Rocket GTM 🚀 - Avoid this critical GTM mistake

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One Major Mistake to Avoid

When building a house builders are focused on doing a good job, they're not focused which job to do, or whether the house is built in the right place. All of that has been validated beforehand by the architect and site manager.

Taking a product to market is the same thing. There is the preparation and validation phase, before the execution phase.

The biggest mistake founders and go-to-market leaders make is:

Attempting to execute a business model, before validating which business model to execute.

It sounds obvious, but it's a common problem.

Whether a conscious decision or not, it happens because of an unspoken assumption that product-market fit is validated. This assumption can be fatal.

The objective of a Go-To-Market team isn't to execute an unproven business model, it's to validate which business model to execute. They exist to validate a set of hypotheses and determine which business model to invest time and effort into.

Revenue is not the goal

Focusing on revenue is a common mistake. This is what I call an acquisition focused go-to-market. Although this sounds ridiculous,, winning customers isn't the objective. Winning customers is a consequence of product-market fit, but product-market fit and validating the business model is the goal itself.

Winning customers is a consequence of product-market fit, but not the goal itself. The goal is to achieve product-market fit and validate the business model.

Focusing on revenue, instead of what makes revenue possible, leads to bad practices. Deals are closed at all costs. Low-fit customers sneak in the pipeline. Learnings are foregone in order to focus on closing. It's an ugly spiral that takes everyone away from what really matters. Achieving PMF and validating which business model to execute.

In addition to this failure, focusing on revenue can create unnecessary team tensions. When leadership make the false assumption that PMF and GTMF have been validated, the only excuse for poor results must be poor execution. How can you be sure whether the plan was executed poorly, or the plan itself was the issue?

Focusing on revenue in the early stages of go-to-market doesn't work.

There are five stages to company building

1. Build the product

2. Validate the market

3. Validate the business model

4. Scale the business model

5. Achieve profitability

Focusing on revenue makes the assumption that you've already conquered steps one, two, and three and are now ready to scale the business model.

This can work, but only if you strike gold in having product-market fit (PMF) and go-to-market fit (GTMF) first time around, without any need for iteration. It's extremely rare, but it can happen.

In fact, this is exactly what happened at Spendesk when we launched the UK and German markets. We had a strong product-market fit in France, our core market. When I was hired to launch the UK I picked up the phone, sent a bunch of cold emails, and started to execute a sales process. It worked! We didn't need to validate PMF because we already had it. But we were extremely lucky. When I moved to the US last year, this was not the case.

We arrived in the US four years late. There was a lot of well funded competition, all going after the same customer. There was a strong pain-fit, but our solution wasn't working in this new environment.

Coming to the market with a revenue focus slowed our learning. We continued trying to close the same customer far longer than we should have. Had we been focused on validated learning and laid out a set of hypotheses in the beginning, it would have been clear that we needed to change either the product (what we sell), the segment (who we sell to), or the positioning (how we sell it).

This is when I came across the Customer Development Process laid out by Steve Blank in his book called 'The Four Steps to an Epiphany'. It completely changed the game for our team.

What to do instead

To validate your business model you must start with a set of hypotheses. Everything you do should seek to validate or nullify these hypotheses as quickly as possible. Only once validated can you be confident in investing in growth. If they are nullified, you must take your learnings and begin iterating using the PSP Framework.

1. Define a set of hypotheses

2. Validate or nullify them

3. If validated, invest in growth

4. If nullified, learn and iterate either product, segment, or positioning

5. Rinse and repeat

Your hypotheses may look something like:

• Our ideal customer profile is between 20-200 employees with an in-house finance team

• Our current MVP (minimum viable product) is sufficient to get early traction

• The US market is trying to solve the same problems as our EU customers

• The product required to solve these problems won't need to be adapted

There are a multitude of ways you could go about validating these hypotheses. Trying to sell your product and seeing what happens is definitely one of them. But it's not the only way.

You could equally open a private beta with a waitlist. Launch a landing page and see who signs up. Interview your ideal customers in return for Amazon vouchers.

GTM motions are all about quickly validating hypotheses and figuring out what the right business model should be. It's not about executing an existing business model, because you don't have one yet.

If you're struggling to get traction ask yourselves this question:

• are we focusing on revenue or validated learning?