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Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails. Well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love Knack here at Exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performance forming emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in NAC first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in action@knack.com exit5. That's knock.com exit5 or just let them know you heard about Knack from Exit 5. That's us. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
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Hey, it's Dave.
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Quick note before we get into this episode. This is a recording from Drive 2025, our annual event here at Exit 5. This was recorded live in Burlington, Vermont at Hula as part of our event and we'd love to have you at next year's event. We're bringing it back to Vermont Stow, Vermont. You can go to exit5.comdrive to get more information, put your name on the waitlist and maybe make it to next year's event. But we're bringing the audio recordings from these sessions to you live on well recorded on the podcast because we thought it would be a fun way to show you the stuff we talk about at DRIVE and give you a sense.
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Of what it was like if you.
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Didn'T get to be there. And if you were there, then you get to now relisten and maybe take notes again. So this is one of the sessions from drive. Go and check it out, get tickets, put your name on the wait list for next year.
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Exit5.com Drive without further ado, I'm going to bring it to a guy who's going to take the energy up even more. He's been CMO of $200 million plus companies and I asked him to speak first because he has a great Energy. But also you'll notice a theme with a lot of the speakers. The breakouts that we're going to do with you all might be a little bit more tactical. The sessions that we have here, like, I wanted to pick speakers that can talk to you about things that are timeless. Right. Not ideas that you might hear at this event and then get ripped away in three months because there's some new AI update. And Sangam has an awesome point of view on go to market strategy. He's done it at a bunch of companies, and he's doing it with a bunch of companies now. I'm excited to welcome him to the stage. So, Sangam, you're up, pal.
B
Here we go. I'm excited. First time in Vermont. I'm excited to be here. And part of what I want to do is really just share around go to market. Now, let me ask folks up here, how many of you can define or want to give a shot at defining go to market? So, all right, raise your hands. I hear this is a group of, like, nobody's shy, nobody's introvert. Right? I heard that. Yeah, a little bit of warmup on that one. All right, so here's what we're going to do. If you make eye contact, I'm going to come to you. So there you go. So how do you define dg? No. You literally are, like, saying no. Wow. How about you? Everything in the messaging, positioning. All right, I love you. None of you are me looking at me like this. This is awkward, man. All right, literally, you guys are staring away from me. I'm staring at you. So how do you define go to market? What you bring to business? All right, I'll take that. All right, one more, one more.
D
Really?
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Literally, you're not looking at me. All right, thank you. Ooh, I love that. How do you convince the world they need your product? As DG mentioned, I had a chance to help build two companies that were 100 million. I thought then I knew, go to market. And then I go and actually start interviewing people around this idea of go to market. And every time I would ask somebody about it, they will give me a different definition. And every time I was like, well, I thought go to market was marketing and sales and product launch and positioning and all of those things. And every time I'll go ask somebody, they would say, oh, that's now. No, I think go to market is this. And that made us realize that, whoa, Go to market is much bigger and much different than what we think. So Nick and I were having this conversation at breakfast. And he was like, well, how do you define go to market? So I'm just going to give you a smaller version of that definition. And what we learned in the process was go to market is a transformational process. I'll just keep it at that. The rest of the definition you can look in the book and all that in there, but it's a transformational process and here's why. Are you going to invest more in marketing or sales? Is that a go to market decision? Yeah. If you're going to open an office in EMEA or stay in San Francisco, is that a go to market decision? Right. If you are going to say kind of build a new product or buy a company, is that a go to market decision? So you start thinking about what go to market is. And as we interviewed lots and lots of PE firms and executives and CEOs, we just realized that, well, go to market is a transformation process. It's not something that you go on a weekend and try to put an off site and then come up with a plan. That's not what go to market is. That's strategy. But go to market is what you do every single day. So what we did as GDM Partners, we are a research advisory firm. So all we do is research and then advise companies on go to market since 2021. And recently we just did. This was last week when I was at Inbound, we released a new research around 100 companies, how 100 companies have gone through from a different stages of go to market and actually are able to go and defy some of the odds that we all are trying to do. And as B2B marketers, like what are they doing? What is that working for them and how does that look like? So I'm just gonna show and share some research elements around that. I'm gonna also share a couple of frameworks with you guys because if any of you know me, you know, like frameworks is what I love. And frameworks is how we think and imagine and solve problems. And then lastly, and probably the most importantly, we're gonna do a lot of Q and A. So this is not gonna be an hour long, me just talking. You make eye contact, I come to you. You already have seen that. But we're going to have a Q and A as I share some of these things. So think about questions and thoughts because I think that's when the best ideas come out. So let's get into it. So first of all, two truths and a lie. Can anybody tell me what the lie is over here. I was born and raised in India. I don't know if it's a given. I've never lost my wedding ring. My kids make a pillow stack on my head when I go to sleep. All right, how many of you think the first one is lie? Nobody. All right, all right. How about how many think that second one is a lie? Wow, you really have a lot of confidence in me. How many of you think the third one is a lie? Just a few. All right, well, third one. Well, check this out. I was born and raised in India. I have never lost my wedding ring. I never lost that. All right. But here's what my kids do. Every time I go to sleep or something, they will literally stack up a whole bunch of pillows on me and take a picture and send it to the whole family on the WhatsApp group. Like, here's what dad is doing. So that's what happens all the time. So with that being said, here's a starter for y'. All. Like to see where we are today in both companies that I got to build the first two, and I should create a video on this because of DG. Like, how to make a million dollar in nine months on YouTube and I should put it out there.
