything you need to know about the impact of your GTM motion on your marketing strategy:
Clear definitions of the different GTM motions–without as much jargon
How to audit if you have the right GTM motion
How marketing org charts and roles change based on GTM motion
How your GTM motion impacts your website CTAs, channels, and content
Go-to-market motion overview
Typically, you hear about 3 broad B2B GTM motions: Self-serve, sales-led, and hybrid. Often people use different terms and conflate the definitions of each.
I actually think about GTM motions in 5 buckets though. Since the vast majority of B2B startups at scale have hybrid motions these days, hybrid means a lot of things. But really there 3 main types of hybrid motions (in addition to pure self-serve and pure sales-led motions):
Self-serve + sales assist: Prospects can sign up for the product and upgrade to other plans on their own. But, based on product usage, sales comes in and sells to the most promising prospects.
Sales-led + self-serve option: Prospects primarily buy through sales, but there’s a secondary path for individuals or smaller businesses to self-serve into a free or low-cost plan or trial.
True hybrid: All of the above. Prospects can self-serve or talk to sales for the initial trial or purchase. Upgrades can either be initiated by the customer or by the sales team. This is very hard to pull off as an early-stage company, but many late-stage products like Figma, Asana, etc. have all of these motions.
No matter which GTM motion your startup eventually wants to have, it’s important not to try to build out multiple motions at once. Instead, start with one and baby step into adding additional motions so you don’t spread your team too thin on the GTM (and product) side.
Note/aside: Many people would call the blue section “product-led growth”. I shy away from this because I think this is a bit of a misnomer and I have too much marketer pride. Plus, self-serve and product-led growth are not exactly the same thing.
Why are these motions called product-led and sales-led, when marketing is highly involved? As I’ve asked before—why are we so afraid to call marketing, “marketing”? This bums me out.
How marketing strategy differs by GTM motion
Really, I didn’t need to write this newsletter, I just needed to share this diagram:
How to interpret this diagram:
When describing self-serve below, I’m referring to self-serve dominant motions, which includes self-serve with sales assist. When describing sales-led, I’m also including hybrid motions that are primarily sales-led with a supplementary self-serve option.
To select your initial GTM motion, look at the following attributes: the product plans/packages you will offer, your average deal size and time to close, and how your audience will adopt your product. If your GTM motion doesn’t match up with these attributes, consider making changes.
Hire marketing before sales in a self-serve model and vice versa. Your sales team should not be larger than your marketing team in a self-serve model–if this is the case, you aren’t getting the full benefits of self-serve.
Marketing KPIs in a self-serve model should be centered around driving product-qualified leads. Lead qualification and scoring should take into account not only firmographics and interactions with marketing assets, but also product data. (Try Pocus for this—I’m both an investor and fan of the product). Marketing KPIs in a sales-led model will be centered on handing off qualified leads to sales.
Different channels work best for different GTM motions. Assuming you picked the right GTM motion for your audience and business, start with inbound channels in self-serve motions and outbound in sales-led motions.
The CTAs–and the mix of CTAs–on your website will be different for different GTM motions. For self-serve motions, your sign up process should be extremely low friction and your product and onboarding process should do a lot of the selling. For sales-led motions, booking a 1:1 meeting is often a big ask, so typically you’ll need “shallower” or “easier” conversion events sprinkled throughout your website too—think events, templates, reports, etc. In either case, you are trying to get an email address or a “hand raise” quickly. (I should probably write a whole newsletter on this)
The types of content you create and how content is distributed also differ. Once a user or company is in your product in self-serve motions, you can use the product as a content distribution channel and the product itself becomes a “sales enablement” tool. You don’t have this luxury in sales-led motions, so marketing & sales rely more on email to share content. You will also need more gated“lead magnet” content in sales-led motions.
Marketers with the same title at startups with different GTM motions will have different jobs because channels, content types, etc are different. More on this below in another diagram.
More from MKT1
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including templates to help you organize your team, build your strategy, and choose your channels based on your GTM motion.
🧑🚀 Job board: See roles from the MKT community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.
👁️ Related newsletters: Startup marketing org charts, B2B growth marketing orgs, and marketing advantages.
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how your org chart changes based on your GTM motion and how GTM motion fits into the 3 strategy drivers.