In today's post, I have a free gift for you. It's called Seven Truths and a Lie, and here's the uncomfortable part: what you'll be surprised to learn is that we've all been taught a lie about go-to-market.
Let's dig in.
The Two Questions Nobody Agrees On
For years we've been asking the brightest minds in go-to-market two simple questions.
What is go-to-market?
And who owns it?
Sounds basic. It isn't. These are the exact problems you're probably wrestling with in your own business right now, and even the best in the world don't answer them the same way.
So we set out to conclusively decide who owns go-to-market, and to separate the truths from the one lie we've all been told.
We Spent Half a Million Dollars to Get the Real Answers
I sat down, one-on-one, with some of the sharpest people in this field:
Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm and some of the best books ever written on go-to-market. (1M+ copies solid)
Christopher Lochhead, co-author of Play Bigger and creator of Category Design.
Sydney Sloan, CMO of some of the most well-known unicorns out there, with a real point of view of her own.
Jill Rowley, GTM leader at Salesforce, Eloqua, Hubspot, Marketo and many leading brands
Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner at High Alpha (sold ExactTarget to Salesforce for $2.7B)
Meagen Eisenberg, one of most successful CMOs with 20+ exits, 3 IPOs since 2011
Nick Mehta, Evangelized the Customer Success category and ex-CEO of Gainsight ($100M+ ARR company)
Sydney Sloan, 4x CMO and currently working as Executive in Residence at Scale Ventures Partners
Kelly Ford Buckley, Growth Equity investor with 200+ exits
Kyle Lacy, CMO at Docebo, GTM Advisor, 3x Author
Jay Baer, 5x best-selling author and CEO of Convince and Convert
and a several others
This became a documentary backed by 5 years of deep research. Over half a million dollars, spent to get honest answers from people who have actually done it again and again.
WATCH The Documentary: Seven Truths and a Lie
So What Are The Seven Truths?
Here's what came out of those conversations.
Read these and see which ones you're living.
Truth #1: Go-to-market is like building a product. You start with the problem. And it turns out picking any problem is better than picking no problem.
Truth #2: The revenue team has a new roommate. Customer success is being thought about in an entirely different way. Nobody in SaaS asks "what is customer success" or "why" anymore. The only question left is "how."
Truth #3: Small is the new big. Try to boil the ocean and you'll grow fast, but you'll break, because your product roadmap can't keep up. Chase the total relevant market, not the total addressable market.
Truth #4: RevOps is the new growth lever. The entire execution of go-to-market can be facilitated through a revenue operations team that owns those processes collectively.
Truth #5: Retention is the new acquisition. Customer retention will determine your ability to scale. Full stop.
Truth #6: Flywheels are the new funnels. When the flywheel is working, your clients do the awareness for you. Most companies don't have it, because they don't have strong enough word of mouth.
Truth #7: Watch the series to find out.
Oh! And Then There's the Lie
Here's where it gets interesting. When we asked, "who owns go-to-market," almost everyone reached for a standard answer.
Some said marketing owns the narrative. Wrong. The CEO owns the narrative.
Some said sales. As one leader put it, "until we got the religion from Salesforce, we fell to the standard answer, which was sales."
Others said it's joint. Customer success, sales, and marketing working together. "Go-to-market is not just the sales channel. It's not just the product team. It is the sum of all the parts."
And here's the truth underneath all of it: the CEO owns go-to-market. Not because they do all the work, it takes a village, but because they own the decision and the narrative. When you create it, you own it.
Our blunt advice to CEOs and GTM Leaders
Don’t be fooled.
CEO owns go-to-market.
Which Truth Are You Living? Which Lie Are You Telling Yourself?
When you watch this, I think you'll have that moment. "Ah, that's the lie I've been telling myself." Or, "That's the truth I've been waiting for someone to finally say out loud."
That's the whole point. Find out which truth you're living, and which lie you're building your go-to-market on.
Here's What Happens Next
We're launching this amazing GTM documentary today. And we're not stopping.
Every single week, we'll release another one. So keep an eye out for Seven Truths and a Lie in your youtube feed by checking out the playlist here.
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.