C
Nine months is too long.
B
Too long, right? Like nine minutes. Nine minutes. How's that? Nine minutes. But these are real companies, so it takes a little bit longer. They have real money in it. Right? So. And what was interesting, both companies was in Terminus as well as GTM Partners. They both are different types of companies. So I want to make sure that everything I'm about to share is not something that just theory and like, we went to somewhere and just came up with stuff. This is my personal experience and also the research that we are doing with companies and work we do with companies. What is interesting was both these companies were different types of companies. One was a SaaS company in the up market in the great days of 2014, 2015, where money was flowing like milk and honey and people could do all kinds of stuff with it. And then GDM Partners is a research advisory company. It's advisory. Like people said, you need to go get therapy. Why are you going from a SaaS company to building an advisory company? And I didn't know. I'm just like, dg. We get burned out. I don't want to build another SaaS company. So I started working on this one. But what's interesting is in the process, with the first company, I had very similar experiences. As Dave mentioned, I felt like, man, my Life was a mess. My faith was nowhere to be found. My family life was really, really rough. Like me and my wife were almost about to get divorced. I'm just going real here. It was rough, it was tough. And then as I built the next company, GDM Partners, I felt like, well, those things can't be true anymore. We have to do it better. And that's why I love events like this. Because this is, this is where we actually get to do life together, want to spend time together and see what.
C
We need to do.
B
So these things become way more important to me than just building a company for the sake of building a company. So both of these companies have taught me that. Well, the principles that I'm about to share, regardless of good market or bad market, regardless of the stage of the business or even type, some of you might be, I think I was talking to some of you, there are agencies, some of our, like in construction or supply chain or manufacturing, and some of you are obviously in SaaS. I think these principles are gonna reflect and apply to all of you. And the blind spots that every company, our research shows they're trying to figure out are very similar. Like why are some companies not. It seems like they're effortless, like why are they doing something that we can't? And I'm sure some of that question goes through your mind or we saw that only 1 in 5 actually like truly get a product market fit. And what that even means is a question or growth seems like a black box right now. How many of you know the exact go to market play or growth play you're gonna do right now that's just gonna work? Anyone? Like none of us knows this? Like everybody who says I got the best growth play comment, growth. And you never get it, by the way. That's the worst part. Like I've done like, I actually literally have an ea. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna play along. And two weeks ago I said, I'm gonna do this thing, like, you know, this thing. And I literally hired an executive assistant to say go and comment on this thing. And LinkedIn works like that. And I'm like, but I commented like that 10 times and nobody sent me anything. Am I the only one? Or you guys just did people get it? Like I never got anything from other people. So I'm like, I'm gonna do this though. But I did it and I actually delivered. So that was a good thing. But it seems like a black box what's going on. So I wanna share three principles with you. The first principle is going to be that all these companies did go through truly that are sustainable, that are profitable, that are actually creating relevant businesses and are there to stay. That actually going from problem market fit to product market fit to platform market fit. And I'm gonna define those things for you. As a matter of fact, that's the whole book that we wrote on that we'll share in a little bit. The second thing I wanna share with you is the operating system. Every company needs an operating system and that doesn't mean a product but a process operating system. Which is why I think it's gonna be applicable to every one of you regardless of what stage of the business that you're in. And then I'm gonna use basic examples that you and I know of companies that have done this really well. Companies that are big in B2C because I think there's a lot that we can learn. And I always know like Dave is like always talking about well, you know, the lines are blurring and it's truly because the consumer is the same. The expectation that we all have are pretty much the same. So here are the hundred companies I looked at. This whole research thing was public companies. We looked at lots of companies that are out there, private companies. And we specifically had to look at PLG companies. And the reason is because that became a thing where they started to distinguish themselves from a public and PLG and different types of go to market systems. And so it's important to note that it wasn't just one type of company, it wasn't just SaaS that we looked at because we thought that would be a very myopic way of looking at growth in business around this. So we looked at it. But then we also had to look at a metric that will be a plumb line for us so that we can understand how do you know these are good companies. And the metric that we used for all of this is nrr. Now how many of you are familiar with nrr? Not that many. Not that many. NRR is by default one of the most important metric for your business to survive. Forget thriving, survive in the next few years. If I would have known that, I think we would have had a bigger exit. For example, at Terminus we acquired five different companies over a period of four years. And the reason we were doing is because we were trying to grow top line revenue for the business. And every time we would look at oh, we need to go top line, we need to go top line. Investors are saying that hey, they have invested 100 million, we need to go more. And so we started to do that and we kept forgetting that we need to retain, but not only retain, but expand our customers. That's what net revenue retention is. Yeah. So net revenue retention literally means. And there's a whole formula I can give you, but it literally means that you have customers, they stay with you, and now you can expand with them, meaning that they are actually buying more from you over a period of time. More products, more seats, more departments, more usage, more credits. However, different model that you might have in your business, they're actually buying more from you. So you're no longer going back and saying, well, are you going to renew? You're actually saying, well, what else we want to do? Oh, you have 50 seats. Do you want to now let's go 100 seats. Oh, you are using so many credits now. Let's increase your edits or your usage has gone up. So they're getting charged. And that's what