Hi everyone and welcome back to another video from Zendog Labs. My name is Rafael and I’m the Founder & Growth Advisor here at Zendog Labs. We are a growth consultancy and agency that helps start-ups build and execute winning go-to-market strategies. Today, we're going to talk about one of the key frameworks that we're using in our day-to-day work with clients. We developed this framework based on our learnings as operators and VCs and are now using it to help our clients…and hopefully you, too!

Full-stack go-to-market framework

The framework we are talking about is our “full-stack go-to-market framework for start-ups in B2B and B2C.” Note that it is from the perspective of the seller, so it's seller-centric. It could have been buyer-centric, and we have frameworks that are buyer-centric. However, in many cases, it’s more practical to think about “what I am supposed to do next” vs. “what all the steps are at which I could touch a potential buyer to influence their decision.”

What we've done with our framework is condense all our insights into one slide. You could easily fill 60 to 70 pages of a how-to guide or an ebook with the things we are covering here. There arguably is a LOT of information on this slide, so bear with me as we're going through it. The good thing is that it is all you need to get started thinking about your go-to-market strategy. Without further ado, let me switch over to a second screen that has the slide pulled up, and then we're going to go through it step-by-step.

The 3 sections of our framework

Alright, here we are. You can see that our framework is split into three core sections. There is the go-to-market strategy on the top left. There's go-to-market execution on the top right, with four steps: “generate demand”, “build your pipeline”, “convert leads”, and “engage & expand”. Below that, there is a foundational layer of sales and marketing infrastructure that you need to go to market successfully. High-priority items here likely must be in place before you can get started. The lower priority items are also valuable, but you don't need to bother with buying or adopting these immediately.

How to define your go-to-market strategy

Let's get started where you would naturally get started when defining your go-to-market strategy – which is the strategy itself on the left. You're seeing that it takes a relatively small proportion in comparison to execution. That's intentional because we want to show you visually that strategy is nice and fine but, unless the rubber hits the road, you're not going anywhere and so executing your strategy is more important than the strategy itself. By executing your initial strategy, you learn, you can update your initial strategy, and ultimately iterate toward a winning strategy step-by-step.

The way we have set up the step of defining your go-to-market strategy is along a couple of guiding questions. It all starts with the vision, mission, and strategy. For example, let's say you want to fix healthcare inefficiencies. Well, what healthcare inefficiencies exactly? For instance, there is a huge cardiovascular disease problem that you may be passionate about. That’s a great vision, but the problem is so big that you need to identify an addressable driver that you can take on. That's where the mission comes in. At Eatearnity, my former start-up, our mission was to fix cardiovascular diseases by paying consumers for eating healthier. That’s because poor nutrition is a leading driver of cardiovascular disease. From here, you can define a strategy that maps out exactly how you are going to realize your mission. In our case, we wanted to pay consumers by partnering with food producers in what we called a healthy cashback program.

The second question that you need to ask is what success means for you, for your company, and how you are going to measure your progress. It could be that you're saying: “We want to achieve 500K in revenue per month. We're currently at 200K. We're going to measure our progress based on revenue. We have six months. We have a 500K budget for marketing and sales and continued product development.” Be honest about whether your objectives are achievable with the resources you have. If your goals are unrealistic, you need to think about what’s more realistic or how you can acquire the resources necessary for executing the strategy that you have set for yourself.

The third question is knowing who you are, what you are going to sell or are already selling, and what you are trying to achieve, who may be interested in what you are doing. Look at the market and identify segments that may be relevant for you. You’ll likely need to use some kind of “-graphics” for your segmentation. It could be firmographics, like the size of the company, its growth rate, the tech stack that is used, its regional footprint, and its industry, but it could also be demo-, socio-, or socio-demographic information on consumers. For instance, age, income, where they're living, what language they're speaking, etc.

Once you have mapped out a long list of segments that you could be targeting, you need to be asking yourselves which segment(s) are most attractive to you. Think of criteria like where you have particularly strong product-market-fit, growth rates of different segments, and their size. If you are in B2B, you will also want to think about average margins in the segments that you are assessing. Targeting segments with tight margins, let's say retail, is likely only going to work if you can show potential customers that you are much better than legacy players in some meaningful way costing the same or less. There are a couple of additional factors that we're including here. By no means are we suggesting that you need to be thinking about exactly these criteria or all of them at the same time. Given your product, given your strategy, given the things that make you, you, it may be a subset or a completely different set of criteria that you want to use for defining and finding the most attractive segments. You have to use some criteria though and, ideally, they are measurable.

