Over the last 20 years, we've built two $100M+ companies and made hundreds of mistakes along the way. Everything we do runs on our GTM Operating System frameworks. We even wrote a book called MOVE — which became a WSJ best-selling book on go-to-market, quoted by Geoffrey Moore (author of the iconic Crossing the Chasm).

Our mission: help 100,000 businesses run on GTM OS to build profitable companies. We're at about 3,000 now so we have a long way to go.

We also run the GTMarketplace — connecting CEOs with 100+ certified fractional CMOs, CROs, and ops leaders all over the world who know the GTM Operating System.

With that intro, let's get moving!

At Terminus, we went from zero to $1M in 9 months. No 5 people marketing team. No 10 people sales team. We started with $1 million in the first year, grew to $5 million in the second year, and reached $15 million in the third year. Eventually, we sold the company for over $100 million.

Then we did it again at GTM Partners. Same timeline. Same result. Still no marketing team. No sales team. In the past five years, our services business has made about $10 million.

I’m not sharing that to brag. I’m sharing it because when I say the same thing worked both times, I mean it. And I think you need to hear it.

Here's the context: Terminus was 2014-2015. Up market. We raised a little money. We were building a new category called account-based marketing. The conditions were good.

GTM Partners was 2021. Post-COVID. Nobody was investing. The conditions were hard.

And yet, same result.

That's what a system does. It works regardless of the market conditions.

The difference wasn't luck, timing, or funding. It was eight questions. Everybody in the company knew them. Everybody could answer them. And every decision we made ran through them.

Here's the thing I want to say upfront: the goal of these eight questions is not certainty. It's clarity.

Certainty says "this will work." Clarity says "we all understand why we're betting on this." Most businesses don't fail because they had the wrong strategy. They fail because they had no system. And without a system, even the right strategy dies in the chaos.

Here are the eight questions we answered at both companies. You should consider them too.

We also made a detailed video if you prefer listening.

Not where can you grow, but where can you grow the most.

At Terminus, that answer was demand gen marketers. They had budget. They were ready to buy. We went to the VP of Marketing level and said: you can do more with account-based marketing.

At GTM Partners, we believed the CEO should own go-to-market. So the answer was the executive suite. We stopped marketing to marketers. We started doing roundtables, roadshows, and executive sessions: rooms where only CEOs and GTM leaders were invited.

Two completely different answers. Same question.

That level of focus is what made everything else work.

At Terminus, the first product was account-based advertising. Easy to implement. Easy to get excited about. Sometimes 25 to 30 new clients per event. Why? Because it was easy to buy.

As we grew, we kept asking the same question: what do our customers need next?

Analytics. Chat. Email signatures. First-party data.

We ended up buying five companies, not because of a strategy offsite, but because the question kept leading us there.

At GTM Partners, what CEOs wanted in 2021 was clarity on the new playbook. Post-COVID, they didn't know the rules anymore. So we invented the GTM Operating System and started doing advisory around its eight pillars.

One idea, implemented well, changed the trajectory of their business.

That was the highest value we could deliver.

At Terminus, we created Flip My Funnel. More than 100,000 people became part of that movement.

The idea was simple: instead of dumping a million leads at the top of a funnel and hoping 1% convert, flip it. Start with the best accounts. Engage them. Turn them into advocates.

That idea, not the software, became our differentiated point of view. A podcast. An event series. A community.

At GTM Partners, the differentiated point of view became the GTM OS itself. CEOs don’t want marketing vs. sales vs. CS bickering. They want one operating system that makes every function work together.

Run your business on GTM OS. That's the point of view. And it stuck.

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At Terminus, the answer was events. Nobody in 2014 was running executive-oriented events for demand gen leaders. So we created Flip My Funnel events and invited our competitors.

Analysts came. Industry leaders came. Because it wasn’t a Terminus event. It was a movement.

Every time, we walked out with 25 to 30 new customers.

At GTM Partners, the answer was events again, but a completely different version. For a $100K advisory relationship, you can’t run ads to people who don’t know you. It would take thousands of touchpoints before they trust you enough to buy.

So we did intimate CEO roundtables. 30 to 40 people. Not recorded. Vulnerable. Peers learning from peers.

That built trust faster than any campaign ever could.

This is the one most companies get wrong.

At Terminus, we thought ROI was about product features. It wasn't. For our customers, the ROI was the moment they could run an account-based ad campaign for the very first time and watch impressions hit specific accounts. The breakthrough wasn't the feature. It was the experience of it working.

At GTM Partners, the ROI was clarity itself. One framework. One conversation. One idea they could implement that Monday. For a CEO, that's worth more than a 200-page roadmap.

I learned this at Salesforce after Pardot was acquired. I went from a $10M company to a $10B company and couldn't figure out how they forecasted so precisely. Then I found out: 60-70% of their revenue was already locked in with existing customers. They were only truly forecasting 20-30% of the number.

That changed how I built Terminus. Instead of always hunting new customers, we kept asking: what do our current customers need next? That question drove five acquisitions.

At GTM Partners, we built a value ladder. $5K workshops. $50K advisory. $100K research. $300K strategic partnerships. Every time a CEO wanted more clarity, more transformation, more time with us — there was a natural next step.

Upsell isn't a sales tactic. It's a value design question.

At Terminus, the metric was NRR - Net Revenue Retention. Here’s a stat I tell every CEO: if your NRR is 120%, you can double your revenue in 3.8 years without adding a single new customer. We knew that number cold.

At GTM Partners, the metric that emerged was revenue per employee. With AI changing everything, the question isn’t just, “Is this person adding value?” It’s, “Are we getting 10x return on every dollar invested?”

If you put $100K in, you should see $1M in outcome.

Different companies. Different stages. Different metrics. Same discipline.

This is the most important one. And the one most teams skip.

At Terminus in the early months, we were chaos. Selling, evangelizing, writing copy, running events. Doing everything.

What brought us back every time was walking through the other seven questions together.

Thinking about a new hire? Run it through the eight questions. Considering an acquisition? Same thing.

The eight questions became our decision filter, not a meeting agenda.

At GTM Partners today, over 3,000 companies are running on GTM OS. Every one of them is using some version of these questions to get aligned. Not arguing about whose department is winning. Asking better questions:

Do we have clarity? Do we have alignment? Do we have enough trust that even if this bet doesn’t work, we’ll be okay?

When you stop blaming your functions and start running on a system — everything changes.

These eight questions will not give you certainty. They'll give you clarity.

Two companies. Two market conditions. Same eight questions. $0 to $1M in 9 months — both times.

Go to runongtmos.com/move and take the assessment. Over 3,000 companies have used it to get clarity on these eight questions. Free. Takes 10 minutes. And it will show you exactly where you're clear and where you're not.

love,
sangram

p.s. 100,000+ GTM leaders read our content every day. If you want more strategies like this, follow along at runongtmos.com — and let's get moving.