AWS and all of this really pioneered this idea where you no longer are worried about the top of the funnel. So here's a cool way to think about it. If your NRR is over 120%, you can double your revenue in 3.8 years without adding a single new customer. Let me say that again. We're all in B2B. We all love demand gen. We all love to create acquisition, we all love to create campaigns and bring people in. But color of money, last I checked, is still green. It still works. And if your company's making money, it's still good. So if you can actually be in an organization where you can actually drive NRR close to 100 or 110 or 120%, you're actually doubling your revenue as a business without even adding a net new customer. And here's the reverse of it, which is very, very dreadful. If your NRR is close to 70, 75%, you're literally going to die. How's that for a exciting keynote? That company is literally going to die. I was talking to a CMO who recently posted on LinkedIn about three months ago, said, hey, we, you know, I created $50 million pipeline for my company. That was three months ago. And then last month she posted that, hey, I'm let go from this company, I'm looking for a new job. And I asked her like, hey, what happened? You said 50 million. That sounds like a crazy amount of pipeline. Like, that sounds great. She's like, well, that wasn't for the right segment. These people were not going to renew and therefore they were not going to retain, therefore they were not going to expand. So this was not the right icp. So I was working on the wrong ICP for the company that didn't have an NRR connected to it. So if you are not. If there's one thing you can take away from my keynote, this is not a marketing tactic or principle. This is a business principle that I think if we can understand the business of marketing, then marketing the business, there's a big difference in it. The business of marketing will mandate us to think about NRR as a key part of it. So anything that you're doing, if you can connect that to the NRR number or if you don't know what the NRR number is for your company, go and ask that to your CEO or CFO and spend time on it. Like, how do I improve that? It actually, believe it or not, will help you keep your job longer. Better get promoted because that's the health of your business. So I'm not here to tell you another because you're going to hear a lot about positioning with April and Jen is going to talk about demand gen and I'm sure we're going to talk about AI. I'm not going to talk about any of that. I'm talking about how do you keep your job? Is that good? How do you get promoted? How do you actually help your company grow? If you know how to impact that number, if you can, it changes everything. So that's what we use. We used NRR as a plumb line as a way to say, well, if you do have 100% and more NRR, now you're talking about a better company, a longer lasting company. You're not like this amazing wave that goes up and then crashes down the next week. No, no, no. We want something that stays because we want to have businesses that actually can scale out there. So we looked at a lot of it. What was interesting was There are only 40 companies that had NRR of over 120%. There were a lot of private companies that went private because they wanted to keep more of their profits. And how they looked at their business and actually went private having NRR of 120%. So that's the beauty of it. If you can get NRR over 120%, you actually would want to go private and make sure that you have more of the profits in the way people run businesses is like phenomenal how all that would work for you. So this is all very much research focused on. Here are some of the companies, some of you are using these companies. And the reason is because these companies are reportedly having NRR greater than 120%. That's why they stay. That's why they're still alive. People are using it. People are growing with these companies. And you want to build a business that actually does that. If you're able to do that, you'll be the best market in the world.
C
This came up yesterday in one of our workshops that we did. But it seems so simple, but it is so fundamental. I think that most of the challenges that we hear from marketers, it's because marketing is just done in the silo of marketing. When, like, what you're talking about, the real way to move NRR is to be. Well, we need to be strategic about our pricing and our packaging, and we need to have a tight relationship with the product because we need to be building new features. And I think that's where a lot of us are stuck.
B
Yeah.
C
And what you're saying is important because it's like, how do we level up and have a strategy discussion?
B
Yeah.
C
None of this is because the marketing team in a room had a good idea.
B
Yeah.
A
You know.
B
Yeah. I mean, you know, to that point, how many of you are fans of Chick Fil A? This is Vermont. I don't know if Chick Fil a is in Vermont or not.
C
No, they're absolutely not.
B
They don't love it. It's a bad example. Ben and Jerry. I should say. Ben and Jerry. That would do it.
C
Ask ChatGPT why?
B
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Tough crowd. Okay, well, I'll say that because I'm from Atlanta. Love Chick Fil a over there. And I was talking to the VP of marketing of Chick Fil A, and if you ever looked at the marketing of Chick Fil A, they still have the damn cow. And I was like, dude, this must be driving you nuts that you still have the same cow crawling up the wall in big billboards and trying to say, eat more chicken. Like, you know, the marketers must have come up with new campaigns than the cow for many, many years. And he said, you know what? We did research all the time to prove they spent hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars on marketing research to say, when can we change the campaign? Not what positioning would work. Like, what can we change the campaign? They wanted to figure out, how can I change my campaign so I, as marketer, can write on LinkedIn that I changed the campaign. I changed the cow. Right. I made it purple. Like, whatever that is. Right. And the research Always would come back and say, no, the market likes it. That's boring. That's what these companies are doing. The market likes it, the market gets it. They don't need an awesome tagline. They don't need another thing. Yeah, it might be catchy for a day, but even the movements that we know in the SaaS world, like I was at Inbound, it's still called Inbound. And guess what? They don't have an Inbound funnel. It's still called Inbound conference. It's like a circle. So I don't understand how the funnel changed and not. But they didn't change the name of the conference. Why? Because Inbound works. Salesforce is still saying Dreamforce because Dreamforce works. So we gotta figure out how do we make marketing in B2B actually in some ways boring to boring things that actually work. And it may not make you look sexy, it may not make you get it on LinkedIn and show what I created this incredible banner and a thing and that it actually how can I build a business? That's why think about the business.