Now, at this point, you understood which segments you want to focus on and now you can start defining what we call the ideal customer profile (ICP). Ideally, you start with just one ICP. There are lots of shades of gray on the spectrum of what your ICP could be. Many times, businesses have multiple ICPs, but focus on one, certainly not more than two or three, for now. Develop a strong understanding of who your ICP is, what their needs are relating to your product, and where they’re consuming information. Why does this matter? It matters for things as simple as choosing a color for your app or website and for more meaty questions like how sophisticated your copy should be and where you may reach your target audience. For example, with financial products, consumers typically hang out on Reddit, especially in the US. With Eatearnity, a consumer wellness app, our ICP was mostly active on Instagram.

Lastly, once you have the ICP locked in, you can start thinking about what your final strategy for reaching your ICP should be, including channels, positioning, messaging, and bundling.

Having gone through these questions, you now know who you are, what you're selling, what success means for you, what resources are available for you, what all the potential segments are that you could be targeting, and which segments are most attractive for you, who your ICP is, what to say, and where to say it.

How to execute your go-to-market strategy

You are now ready for going into the second phase: the go-to-market execution phase. As mentioned, there are four steps: generate demand, build your pipeline, convert your leads, and engage & expand. The generate demand step is at the highest level of our framework but that doesn’t mean that you can’t start with building your pipeline – if there is existing demand for the category of products that you're selling. Why invest time and money into generating demand if people have already recognized that they need a product like yours and are actively searching for solutions at a volume that’s high enough for you to live off it.

While there's no requirement to focus on any of these steps specifically or take them in sequence, there is a logical relationship and we're going to explain it in that way now. Remember that these steps are from the perspective of the seller. We are also differentiating between the things that you need to do, the must-haves, and other ideas that would be nice ideas that are experiments.

For nice-to-have experiments, we strongly recommend that you use a framework that’s called the Bullseye Framework to guide your experimentation. This framework was developed by the founder of DuckDuckGo, a popular, privacy-first search engine. The Bullseye Framework suggests that you first make a list of all the marketing ideas that you can come up with, then you prioritize 4-5 of your ideas to run a quick and cheap “traction test” for each prioritized idea (you shouldn't be taking more than two weeks per test, you shouldn't be spending more than 2K, probably 1K is enough for finding out whether channels work for you). The one idea that performs best based on the data you generate is the idea that you fully focus on for now, until that channel runs out of gas (e.g., CAC goes up, you’re not able to reach more target customers).

Step 1: Generate demand

Let's now start going through these four steps. First, generate demand. I think the way you generate demand in 2022 and the next couple of years is by producing world-class content (video, text, or audio) that demonstrates that you are a subject matter expert in your niche. Small, productized tools are another example of great content. For example, SEO checkers that are free to use but hook your audience. The specific type of content that you're using depends to some degree on the platform that you want to use it for. For instance, you need audio for a podcast, you can use video on social and YouTube, and you can use text on socials and on your blog. Producing your content is step number one. The most important part of demand generation, however, is the distribution of your content. Distribution should take 80 percent of your attention and resources and can happen in a plethora of ways. We can’t cover them all here but, on a high level, distribution channels include organic social, paid social, and earned media. Talking with a news outlet about publishing your content there is a great idea. You can also distribute your content through email newsletters, your blog, or - even better - on third-party websites and blogs (because it generates backlinks for you, which are the most effective tool for SEO). Podcasts are a terrific way for generating followership. Trade shows are also good. What we mean by trade shows is not related to participating in an exhibit with your booth. Trade shows in the generate demand step are about having a speaking slot, ideally a paid-for speaking slot, where you talk about insightful content rather than your product.

