A GTM motion...Is that like a dance move?

Go-To-Market (GTM) motions are critical to any successful commercial strategy. But what exactly are they, and why are they crucial for sustainable and durable growth? Let’s break it down.

A GTM motion is not just a strategy—it’s a coordinated set of processes, tactics, and activities that work across the entire customer journey, from awareness to advocacy. It involves every part of your revenue engine: marketing, sales, product, customer success, revenue operations, enablement, and any other customer facing team. The goal? To deliver seamless, repeatable, and scalable ways to reach and serve your customers.

The Power of GTM Motions

A well-designed GTM motion accelerates your market impact, reduces friction, and boosts revenue efficiency. Here’s why it matters:

? Breaks Down Silos: Effective GTM motions align cross-functional teams, ensuring that marketing, sales, customer success, and product work cohesively.

? Reduces Costs and Boosts Efficiency: By creating repeatable revenue plays, GTM motions eliminate redundancies, allowing companies to maximize every dollar spent.

? Enhances Customer Experience: When every touchpoint—from marketing to renewal—works in harmony, the customer experience becomes effortless and delightful.

? Scales Predictably: With GTM motions, growth becomes predictable, making it easier to scale and allocate resources effectively.

Key Types of GTM Motions

The GTM Consortium highlights several GTM motions that companies can adopt depending on their goals and customer profiles:

Inbound: 90% of those surveyed use Inbound Led Growth

? AI can support faster content creation, personalization, optimization, and data analysis. It however, cannot offer you differentiated brand statements, provide a contextual understanding of what information is critical to that specific buyer, execute on complex decision making, or control the quality of your content. Leverage AI to speed up your inbound content creation process.

? Content should extend beyond the top-of-the-funnel stage to cover the entire customer lifecycle.

? Emphasize how content educates and empowers advocates within the audience.

? Stay attuned to evolving content consumption habits; where people spend their time and whom they trust continues to shift, notably with changing search behaviors.

? Prioritize investing in content that resonates with high-intent prospects and existing customers, ensuring it is highly consumed and impactful.

Outbound: 86% of those surveyed use Outbound Led Growth

? Pilot test before committing to a large-scale program.

? Recognize that your existing team may not naturally excel at outbound calling. Invest in training and skill development before expanding efforts.

? While volume is important, prioritize targeting accounts based on a well-tested Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This isn't about spray and pray.

? Regularly re-engage with lost opportunities to potentially revive deals.

? Leverage existing assets to create effective talk tracks, emails, and leave-behinds that represent your brand and offerings.

? Explore how partnerships can support your growth strategy.

? Base decisions on data and metrics rather than intuition or gut feeling.

Product-Led Growth: 41% of those surveyed use Product-Led Growth

? Product-led growth (PLG) has evolved significantly over time, becoming more sophisticated and tailored to specific audiences and goals.

? PLG is not universally applicable; it requires careful consideration of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and target audience.

? PLG can operate independently of traditional sales processes or be supported by sales in a referral-like or lead generation motion.

? When executed effectively, PLG can yield significant benefits, including shorter sales cycles, higher win rates, and increased average contract values (ACVs).

? However, PLG may introduce higher churn rates. To accurately assess performance and avoid misleading Net Revenue Retention (NRR) metrics, it’s essential to differentiate between users sampling the product and those making a deliberate decision to discontinue their subscription. This can be achieved by tracking and treating each group separately—one as paid leads and the other as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) or Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) customers.

Partner-Led Growth: 66% of those surveyed use Partner-Led Growth

? Partners play a crucial role in expanding your pipeline, enhancing conversion rates, and accelerating deal cycles.

? There are five distinct partnership types, each serving a unique purpose that should be measured and managed independently. It’s important to avoid conflating results by comparing affiliate programs with referral or ecosystem partners, as each contributes to revenue differently.

Affiliate Partnerships: These are typically performance-based, where partners earn a commission for bringing in customers. Metrics to track include conversion rates, affiliate-driven revenue, and cost per acquisition (CPA).

Referral Partnerships: These involve partners recommending your product to their network. Key metrics include referral volume, conversion rates from referrals, and customer lifetime value (CLV) of referred clients.

Reseller Partnerships: Resellers take your product to market as if it were their own. Track metrics such as reseller-generated pipeline, revenue contribution, and deal registration rates.

Ecosystem Partnerships: These are deep integrations between your product and partner products to create a more comprehensive solution. Metrics include joint customer acquisition, product usage overlap, and customer retention rates.

Technology Alliances: These partnerships often involve co-development or co-marketing efforts. Important metrics include product enhancement impact, co-marketing pipeline contribution, and influence on win rates.

Event-Led Growth: 38% of those surveyed use Event-Led Growth

? Events represent a top-performing channel throughout the buyer’s journey.

? Smaller, customized events are driving higher levels of engagement.

? Leverage technology to track and boost event attendance, pipeline growth, and revenue.

? Establish specific KPIs for each event and measure performance against these objectives.