C
That's why everybody's been sharing those like cluli billboards. You've seen those? Like, yeah, all right, that's cool. Does it work?
B
I mean. And nobody know.
C
Nobody knows.
B
And so the way to go about this is like think about not marketing the business. I'm pretty sure this room is full of great marketers, but think about the business of marketing, which means your job is to actually drive the growth of the business. The reason companies hire marketing is to grow, period. That's it. So if you can figure out how to grow the business and you can help impact. And I'm giving you a clear metric that actually tells you if the company is going to stay there from 12 months from now or six months from now, 18 months from now, that's your NRR. That's your plumb line. So with that being said, these three stages are very, very simple when you think about it. We wrote that in our book. It was sort of the first research we did. But the reason I wanted to bring that up is because it's a squiggly line. It's not an up and to the straight. You see a lot of times people say, well, look at our growth. It's going up and to the right. Not true, not true. Because it typically does never go up into the right. It actually always have this dips and valleys and navigating through all of it. Every single one of the research company that we did all these 100 plus companies we did. They all had these dips and valleys and they happen on days and weeks and months and quarters, but you flatten them out year over year. So they all look up and to the right. But that's not how actually most companies work. And you may be right now in one of these stages. Right now where problem market fit. In our research, we could see a $20 million company still in problem market fit. Any guesses why a $20 million company be in problem market fit? Market is changing. Not really, but you're close. They have one big customer. They are kind of at one place much way closer. What else wrong. Icp. That is probably the closest to it, but I'll dig into that one. I think that's probably the closest to it. They $20 million business. They have five different types of ICPs, five different types of customization, five different ways to sell. You add the complexity. The last time I checked, 1 times 1 times 1 times 1 times 1 is 1. Meaning that if you can create one funnel, one product line in the early stage, you go after one type of market, you one go to market motion. One product, you can actually do a really good job at it. But then you do the same math and say, well, what if we had two different products too early and two different types of ICPs and two different types of go to market motion. Somebody do the math for me. And two different types of process that we want to do and two different types of messaging because they might be two different things. How many of those. Yeah, you're screwed by that time. You really don't know what you're saying. And your website looks like a coffee shop, right? And how many times you would say, well, my website just looks like my competitor's website and they're using my words. And the reason that happens is because everybody just sounds and says the same thing anymore. There is no exit 5. And when they went through that, I'm calling David, Dave, DG, I don't know what I'm calling now, but Exit 5 guy over there talking about Exit 5. Because that, oh, nobody can copy that. And that's the genius of that. So everybody has to think through that. So when you go through this and we looked at companies like, well, growth happens in stages and every single company that you look at out there, they all went through that. And I use McDonald's as an example. Another, I don't know why I'm talking fast foods today, but McDonald's in 1940, they had everything from barbecue to orange juice. But then they did a research in about 1948 and they said everybody is like sangram. They like hamburgers, fries and soda.
A
This episode is brought to you by a team that I've personally hired twice, Compound Growth Marketing. And they're smart enough to sign up as a sponsor for us here at exit 5. I work with John and the team at CGM, both at privy and Drift. And if you're trying to figure out demand gen, they're the team you should call. Especially in a world where so much is changing. With AI they know what they're doing. They're grounded in first principles. But they're also fast and adapting to what's changing with technology today. They've managed over 50 million in ad spend for fast growing startups and public companies. But here's what really sets them apart. They don't just run campaigns, they build systems that scale. Compound Growth Marketing has leaders and consultants who've been in the trenches at companies like hunt club, goto, workable monster.com and IBM. So they show up like true operators, not vendors. They understand what it's like to have the pressure to hit pipeline targets and to be accountable to the sales team inside of your company. And the biggest unlock, they blend demand gen with something that they call GTM Engineering. It's a mix of low code automation, AI workflows and systems thinking that helps drive more revenue. It's not just about leads, it's about building smarter, more efficient go to market machines. Most agencies are still stuck on cost per lead models. But Compound focuses on full funnel roi, pipeline creation and long term growth. If you want a partner that understands your goals, moves fast and can actually help you win, go to Compound Growth marketing dot com. That's Compound Growth marketing dot com and make sure you tell them that I sent you there.
B
So they cut down everything in 1940. They actually went through just three items and they grew like crazy and they got that. That's the proverbial way of thinking about product market fit. I promise you this, if you go back and look at, or even in the breaks looked at all the things you do in marketing, there is probably 60 to 70%. And I'm not exaggerating because we do advisory on this thing a lot. There's 60 to 17% of the things you do that if you didn't do, nobody would know. Like imagine the next newsletter you send, you don't send and nobody would know. I know that hurts. That's your job. But that's the difference between business of marketing and marketing. The business it's not a to do list. It's not three webinars a week and two blog posts and one social post. It is about finding what sticks with your customer and be boring at it.