Very few of the tactics we mentioned above and below are must-haves. They're mostly experiments, and you need to think about which ones you want to try based on who you think your ICP is, where they consume information, and then run the quick and cheap experiments we mention above to not spend months or years on setting up some infrastructure that then goes to waste because it turns out to not be an effective channel for reaching your audience. At the same time, some of tactics we mention are simply more challenging to execute and cannot be executed cheapy and quickly. Always make sure to prioritize your long list of ideas based on criteria like likely success, likely cost, speed to results, feasibility for your team. One example: SEO. The basics of SEO are easy to do, specifically on-page optimization and technical SEO. But a backlink strategy, which we found to be most impactful tool for SEO, is much harder to pull off – mostly because it's not easy to convince others to link back to your page if you have nothing meaningful to offer in return. If you have a way of getting backlinks, fantastic, do it. If you're a new start-up, backlinks may happen over time as you build your business, enter partnerships, release PRs, etc. Focus on what’s relevant for your ICP, that you think can be done in a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable budget, and will show results quickly – not because you're looking for quick results but because you're looking for generating data that can inform your future strategy.

What's great about generating demand is, that once you started to be good at it, you can feel the impact of your demand generation activities across every other growth dimension. For example, at Lokavant, where I led demand generation and sold to enterprise accounts, it was noticeably easier to get in touch with cold contact and move leads through the pipeline when we had active demand generation supporting us in the background because we were on top of people's minds.

Step 2: Build your pipeline

The “build your pipeline” step is about capturing demand, be that by “pulling it into” your company or by “going out and grabbing it”. How do you do either of those? If you already publish content, it's an easy way for you to put that behind a gated landing page. In this way, you can collect emails from traffic that comes to your website. If you are comfortable switching to ungated landing pages, do so – it significantly increases the viewership for your content. Paid search is another effective tool if people are already searching for terms or queries that suggest that they have a high intent to buy a product like yours. A good way for building your pipeline may also be retargeting people that have already been on your website and have dropped off before completing a purchase or another valuable action.

By the way, you may think that some of the tactics mentioned may fit better into one of the other steps than the step they are listed under. And that’s true and perfectly fair. The tactics we list on our framework are not constrained to the step that they are listed under. They may be active across multiple steps. What we have tried is to put them where they're most relevant / play most of the time.

Back to building your pipeline. Let’s say you have an app and people are browsing for your category on a technology assessment platform like G2. Why not be where customers are actively assessing alternatives for your product? I don’t think you can advertise on G2, but you certainly want to have a good profile on G2 and respond to comments. You can also invite happy customers to leave positive comments for you. You need to double-check the G2 T&Cs, but there’s probably a way to pull it off. In the case of Zendog Labs, or any kind of services-based business like ours, why not be on a platform like Upwork. Companies use Upwork to advertise projects and find talent. Be where your demand already is if you want to capture traffic.

Going outbound is about having your sales team build contact lists, and reach out to contacts via phone, social media, one-off emails, and email sequences. The most effective tactic under “going outbound” is warm introductions. Channel partnerships can work well as well but take time to take shape and require a lot of handholding. The sad thing about going outbound is that it’s a heavily saturated growth strategy. This is particularly true for cold emails. Email-based sales development is a horrible activity, both for your employees that do it, and for the people that receive the trash you send out. We try hard to convince companies to stop going outbound, but it's so easy to do, and sometimes still works (far below 1% of emails receive a response), that it can be tough to ignore.

Step 3: Converting your leads

Once you generate demand, once you brought people into the door, once you put them into your pipeline, it's about how you convert them, and that's largely driven by what type of company you are and what type of product you sell. It's a generalization but it tends to be true that, if you sell an expensive B2B enterprise product, each of your deals is a major thing for your customers, then you are likely going to need to have a sales team. Your sales team will take customers by the hand, help them understand what their needs are, help them understand how your products fit in, evaluate alternatives, resolve concerns, negotiate prices, and help them implement your solution.

Our favorite book for enterprise sales is Major Account Sales Strategy. I'm considering doing a video about it in the future and, by the way, also about the Bullseye Framework. Let me know in the comments if you want to learn more about these frameworks.

