How (and why) to create a lean, mean, GTM machine

Now is a great time to ditch your traditional B2B sales funnel and replace it with the flywheel model.

We’ve all faced a reckoning as we’ve examined what is truly essential for our business' success vs. what’s nice to have. If your go-to-market (GTM) approach appears to be working “well enough,” restructuring it might seem like lunacy, especially at a time like this. But in the long run, a hyper-efficient, go-to-market (GTM) machine is vital to unlocking exponential growth.

Atlassian pioneered a hyper-lean, hyper-efficient GTM model –?mostly out of necessity –?in our early, bootstrapped days. Some aspects of our GTM model have evolved since then, but we’ve stuck with the core tenets as we’ve scaled, propelling us to over 200,000 customer organizations around the globe today. We believe our model will sustain itself over the long term and set us up to be a 100-year company.

We also believe other B2B companies can do the same by relying more on automated, self-serve sales motions and transferring more investment to R&D. Transitioning to a low-touch sales and marketing flywheel is a long journey riddled with difficult trade-offs. But the return on your investment can be huge.

It starts with a product-driven mindset

Atlassian is living proof that the right GTM approach helps you survive –?even thrive –?amid uncertainty. A lean approach helped us get off the ground just as tech bottomed out in 2002, and actually grow during the Great Recession and the pandemic.

Just how lean? Atlassian runs its entire GTM game on approximately 15% of revenue.

This allows us to invest roughly 35% of revenue in R&D. The ability to invest so much in R&D allows us to experiment, innovate, and develop differentiated products that give us a competitive advantage. In fact, there is no single larger advantage in Atlassian’s business than the fact that for every dollar, Euro, or Yen a customer spends with us, they get more back in product innovation than they would with any other vendor in the industry.

Software should be bought, not sold. If you have great products that customers can try for free and essentially sell themselves, then you can reduce spending on GTM. Plus, great products tend to spread across teams and companies organically. We have multiple expansion vectors that attract more users within an organization, as well as fuel both cross-sell and upsell. This creates a flywheel system in which we’re consistently landing new customers who then expand their use of our products.

How to get your GTM flywheel cranking

The rules of physics that govern physical flywheels also apply in a GTM context. Think about that first pull on a rowing machine. It’s frikkin' hard! But once you set it in motion, keeping it in motion takes far less effort. Heck: it’ll even keep spinning on its own for a while if you let go.

Similarly, moving to a GTM flywheel is slow going at first. There will be short-term sacrifices in the name of sustainable long-term growth. And the reality is, this model doesn’t work for everyone. It only works if you can sell to teams and individuals, not just executives.

Atlassian is good at flywheel GTM, but we still make mistakes. The upshot is that we’ve learned a lot over the years. As you consider whether this model is right for you, keep these two points in mind.

Friction is the enemy

Remove as many barriers between customers and your product as possible. If a prospective customer has to call or email you, it means you haven’t explained something clearly or completely enough on your website.

Price your products transparently and with high volume in mind. For example, we made all our cloud products free for teams of 10 or fewer. And our purchasing process has long been automated using e-commerce and delivery systems. The point is to get people into the product as quickly as possible so they can start using it and decide for themselves whether it’s a good fit for them.

To be fair, we’ve also incorporated higher-touch, higher-commitment tactics along the way. Atlassian is known as “that B2B software company with no sales force”, but that’s not quite true. We do have teams dedicated to helping customers find the right products for their needs and facilitating sales. But these teams work on salary rather than commission. And even before the pandemic, they overwhelmingly engaged with customers virtually. The savings on travel and predictability around compensation help us stay that much leaner and more agile.

We’ve learned through removing friction and fine-tuning our pricing mechanics that we can build a robust, diverse customer base where our products become mission-critical very quickly. We make our products accessible to even the smallest customers, knowing that if we let them pay for just what they need, they’ll grow with us over time.

Not that we never lose customers. But even when we’ve lost a large customer, it hasn’t destabilized our business because our base is so broad.

Friends are good for growth

Another way to streamline your GTM costs is to get other people to help –?kind of like enlisting your buddies as movers and paying them in pizza and beer. Atlassian invested in a sales channel program early on that now accounts for a third of our revenue. We have also built a community of passionate Atlassian admins and end-users who champion our products through word of mouth.

A channel is critical if you aim for a global customer base. Businesses in some regions (Europe and Japan in particular) value vendors with a local presence who will interact with them in the local language and guide them through the product onboarding process. By building a global network of channel partners who know the lay of the land, you can avoid establishing a footprint in every region.

On the community side, providing an online forum for users to ask questions and exchange tips is a low-cost way to keep users engaged. The Atlassian Community program has evolved to include a website containing a user-generated knowledge base, discussion threads, and articles, as well as user-led live events. It’s like the best parts of StackOverflow, Reddit, Medium, and MeetUp all under one Atlassian-blue umbrella.

Amid chaos, there is opportunity

If your GTM spend is disproportionately high (and I’d argue this is the case for many, if not most, companies), this may be the right time to make fundamental changes to how you bring your products to customers.

Executing a transition of this magnitude takes time (digital transformation, anyone?) and courage. There isn’t a fool-proof roadmap. You just point yourself in the direction of lean GTM and get ready to make difficult decisions along the way. That may seem antithetical to short-term growth, but when you’re able to funnel the savings back into product development and faster time to market, it’s a huge differentiator.

As leaders, this is a moment of tremendous opportunity – not just for our teams and companies, but also for ourselves. We have a chance to leave a professional legacy of seeing and seizing opportunities amidst chaos. If you want to build a business that thrives long after your time there, now is the time to lay the foundation.