C
Do with a question.
B
Yes, sir.
C
Hi, I'm Dave from Exit 5. How do you get off that hamster wheel? Like this comes up a lot, right? And I think this is awesome because I think there's a lot of times where marketing does feel like the order taking department. And this came up yesterday. Colin, I'm just thinking of you. Have you where like it was like, hey, all these people push back. Like marketing feels like the no department because they want us to do this, this, this, this, this, this. So how do you say no and say like, hey, we're not going to do these things because we need to go do X. And how do you become credible? How do you get the permission to go do that?
B
How do you.
C
It's like a drug, right? Like how do you.
B
It is.
C
How do you get off that? How do you stop the Ozempic and still stay fit? Like how do you do that?
B
You need a lot of pills and a lot of scotch and all of it. I think it's really hard. I mean I wish there was a silver bullet to that, like an answer to that. But here's how I've seen that work. First of all, go figure out what the top three priorities of your business are. Maybe two, maybe one. Go in there and if you cannot connect that back to the NRR number, you can challenge that. And you have to learn to challenge it. Because just like that CMO that generated 50 million pipeline, you don't want to be. That is the worst thing in the world. When you feel successful, you're high fiving and the next week you're told like, hey, we need you. No more. You don't want that. And the reason that happens and the reason why we can't say no a lot of times is because, whoa, well, okay, I don't know what I'm doing. So let me try this, let me try that. That just is to me it also means that, well, you're not sure how you're doing is driving business outcomes. So the no is only possible when we say, hey, we are doing all of these things. Which one of these things would you want me to stop? That's a great question to ask. I do that with my kids. It works. But it's hard. It's very hard. Because if sales are not closing, marketing launch a campaign. If customer success is having shown is killing your business marketing. What are we doing with our customers? So you're all end up becoming the person who actually is in the middle of everything. So in a way it's awesome and in a way it's like the worst job ever. But you have a role to play and the only way we can, I think we can play. And as a CMO myself twice, I could tell you the only way it worked for me was going and saying, well, here are the top three metrics and here are the three things and here are the projects we have. Which one do you want me to drop? So I never say no. I never say no. I always let them pick which ones and I'll tell them what each one of them are doing. A lot of times it's just communication and what's going on in the middle. So I'll get into now the rest of the results and the operating system and all of it. But I want to, I want to just go ahead and say it out loud that, look, go to market is hard. At one point we all had the inbound system. That's all we did. The best market in the world were good at inbound. And then we added outbound and then we added plg. And then an investor in the company said, hey, you should be doing PLG work. Why are you not doing that? So you added that. Then you started building community because everybody was building community at that time as a SaaS business. And I did that. And then you started doing events and all of a sudden you're like, I'm a SaaS business or an events business. I don't know. Like, you know, so you're starting to do that and you're doing all of it. Then you start at a partner LED growth. So there are like six different go to market motions that most marketers are actually running. You may be running 2, 3, 4 of these. So it's extremely hard to figure part. It's. It's becoming increasingly hard. And you are, you fall in this valley of death at any given point. We call it like the five valleys of death. In our research, when we do with companies like, which valley of death are you in? Like, let's just get it out. And so once you know that now you know how to navigate. Remember the squiggly line? The squiggly line is all about do you know where you are and do you know how you can get out of it? Do you know where you are and you know how you're going to get out of it? That is the whole gymnastics of what go to market really is all about. And ultimately, I had to learn this the hard way. At Pardot, when I was running marketing, my sales leader came to me and said, hey, we need more leads. I'm like, I gave you 30,000 leads last quarter. Like, I don't got no leads. What do I do? It's my gumbo machine. Like, where do I put the dollar and get a bunch of leads for you again? And he would not listen. He's like, dude, just go get me more leads. That's when I decided I need to go do something else. And that's what led to starting Terminus. It was like, I'm going to try to fix the marketing sales issue. Why can't we focus on pipeline and expansion and velocity and stuff like that? And as we started Terminus, it was a new category in abm. Guess what I hit? I hit a wall with retention. And I said, man, the customer success team sucks because it's not just sales now. Sales, I think I got a handle on it. But the cs. So we started to fire a lot of CS people. We did that to try to fix that. We thought that will fix the churn. Let's hire more experienced people to solve our bad product problems. And that didn't work. And so all along I learned that, oh, we have been pointing fingers the whole time. Instead, if you would have said, hey, what's our go to market problem? How many of you have sales and marketing alignment meeting? Kill it. Does it work? I mean, think about it. If you go to a therapy as a husband and wife, which everybody should, if you're married. If you're not, you should certainly go then if you want to get married, if you go there and saying, all right, we're going to make both of you talk to each other. Go. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. So in general, if you call what you call the naming has a lot of power. What the lesson that Dave went through earlier was like, phenomenal, that naming does have power. So call it the go to market meeting. Call it a meeting that actually is about solving a business problem. Because go to market is the business. If you call it a sales pipeline meeting, guess what? The salesperson is coming with all kinds of defensive line and review of like, why my job is better and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. You call it a campaign reporting meeting. The marketing is coming with campaign that you don't understand a thing about it. But it's amazing, right? But Instead, just call something that actually is about the business. Guys, all I'm really saying is that understand the business of marketing. It is the best role in the world. Only if you can think about the business of marketing, not marketing the business. This is one of my favorite quotes of all times. If you have read Atomic Habits, if you have not read it, you should go get it. Read it. He talks about this idea that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you rise to the level of your systems. And it made a big impact on me, recognizing that, oh, yeah, we always created goals. You all have goals, your company has goals. And we all have, like personal goals like be healthy and all that stuff. Or company like, you've got to hit so