5 Questions to Speed Up Growth

After many long months of testing, learning, adapting and refining, you’re finally confident that you’ve achieved product-market fit and are ready to invest in scaling your business. But how do you know if your go-to-market (GTM) approach is the right one? You’ve witnessed too many companies with strong products become casualties of an inability to execute, and you don’t want your business to join that club. The five questions below are a good litmus test to know whether you are on the right path to success.

1. Do you know who your Zealots are?

Zealots are the people who care the most about the unique value your product or service offers. Zealots believe in your “why” and connect deeply with the value that you offer. Because their needs and beliefs are so well-aligned with your brand, they will be your most eager customers and the most likely to enthusiastically spread the word to others like them. Zealots become the core of the community that will eventually define your identity to the market.

Zealots are also the foundation upon which great brands are built. Geoffrey Moore named them ‘early adopters’ in Crossing the Chasm, while Seth Godin refers to them as the ‘minimum viable market’ in This is Marketing. Regardless of what you call them, it’s imperative for you to understand who they are, what they need, why they care and how they buy. The deeper your understanding of your Zealots, the more readily you will be able to find and recruit more of them to join your cause.

Unlike consumer brands, Zealots for B2B applications must also be understood in the context of the businesses where they work, commonly referred to as the ideal customer profile (ICP). Once you are aware of the types of companies your Zealots work for and the kinds of problems they need to solve, you can find more of them using data driven identity clues such as industry, size, location, enabling technologies, use cases and triggering events. You can learn more about how to do this here.

2. Do you feel their pain?

Once you’ve identified your Zealots, you’ll need to demonstrate your understanding of their pain and how your company can help alleviate it. This means communicating your “why” (your vision) and your “how” (what makes you different) in addition to your “what” (the problem you solve) in a way that will resonate deeply with your Zealots.

As Simon Sinek articulates in his book Start with Why, people want to buy from brands they believe in—and the clearer you are about your purpose and what makes you different, the easier it will be for your Zealots to find you and join your cause. For B2B applications, this is especially important, because you must be able to create enough organizational energy to overcome the resistance of the existing status quo. To maximize your effectiveness, your messaging should connect on practical, emotional, and social levels. Having an amazing product and compelling purpose will not be enough if you’re unable to articulate it effectively to your target audience.

3. Is your message reaching the right people?

The next step is to get the word out—intentionally. You’ll need to proactively seek out the individuals and companies that fit your Zealot profile and help them navigate the intricacies of their internal buying processes. This means tailoring your messaging based on the stage of your customers’ buying cycle rather than on your own internal selling process.

How your target audience buys can vary significantly based on product category, average sale price, and size of buying committees. In general, the more expensive or organizationally comprehensive the offering, the more complex and centralized the buying process. But there are other factors too.

One of the most important is who feels the pain most acutely. Is it the user of your product or the economic buyer? It’s advantageous to focus on whomever feels the most pain as your entry point into an account. This will help to define your GTM approach (e.g., top-down, bottom-up, or hybrid).

Another decision point is whether the value of your product is best communicated via a more sales-led or product-led motion. While several factors drive this decision, it ultimately depends on the degree to which users can readily understand what your product does and then quickly derive value from it on their own versus needing an expert guide to explain or implement it for them. More details on the key factors to consider when choosing your GTM structure can be found here.

4. Is your tribe growing fast enough?

World class B2B brands like Slack, Atlassian and Dropbox helped fuel their exponential growth by building a strong base of Zealots who spread the word to others like them. Programmatically encouraging, nurturing and empowering your Zealots’ engagement within your community can be a big help to drive such viral growth.

There are many approaches to building a vibrant community based on the outcomes you intend (support forum, evangelizing to others or code contribution). Regardless of the approach you choose, you must pave a clear path for your Zealots to learn, engage, derive value and ultimately become a part of your cause. Jono Bacon’s most recent book, People Powered, is an excellent resource on this topic.

5. Do you have the right team?

At the end of the day, you can’t achieve any of the above goals without the right team. This means hiring leaders with the experience and skills that match your GTM dynamics. For example, a bottom-up, product-led, high-velocity GTM motion requires quite different skills and experience than a top-down, sales-led, enterprise approach.

The stage of your business evolution also greatly affects the profiles of people you need to create success. Earlier stage businesses for example require leaders who thrive being pioneers and are comfortable with constant change and little structure, whereas leaders in more established businesses need to be more adept at building out organizationally and establishing scalable processes.

It’s also essential to hire executive-level leadership at the right time in your company’s growth timeline. Hiring the right leaders at the right time can dramatically accelerate your momentum. But if you get it wrong—specifically, if you hire too early—you may be faced with a costly mess that can dramatically slow your momentum and make it difficult for your business to re-start with the right leadership. A somewhat dated, but still quite relevant reference for insights on the right time to hire can be found in this HBR article on The Sales Learning Curve.

So, now that you have answered the questions, how do you feel about your assessment for your business? If you’ve identified gaps, you’re not alone—most early stage businesses have them. But regardless of your outcome, congratulations on taking the first step—which is to realistically assess where you are today, what you know, and most importantly what you don’t know. There are many great resources to support you on your journey—the references listed above are a great start.

If you would like a free consultation with the experts at GTMhound, just click here and we will be glad to talk it over with you. We’ve been there before and are happy to help however you need.