Back when I was selling to enterprise accounts, Major Account Sales Strategy was insanely valuable. Enterprise sales is hard and often counterintuitive. For instance, many sales teams set their CRMs up such that their pipeline is split into “outreach”, “contacted”, “demo’ed”, “proposal”, “lost”, and “won”. These phases, however, are mostly useless because they are not tied to the buyer journey. Your team ends up chasing false metrics rather than helping buyers move through their decision-making journey. What’s also counterintuitive, and hard to do, is ruthlessly removing low intent leads from your pipeline, especially if you don’t have many leads. People waste a ton of time on leads that were never going to buy from them. That’s frustrating for everyone. If you feel that a lead is not a good fit for what you do, be honest and tell your lead that your product is not the right solution for them right now and remove them from the pipe. This frees up resources for deals that you can win. So that's sales-led growth.

Now on the other alternative here, which is product-led growth. If you think that your growth strategy could be product-led, you almost always want to be product-led. If you are not, you risk frustrating potential customers. Personally, I hate it if I go to a website, and want to test the product, but can neither see pricing nor get a demo without talking to sales. Why waste your and my time? For example, Slack. Would I use Slack if they didn't have a product-led growth strategy, where you can download the app and use it for up to 10,000 messages before you are gently pushed to pay (or can still use the product for free but lose access to old messages)? Enable your customers to adopt your product without talking to sales. You're going to make everyone a huge favor.

There are certain requirements that you need to be thinking about when assessing whether you’re a good fit for product-led growth. Product-led growth is deep philosophy that we can’t cover here appropriately but what stands out is that you want a product that can sell itself thanks to its convincing UX. If your UX is not good enough then you likely need a sales team to help customers understand how to use your product, what kind of buttons to click to get to the results they’re looking for, and what the results mean for them. Ideally, your product is also easy and free to test. Product-led growth works less well if there are too significant switching costs associated with your deploying your product. You also want a free pricing tier just because it’s hard to demonstrate value well enough on a landing page alone. And lastly, value-based pricing. If you think about Slack, for instance, they only charge you money once you cross 10,000 messages. That’s a clear indicator that you have been using their product intensively. Another example is HubSpot. HubSpot is a very complicated platform for sales and marketing teams. There are just so many modules. But you can start using HubSpot for free. It gives you basic capabilities like the CRM for sales. Once you want to use deeper sets of features, that's when they start charging you money.

Step 4: Engaging & expanding

Alright, so what you have done so far is generating demand, building your pipeline, and converting your leads. Now it's time to engage the customers or users that you have and expand from where you are. It is critical especially in B2C to recognize that customer acquisition (or user acquisition to be correct) is relatively easy. What's much, much harder is retaining users. There's just so much that competes with the attention of users, one million different apps on their phones to spend time on. Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat, Twitch.

So how to retain folks? In B2B, the first tactic is your Customer Success team. If you don't have a dedicated Customer Success team, at least one of your founders should focus on making sure that your customers are happy and get the value that they were promised. The moment you sign a deal is the moment the real work starts. Sales is tough, making customers happy is tougher (and riskier).

On the B2C side, one example of a retention tactic is community management. For example, you may want to have a group chat on WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, or Discord. There are pros and cons associated with each of these platforms. For instance, WhatsApp has good engagement but is not featured well enough for big communities. Slack is good for community management but has low engagement in B2C since it’s mostly used for professional purposes. Whichever tool you use, community management has people come back. It is also a great way for learning what kind of challenges consumers are experiencing as they’re using your product in a much more dynamic way than you waiting for them to send you emails or call you to complain. Notifications may also work, though you need to be careful with notification fatigue. I'm sure we all hate notifications and immediately disable them unless they have an important reason to exist. If you have a suite of products, you could try to cross-, up-, or re-sell your products. Think of car brands like BMW. They will sell you a cheaper model when you’re young. As you age, and your income hopefully increases, they will sell you more premium models. In fact, the only reason they have cheaper models is likely to get you in the door and hooked on the BMW brand.

Ultimately, what you want to achieve in the “engage & expand” step is the last two items on our list: turning customers or users into referrers and advocates that drive viral loops for you. Calendar booking tools like Calendly are such a great example, where every user naturally invites other users by asking them to grab time off their Calendly. Free marketing is the holy grail.

We spent quite a bit of time defining your strategy and going through specific examples of how you can execute your strategy, with certain must-haves and nice-to-have experiments that you can test through the Bullseye Framework.

Sales and marketing readiness

Now, let's look at sales and marketing readiness. As I was saying before, there is a prioritization here, where we list specific tools and things to focus on under priorities 1, 2, and 3. Your prioritization may look different, and you may have found tools that we don’t have on this list. That’s great. Our list is just one way of looking at it. There is no right or wrong. The key, however, is to prioritize and not to try to do everything at the same time.