Community-Led: 52% of those surveyed used Community-Led Growth

? Consider the tech that makes the most sense given your goals (white-label community platforms, Slack channels, Discord, or dedicated forums). Each option has specific pros and cons—such as engagement features, ease of access, or scalability. Choosing the right technology will depend on your specific community goals, and consulting with your technology vendor can help align the chosen platform with your desired outcomes.

? There are four key types of communities to consider:

Support Communities: Focused on helping customers solve problems and find resources. Metrics include response time, issue resolution rates, and customer satisfaction.

Advocacy Communities: Built to encourage loyal customers to become brand advocates. Key metrics include advocacy-generated leads, customer testimonials, and user-generated content volume.

Engagement Communities: These foster deeper customer engagement, such as product feedback, discussions, and interactive events. Metrics to track include engagement rates, community member growth, and content contribution frequency.

Learning and Development Communities: Designed to educate customers about your product or industry. Metrics include course completion rates, knowledge improvement scores, and time spent on educational content.

? Your community strategy should align with overall business objectives—whether that means driving marketing efforts, enhancing sales opportunities, providing customer support, or gathering product feedback. Often, successful community-led growth involves combining several of these elements to create a vibrant, multi-functional community that delivers value at every customer interaction.

GTM Motion in Action: Real Examples

- Slack: Leveraging a product-led motion, Slack’s freemium model allowed users to experience its value, turning initial trials into loyal, paying customers.

- HubSpot: Through an inbound-led motion, HubSpot created extensive content to educate customers, establishing trust and consistently driving high-quality leads.

- Salesforce: Using a partner-led motion, Salesforce expanded its reach by building a strong partner ecosystem, allowing resellers to bring in customers they couldn’t otherwise reach on their own.

How do you measure them?

Avoiding the GTM Valleys of Death

The GTM Consortium warns about the “GTM Valleys of Death”—common pitfalls that companies face if GTM motions aren’t well-defined or executed poorly:

? You Can Create but Can’t Market: If you’ve built a product but struggle to create demand, you’re stuck in this valley.

? You Can Market but Can’t Sell: Generating leads without converting them into customers indicates a misaligned sales and marketing process.

? You Can Sell but Can’t Deliver: Closing deals without being able to deliver on promises creates churn and damages brand trust.

? You Can Deliver but Can’t Renew: If customers enjoy your product but can’t see the quantifiable value, they won’t renew.

? You Can Renew but Can’t Expand: Customers may stay, but without new value propositions, upselling becomes nearly impossible.

To avoid these pitfalls, companies must ensure their GTM motions are aligned across product, marketing, sales, and customer success, keeping the customer’s experience and value at the center.

Evolving Landscape of GTM Motions

The landscape of Go-To-Market motions is evolving rapidly, influenced by technology, customer behavior, and market dynamics. Here are some of the key trends shaping GTM motions today:

? AI and Automation Integration: Companies are increasingly using AI to enhance GTM motions, particularly in inbound and outbound-led strategies. AI helps personalize outreach, predict customer needs, and automate repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategic activities.

? Hybrid GTM Motions: The distinction between different GTM motions is blurring, with companies combining elements of inbound, outbound, and product-led approaches. This hybridization allows for more flexibility and responsiveness to changing market demands.

? Rise of Community-Led Growth: More companies are building vibrant communities to drive brand loyalty and growth. Community-led motions are becoming critical, especially in industries where peer influence and trust are key drivers of customer decisions.

? Data-Driven Personalization: Leveraging data to drive hyper-personalized GTM strategies is becoming a must. Whether in product-led or outbound-led motions, understanding individual customer journeys and tailoring interactions is proving crucial for conversion and retention.

? Focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): GTM strategies are increasingly focused not just on customer acquisition but on maximizing customer lifetime value. This shift requires companies to align all GTM motions—product-led, community-led, partner-led—to deliver consistent value over time and encourage upselling and cross-selling.

? Event-Led Motions Go Virtual and Hybrid: While in-person events are still powerful, many companies are embracing virtual and hybrid models to expand reach and accessibility. These models are not only cost-effective but also allow companies to gather more data on attendee engagement.

These trends highlight that GTM is not static—it requires ongoing adaptation and innovation to remain effective and competitive.

? Map Out Your Customer Journey: Understand every stage of the customer experience, from awareness to renewal, and ensure your GTM motions cover each touchpoint.

? Align Cross-Functional Teams: Break down silos. GTM motions thrive when marketing, sales, and product teams work in lockstep.

? Track Metrics Closely: Use key metrics like pipeline velocity, time-to-value, conversion rates, and customer ROI to measure success.

? Adopt an Iterative Approach: GTM is not a one-off project but an evolving strategy. Continuously refine your motions based on data and customer feedback.

GTM Motion is the Key to Revenue Resilience

To survive—and thrive—companies need to move away from reactive, siloed revenue strategies and adopt a cohesive GTM operating system. With GTM motions, you can turn revenue growth from guesswork into a science, driving efficiency, alignment, and customer satisfaction at every step.

So, build your GTM motions. Unite your teams. And watch your revenue soar.