much pipeline, but ultimately only a few of us are able to get there. So the question is, what is your system? What is the system that gets you to that point? So what I want to give you is this. And the QR code is really the recording. I'm not selling a free course, Dave, but it has a recording of all of it. So you all can have access to it. Because the research is so deep, you can just go do that. But it literally came down to this system. And this is where I'm going to park. It came down to all these companies. All the research you have ever done has led to these eight questions. If you and your organization can answer these eight questions clearly, mark my words. I'm not talking about certainty. Nobody knows except death and taxes. There's no certainty you know of it, right? But clarity, what ICP you want to go after? Whatever. These eight questions are the most important questions that bring alignment, clarity, and trust in your team. And note each one of these words in here, I've highlighted the one. They are very intentional. The worst question is, where can we grow? Sounds smart, but it's the worst question because it doesn't have any parameters to it. But if you ask the question like, where can we grow the most? Now you're talking about, oh, do we have product for that? Do we have customer success that can service that product? Do we have enough gross margin on that product? Is there a market for it? You're going to ask all kind of qualifying questions that makes you make great business decisions. So I'm going to park at that. And we'll go through examples if you want to, through all of it. But these eight questions is literally the system that seems to be used by all these companies. They are very clear about these questions. They know exactly what their differentiated point of View is they know exactly what their ICP looks like, where they can grow, they know exactly how they're going to expand with their customers. Once they know that, they are just boring after that. And I want to encourage all of you, if you didn't want you came for creative and better ideas. Become a boring company. It pays you really well, it has great benefits, it stays with you long and you get to be on a slide on somebody else's presentation like mine. So you get to do amazing things when you do that. So I'll park at that and open up with questions, but thank you so much for letting me share this.
D
My name is Nick. We talked a little bit about this at breakfast, but I'd like to go deeper on it. I'm sure other people have the question. I've tried to as cmo try to spearhead more go to market initiatives and it's like herding cats when you have CS and sales and product and so it's hard to get everybody on the same page. So instead of trying to get everybody on the same page, I think what kind of a discovery for me is let's try to just get the CEO on the same page and let him, he who has the power to hire and fire, let them get everybody on the same page. So what are some different ways that I can go back and talk to my CEO and say this is really important and just sell him so that he can then drive the process?
B
I love that. Nick. First of all, the reality is that CEO owns go to market in all of our research and we have books we can give away as well in this. But that was the number one thing that CEO owns go to market. They may or may not know it, but that's literally they're making go to market decision all day long. So I will phrase that question very differently. It's not about, hey, this is really important and we better do this thing and can you help me here to do it? It's like, hey, do you think this is important? And I put that in front of him saying, hey, can you help me answer these questions so we can understand? What do you think? If would all of us, all of us as executive team would be answered the same way as you did? Should we just do that as a group to make sure that we're on the same page? Give the CEO all the ego that they need because ultimately they're making decisions and they may be making it with some data points that not everybody's gonna have because they're the CEO, but they are the most invested in this. They actually want this to work. No CEO wants to go in and say, hey, have the cat and dog fight in those meetings, what they want is actually answers. They just don't know how to phrase it. And they're asking these same questions in different ways. And if you put in front of them, I promise you the first thing is like, yeah, yeah, I think I know what the answer because in their mind they've already answered it. But the question is, do you think all of us have the same answers? That's what I would do right away and see where you are.
E
Hi, I'm Rachel and I'm curious. I mean, I love what you said about systems. A lot of these questions rely on customer discovery. And when you're small, you can intimately know your customers. As you scale, it gets harder.
B
Yeah.
E
And so I'm curious if what systems you have, I guess to do really good customer discovery and not just what they're saying they want, but truly what they want and will use and will pay for.
B
Yeah. Well, how big is the company?
E
We're small. A few million.
B
Yeah. So is this the problem in your company? Are you talking generically if companies have more.
E
No, I'm talking generically because it's something we're really good at and I see the need to continue to be really good at that.
B
Yeah. Okay. Well, first of all, I think truly, if you're companies that actually. I didn't even say AI, Can I get an applause for that? I didn't say AI in my, you know how hard it was for me not to say AI in the whole thing. Because the point is that AI is not going to solve all the problems. But on a question like this where you have, let's say you have 100 customers today or a thousand customers, you can actually deploy an AI agent today and say, how are my customers using my product? You can actually get that data way more than asking the four fancy same people who say all good things about you and they are just drinking the Kool Aid, you actually don't want their feedback. You want the feedback of all of it. So with AI, you actually can get all of that data and actually ingest that. In trying to answer these questions better than ever before, and I think it's a must for it. But most companies don't have a problem there because they have all these data points and conversations. The problem, and one of the slides I had was the reason companies are not hitting their revenue goals is not because they need another tool. How many of you need another tool to hit your number. How many of you need another AI agent that will just do the trick for you and send all those DMs and get meetings booked? It doesn't work. What works is alignment. This works. I can promise you this. Like, if you get clarity on this at the executive level, it will work for you. Because we have just seen that in our research over and over again. This is hard work. This is work that requires humans to talk to each other and actually align on something. Not marketing aligned to sales. Like, you could see. Like, we didn't even say brand and demand. We didn't even split that out. Brand and demand to us is the same like you and I, Dave, you and I have talked about that forever. Is that why do companies even split that? It's not. There's no reason to split that. It actually drives your differentiated point of view. So the issue is not those things. The issue is not having clarity on this.