Priority 1 includes your website and social handles, both for your company and personal profiles because personal profiles are typically able to win more organic reach on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn as these platforms want you to pay for reach if you are a company. You also want to set up analytics tools like Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, I find it very helpful to set up custom events that don't just relate to standard events like page views or time spent on a page but relate to something valuable for your start-up, that demonstrates actual engagement with your web or mobile app. For example, clicks on an important button. Custom events can be set up relatively easily through Google Tag Manager. It takes a little bit of time to figure out how it works but once you've done it it's great. You also need creatives to demonstrate who you are as a brand and be able to run paid social ads. You may need lead lists depending on the type of business you are. You can build them with tools like Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or ZoomInfo. Same for a CRM, especially if you're in enterprise sales you just need to have a CRM like HubSpot, Zendesk, Salesforce, or maybe monday.com. Salespeople will leave your start-up and you want to make sure that you know what happened in the past. CRMs also help keep everyone accountable and check how leads are moving through your pipeline. For email collection, we like tools like Sendinblue or Mailchimp. Get started collecting emails even if you don’t want to launch an email newsletter soon. Just collect emails of people that you're talking to because you never know when you need to and want to reach out.

Let's look at some priority two ideas next. SPIN questions are very impactful questions that help you discover whether a potential customer has a need and whether your product fits their need. SPIN is an acronym for Situational questions, Problem questions, Implication questions, and Need-Pay-Off questions. The SPIN concept is, again, taken from the book Major Account Sales Strategy by Neil Rackham. Question trackers help keep track of what kind of questions you're hearing in sales discussions. You can share your question tracker with your Product, Development, and Customer Success teams. They will be very happy to hear what the market is saying about the products they built and how well your start-up performs.

What can also be helpful is having a one-pager. One-pagers are often more helpful than a sales deck. It’s easy to share, easy to digest, and keeps the conversation away from slides. It's always better to look at people and see how they respond to what you're saying rather than being buried in a dense PowerPoint presentation. Your content engine is also marked as a priority 2. It’s an interesting trade-off. Generating demand is important for you in the competitive environment that we're in, but establishing a solid content engine takes time, costs money, and is resource intensive. You need writers, you need a list of regularly refreshed content ideas, you need editing capabilities, and so initially you shouldn’t build a robust engine. However, you can immediately start to blog, record videos that are so low quality that you may be too embarrassed to share them. Things don’t need to be perfect to get started. Look at me. I am sitting in my bedroom, my background isn't fancy, and I'm trying to generate content. I don’t yet need to be focused on making it the best it can be because it’s not necessary.

Trustpilot and Google my Business are also great channels. They let you collect feedback, both negative and positive. You want to make sure to curate those as much as possible. It’s fundamentally the same as with G2. Make sure to respond to all negative reviews and encourage people that are having a positive experience with your products to comment on these outlets. Ultimately, review tools let you build a social reputation and social reputation is critical for selling effectively on digital channels. I don’t know about you but when I am planning to buy something, I always check for social reputation before I buy. Off-page SEO is mostly backlinks. Social media queuing tools can be helpful because ultimately you don't want to spend time on Instagram daily. Instead, set aside focused time once a week, let's say on Monday evenings, for two to three hours, writing up all the content you want to publish in the next week or two and then have it run on autopilot. Email sequences with tools like Apollo can help go outbound. These tools cost money, though. Apollo is some 49 per month, maybe 99, depending on how robust the capabilities need to be that you look for. Lead enrichment tools can help you scale your outreach in a personalized manner. At least that’s their promise. I have heard mixed results but if you think it may be worth a test give it a shot regardless.

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I do not have any affiliation with the tools mentioned here. Tools are important for start-ups, and I happen to have used all or most of the tools mentioned here.

Congrats, you are ready for going to market!

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, that was a mouthful. Thank you for staying with me through to the end. Let me know what you think about the content and, if you have any questions, drop them in the comment section below or send me an email at the email address mentioned in the description below or in the description of my YouTube channel. You can also find me on other platforms. I will respond because I love hearing and learning from you all. Keep on grinding and see you soon!