Sangram Vajre, Founder and Chief Evangelist at Terminus and host of the Flip my Funnel Forecast, joined our host Ray Rike to discuss his MOVE Go-To-Market framework.
Sangram ran marketing at Pardot, an early marketing automation vendor for salespeople, which Salesforce ultimately acquired and co-founded Terminus seven years ago.
Terminus is a true pioneer in providing a platform for Account-Based Marketing programs, which in today's B2B SaaS world represents about 44% of total marketing investment in customer acquisition programs.
The first thing Sangram shared was that marketing and sales need to SHARE the same "REVENUE" number. Marketing's ultimate value must be measured by "Sales". If the two executives do not share the same number, Go-To-Market challenges are soon to follow.
What exactly is a "Chief Evangelist"? Guy Kawasaki, Apple's early Chief Evangelist, said, "evangelism in a tech company is the purest form of sales"! A chief evangelist is the representative of the market on behalf of the practitioners. Sangram has been doing this for over seven years in the world of Account-Based Marketing.
Next, we move to Sangram's Go-To-Market framework, which also happens to be the name of his latest book - "MOVE". MOVE focuses on four primary questions every company must ask as they "move" through each growth phase. Those four questions are:
1 - Who should we market to?
2 - What do we need to do to operate more effectively
3 - When can we scale our business
4 - Where can we grow the most
These four questions relate directly to the MOVE acronym:
M - Market
O - Operations
V - Velocity
E - Expansion
McKinsey says the primary reason companies fail as they begin to scale above $10M is the lack of evolving the Go-To-Market strategy and tactics.
The four primary "Go-To-Market" strategy questions do not change at each growth stage, but the answers and resultant approach must change to maneuver through each stage of the growth journey successfully.
Another framework MOVE includes the 3P framework:
P - Problem Market Fit
P - Product Market Fit
P - Platform Market Fit
Each stage of the 3Ps does not directly correlate with company size (revenue). Sangram shared that some companies can hit $10M and even $20M before they move from Problem-Market Fit to Product-Market Fit.
Similar to the concepts in "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore, the issue is when a company attempts to move the one phase of the #ps to the next phase - a classic chasm crossing challenge.
Sangram is a wealth of information. More importantly, he has invested most of his career in learning, understanding, and now sharing his experiences and insights in an easy-to-understand yet robust Go-To-Market framework called MOVE.
This conversation is a great listen for every B2B tech founder, CEO, and Go-To-Market executive regardless of which stage of growth your company is in to help cross the chasm to the next phase of the growth journey.