C
Yeah, this is. Oliver, really enjoyed the presentation. I think this, the sort of system side of things is really interesting. I spent the last 12 years in the SaaS kind of product world and recently switched over to services and consulting and advisory. Curious to understand how this changes in that environment where maybe you don't have sort of products that people buy or implement, but you have services that people are a part of and things like that.
B
Yeah, we were shocked how well it works for that. I think the first 60% of our advisory work is actually in the services industry. I was shocked by that because in the service industry, you're always thinking about this. It's actually more natural in a services business. In a SaaS business, this is unnatural because in a SaaS business, you're like, hey, let's just go and try this and spend a lot of money and launch this campaign. In a SaaS business, let's just try that messaging and stuff. In a services business, the cash flow is king. You got to figure that part out. Because most of the services business don't raise money. So this is actually more natural to them. And 60% of our work, this works. I know this works really well. The hardest thing for services business is really, how are you going to upserve your customers? Because most services business are based on hourly rate or projects and they just try to keep going on that and you don't know what else can you do? What else can I bolt on that will actually keep us with the same customer? That's the hardest question to answer for SaaS businesses. That's easy. They can Add new features, new products, new service. You know, they can do that.
E
Hi, I'm Chelsea with Recast CyberSecurity company. Regarding NRR, we have about 110% NRR.
B
Nice. And we do give it up for that 110%. Whoo.
E
We do very well on cross selling and expansion into our customers.
B
You have to.
E
However, we are not meeting our goals on new business.
B
Yeah.
E
So we have 40% growth rate, 35 million in ARR.
B
You have a 40% growth rate and 110 NRR. You know, you're one of the rare ones.
E
Yes.
B
Okay.
E
However, we are not meeting the goals on the new logo side. And so now there's increased attention on everything. New logo. It's all about bringing a new logo.
B
Yeah.
E
So we've totally. I mean we're not doing anything on the. For marketing on. On cross sell right now.
B
Yeah.
E
However, based on, you know, if we want to get to 120% NRR and we shift our focus to cross sell, I'm certain we can get there. But do you see, you know, down the road a ceiling of can we continuously reach 120% NRR without adding a significant amount of new logo to cross sell into in future years?
B
It's a great question. It's great. First of all, reaching that kind of is like phenomenal. I think people should talk to you. I want to come talk to you after this because that's fantastic. How did you do that or what? Your product must be really good. That actually allows you to like, that's like a by default has to happen. The question for you is like, it's a great problem to have. You're not going to go out of business. I can guarantee that. Right. Like, so you don't have to worry about that. And now from a growth perspective, if you're at 35, 40% growth rate, that's actually a good healthy growth rate. It's not bad. But maybe the security world right now is growing massively. So compared to all of your peers, you guys probably are not growing as fast as they all are growing. And that's why the pressure comes in. But that's literally your first question. Where can you grow the most? So whatever amount of time you can spend on segmenting and isolating and saying can we go in this particular vertical or this particular industry or this whatever, all those things is literally going to be the whole focus on it. I don't think there comes a time once you start hitting those kind of 110%. I've not seen Companies go down. Our research did not show that because the reason Most companies get 210% is because they have a really good sticky product and people can stop using security once they install it. And it everything. But your growth rate will always, always at some point is going to be under question because you're probably really good for that particular industry. And now you almost need to reinvent yourself. You have to almost go after a new market out there. And for that market, the NRR might be not as good as the market that exists, and that's okay. So it's almost like launching a new business out there and you have to look at it differently. You have to look at NRR differently. You have to look at. To go back from a problem product platform. You want to go through those stages and again and again as you launch new products. But sounds like you're in a great place. And I think that's fantastic.
E
Thank you.
C
I feel like sometimes you got to ask a question in here to just feel like, yeah, I am doing a good job.
B
Yeah. Right. I mean, that's awesome.
C
Any other questions for Sangram before we. Before we wrap?
B
Yeah, I was just curious if, hypothetically, we don't know the answer to any of those questions. It's a hypothetical, right? It's not. Yeah, totally, totally get it.
E
Where would you start if you.
B
Obviously you kind of want to address all of them at the same time.
E
But it's the real world, and if.
B
You had to pick a place to.
E
Start, where would it be?
B
Oh, gosh, that's a great question. First of all, thank you for that honesty. I really do, because I think most companies don't have answers to these questions.
C
It was a hypothetical. What do you mean? Honest?
