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!

Let's dig in.

Let me start with a story.

I ran marketing at Pardot, a roughly $10 million company. We got acquired by ExactTarget for $100 million. Then six months later, ExactTarget got acquired by Salesforce for over $2.7 billion. That's with a B.

So I went from working at a $10 million company to a $10 billion company almost overnight.

And I had to learn a question fast: how do you decide what products to sell?

At Salesforce, this got real. We had over a hundred different products all over the place. And I kept asking myself, how does Salesforce actually know which products are good and which ones create the most value? Do the reps just try to sell whatever?

What I learned was fascinating.

Salesforce knew exactly where the highest margin lived for every single product. They had a categorization of their highest-value products, and they built the whole company around it.

The way they did it was by dividing the entire business into what they call clouds. If you know anything about Salesforce, you know they're big on cloud. Their whole event, Dreamforce, is built on it. Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Developer Cloud and it keeps going.

What that did was let customers choose which cloud to subscribe to, so Salesforce could create the most value for them. And it all came from answering one hard question: which product creates the highest customer value?

Here's the part that should stick with you.

When Pardot got acquired, we became part of the Sales Cloud. And I was confused.

Pardot is a marketing product. What is it doing in the Sales Cloud?

The reason was simple. Sales Cloud was built for B2B, and Pardot was a B2B marketing automation platform. Salesforce knew that if they attached Pardot to Sales Cloud, they could sell the exact same product my little company had been selling.

Before the acquisition, we sold Pardot for about $1,000 a month. Salesforce sold the same product for $20K, $30K, $50K, and eventually over $100K a year.

Same product. The difference was that Salesforce understood the highest customer value. They knew customers would value marketing automation as part of the CRM they already had. That's the whole game.

When we built Terminus, we grew to $1 million in year one, $5 million in year two, $15 million in year three, and kept going. And we had to answer that exact same question.

Here's what we did. We launched a brand new category called ABM, account-based marketing. And we asked ourselves: what is the highest customer value here?

Back in 2015, nobody could advertise at the account level. If you wanted to advertise to just Coke, Pepsi, Lowe's, or Home Depot, you couldn't target only those companies. That's why we originally called it account-based advertising.

So we launched the whole category of account-based marketing with one tiny product inside Terminus. And because marketers could finally target the exact companies they wanted to sell to, we took off. A million, five, fifteen.

We grew that fast because we understood the highest customer value: giving marketers the ability to target their target accounts, fast. That's how you know you've found the answer.

This is the thing most CEOs miss.

The answer to "which products create the highest customer value" tells you what to do and what not to do.

Should you launch a new product? This question answers it.
Should you open an office in a new location? This question answers it.
Where should the investment go? Same question.

When you can answer it with confidence, you stop guessing and start compounding. When you can't, you spread yourself across a hundred products like pre-framework Salesforce and hope the reps figure it out.

Go to runongtmos.com/move and take the assessment. It'll help you figure out how to find your highest customer value and answer this question for your own business, so you can decide what to build, what to sell, and what to walk away from.

Now, let's get moving.

love,
sangram

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