B
Yeah, yeah. I'm just reading too much. I mean, yeah, I know most companies do not have answers, clear answers or aligned answers on these. Most companies. So the hypothetical is actually true. Most companies don't. The goal is to see how far are you from it. And if you were to start somewhere, I would always start with like the ROI and how retention and rr. So the bottom two, the customer time to value and customer expansion. Because if that doesn't work, no matter how fast you grow at the top and some of you have probably experienced it, you're going to come tumbling down very fast. Because if that number is not good, the writing is on the wall. If you're not at 100% or more NRR, like, you have to demand your company to think about it. Because a lot of times executives and investors and all like, no, no, let's just grow. But I've never seen a business that is at 70% NRR and still in business after three years or so. So if you're at that, that's your bigger problem. It doesn't really matter if you created a great campaign and created more demand at the top. You can't retain it. You're not in a, in a market. That means you need to really figure out which market do you need to serve, where they will stay, and if customers stay with you and you become a logo on a slide, that's a great business. All right, guys, thank you so much.
C
Give it up for Sangram. Hell yeah.
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe. Subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Hey. This episode is brought to you by our friends@customerio. Do you remember? I'm old enough to remember this. You remember when a personalized message meant slapping someone's first name into an email? Hello, David or hello Gerhardt. Yeah, well, those days are long gone in marketing. AI has raised the bar for lifecycle marketing because now you can deliver smarter context aware communication that actually feels personal. And you can do it at scale without hiring five more content people personally. Personalization today doesn't just mean using my name. It actually means having context about any previous interactions. But the problem here happens because even though this sounds great in theory, most teams aren't actually doing it. They're stuck with broken reporting, siloed data and outdated stacks. It's often easier just to keep doing things the way you've always done them, right? Isn't that kind of the the norm? Default to the status quo? So customer IO they did a survey on this. They surveyed 600 marketers just like you and me to figure out what's actually working and what's broken in. This is what we call lifecycle marketing and they detailed how the best teams are actually solving these problems. The report breaks down 2025 priorities, where budgets are moving and how to tame the measurement mess. Real world examples from brands like Notion and Monarch Money that use AI Personalization experime and understanding the next chapter of AI what's on Marketers Wishlist right now and how customer journeys can get smarter, not just faster. It's packed with examples, data and strategies you can put to work right now. If you want to get smarter about lifecycle marketing, this is a great free resource, so go check it out. You can get it@customerio exit 5 and you'll learn how to build lifecycle marketing that keeps up with today's expectations. That's customer I.O. exit 5.
Podcast: The Dave Gerhardt Show
Host: Dave Gerhardt
Guest: Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder & CEO of GTM Partners
Date: October 30, 2025
Recorded Live at: DRIVE 2025, Burlington, Vermont
This episode features a high-energy, research- and wisdom-packed keynote from Sangram Vajre, focused on demystifying go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Drawing from his experience leading $100M+ companies and in-depth research of 100 organizations, Sangram explores the foundational principles of sustainable business growth, frameworks for aligning teams, the role of Net Revenue Retention (NRR), and how to apply a systems mindset to building lasting companies.
Theme:
Understanding go-to-market as a transformational, cross-functional process, and equipping listeners with the frameworks and real-world insights needed to drive repeatable, scalable growth—in any market, at any company stage.
“Go to market is a transformational process.”
(06:15, Sangram Vajre)
"Growth seems like a black box right now... None of us knows the exact go to market play or growth play that’s just going to work."
(09:55, Sangram Vajre)
“If your NRR is over 120%, you can double your revenue in 3.8 years without adding a single new customer.”
(15:12, Sangram Vajre)
“If you don’t know your NRR, ask your CEO or CFO and figure out how you can improve it.”
(16:22, Sangram Vajre)
“If there’s one thing you take away from my keynote, this is not a marketing tactic or principle. This is a business principle.”
(16:40, Sangram Vajre)
“Most of the challenges that we hear from marketers, it’s because marketing is just done in the silo of marketing.”
(17:51, Dave Gerhardt)
“They wanted to figure out, how can I change my campaign... But the research always would come back and say, no, the market likes it.”
(19:00, Sangram Vajre)
“You add the complexity… two different types of ICPs, two different types of go to market motion… you’re screwed by that time.”
(22:24, Sangram Vajre)
“Go figure out what the top three priorities of your business are... If you cannot connect that back to the NRR number, you can challenge that.”
(27:08, Sangram Vajre)
“You do not rise to the level of your goals, you rise to the level of your systems.”
(31:53, quoted from Atomic Habits by James Clear)
“Become a boring company. It pays you really well, it has great benefits, it stays with you long, and you get to be on a slide on somebody else’s presentation.”
(34:40, Sangram Vajre)
“The reality is, CEO owns go to market. They may or may not know it…”
(35:47, Sangram Vajre)
“You can actually deploy an AI agent today and say, how are my customers using my product?... But the real problem is not tools, it’s alignment.”
(37:47, Sangram Vajre)
“60% of our advisory work is actually in the services industry… in a services business, cash flow is king, so this is actually more natural.”
(40:00, Sangram Vajre)
“I would always start with the ROI and retention—customer time to value and customer expansion… If that doesn’t work… you’re going to come tumbling down.”
(44:35, Sangram Vajre)
For more resources, frameworks, and to connect with this community, visit exit5.com.