Using GTM Strategies for Digital Tech Startups: My Guide from Launching 7x Businesses

Everyone knows that term lead generation is accountable for business growth, particularly in the B2B: SaaS, fintech and AI sectors, where the market competition is quite fierce and the route to gaining some revenue traction is riddled with challenges.

I’ve launched business development and sales activities across 4 tech startups right now, diving into absolutely different market specifics (B2C e-commerce marketplace, AI PaaS, Empathetic AI and a little bit of funtech/fintech B2C subscription service).

I have helped several startups built solid revenue engine. One of my top achievements is building from 0 to $1.5 ARR during COVID with closed borders and inability to travel. I built revenue engines for startups cross CIS, Europe, South East Asia, APAC and USA.

In this article I would like to share not only the differences between outbound and inbound lead generation, but actually share new sales concepts that are evolving in startup industry bringing all together my 14+ years of experience in GTM strategies, sales and business development.

Outbound Lead Generation

Initially this channel was the most popular, as it came from 70-80s from the US, when you had no internet and the only way to find customers and sell your stuff was to get a phone and make X phone calls, or visit Y trade shows or conferences and actually network a lot. You couldn’t use emailing, zoom calls - anything like that.

So that relied heavily on direct outbound activities, being very outgoing in your manner and being very salesy. The product won’t sell itself without pushing it hard.

Another notion that was popular is that you need to foist off it to eveyrone, even your family if they gonna buy it. If you watched the movie Margin Call this approach is very well represented by character played by Kevin Spacey who is playing a financial sales guru with 20+ years of experience.

Later on that approach got boost with ability to send emails after invention of internet. It became easier to get contacts and by 2010 this was predominant sales method im majority of companies. It still stays predominant in our days.

However, after the emerging of many social medias, this approach changed a little bit from sending emails into sending DMs on social media, like LinkedIn. They can happily coexist with one another, but until COVID they were both more or less successful in terms of building sales pipeline and gathering leads.

Right after the COVID started many businessmen lost their opportunity on constant business travel, especially with some budget tightening on sales and marketing activities, so people started inventing new more efficient ways of getting leads.

During my time as International Sales Director at RPC LLC we launched global sales from scratch into China, Central Asia, UAE, Middle East - that resulted in contracts exceeding $100,000 per month.

Advantages of Outbound Lead Gen:

• Control - you can identify and target specific leads that fit your perception of ICP (Ideal customer profile).
• Speed to market - outbound compared to inbound can produce results faster, you don’;t need to wait for clients reading your content.
• Scalable - when it’s structured you can easily reach 5-10-15 SQLs per month.

Inbound lead generation

While the term can freely coexist with outbound lead gen and they best work together, it’s a completely different approach. It started developing only after major search engines started evolving and gaining popularity.

FIrst of all, Google Search and Yahoo Search in Western countries, Baidu in Mainland China, Yandex search in Russia.

The crucial difference is that inbound lead gen allowed you to gain leads without actually writing cold email messages, sending thousands of DMs to anyone, and the quality of those leads were actually higher.

The inbound marketing is first of all:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO blog)
2. Paid Ads (Google Search, LinkedIn, Facebook)
3. Content Marketing (social media posting, webinars, newsletters, communities, short videos, interviews, industry reports)
4. Company-related content marketing (product demo, case studies, product guide, private webinar or event)

Investing in those activities doesn’t necessarily directly bring you customers, because you don’t interact with customers (via phone, email, trade show), but you educate or entertain them with your content.

It could be industry-wide content (that shows your industry authority) or company-focused content (that shows how your product/solution fits the market and solves particular challenges). Both types of content are necessary.

The evolution of the content marketing has evolved a lot for the past 5-10 years. From simple content creation telling you about industry trends or company demos into super personalized and super niched content that target specific ICPs, specific groups of people with really amazing graphs, featuring specific customers pain points or even creating market demand for blue ocean product. The latter is a really difficult craft, that requires a lot of creativity, knowledge, and sales/marketing skills.

During my time at Toloka.ai I managed to book at some periods of time around 3 meetings a week with leads from Fortune Global companies. 1/3 of that was because our inbound marketing channel could land quality Google Search Ads into specific target audience with predetermined ICPs and target companies.

Advantages:

• Trust building - building relationships with your prospects nowadays is crucial, and a client would likely to buy from someone who has open trustworthy brand and credibility
• Cost efficiency - if it’s not paid ads, you can basically generate leads with zero $ CAC (customer acquisition cost) only with your content
• Scalability - Content strategy and SEO once optimized and streamlined can drive significant traffic and SQLs (sales qualified leads)

Both approaches are good in their sense, but their became outdated, because notion that you can simply and silly generate leads without having a look into market dynamics, customer identification, distribution model, pricing strategy is no longer viable.

So that’s how GTM-strategies have came onto the stage.

GTM (Go-to-market) Strategies

Few years ago many B2B tech startups were pouring money on their SDR, sales and marketing activities a lot without actually analysing the efficiency of those activities and methods. Only recently the majority of successful startups started paying a lot of attention into GTM-efficiency, win rates, ROI on marketing and sales investments.

The lead generation term is actually becoming outdated. Why?

The lead generation term itself reflects on creating a sales funnel that doesn’t help you build rapport with your audience, it’s like pouring money into an old vehicle that doesn’t actually work anymore. Sales-led companies and brands quickly understood that AI-automated messages if scaled don’t necessary bring more leads, as automated approach is not really effective. That’s how the concept of GTM came into place.

GTM itself is a comprehensive action plan for launching products or services with understanding why, how and when it will reach it’s audience and target their customers. It encompasses various elements: market definition, customer identification (ICPs), distribution and business models, product positioning and pricing strategies.

The major goal of a GTM strategy is to secure successful market entry with low-risk providing solid approach to launching products and maximising impact in the marketplace.

Key components of go-to-market strategy:

• Market Definition - identifying specific markets, regions
• Customer Identification - understanding who is your target audience, target companies, ICP profiles
• Distribution Model - how is the product will be delivered to customers and potential clients
• Product Positing - identify USPs, value proposition, how the product outstands competitors
• Pricing model - Determine appropriate pricing model for your service or product

The huge difference here between lead generation and GTM, is that lead gen refers mostly to attracting and converting prospects into potential customers, mostly through outbound and inbound, but not limited to.

Different types of GTM:

• Sales-led growth - originally, GTM strategies were sales-led with focused heavily on direct selling and networking. This approach was quite effective in an era when customers had no access to information, internet and relied mostly on sales reps for insights and products.
• Marketing-led growth - at some point of time customers began to self-educate through online resources, as a result the effectiveness of sales-led strategies has dramatically diminished. This approach allowed companies to engage with customers earlier in their buying journey by providing relevant information that addressed buyers needs, pains and interests.
• Product-led growth (PLG) - focuses on delivering exceptional product that in addition building community around product and self-service model to minimise interaction with sales personnel and so that clients could test and purchase faster without salesy interactions.
• Founder-led (personal brand) growth - focuses on active involvement of company’s founder in driving business, growth and sales. It’s specially effective on early stages due to direct customer engagement, authentic storytelling and cost efficiency.

I consider founder-led growth through LinkedIn is one of the latest cost effective, fast and authentic ways to build your loyal client base for early-stage startups.

It took me 2 weeks to start generating leads on my LinkedIn account since I started posting consistently.

Feel free to reach out if you’re interested to learn more or you have questions about GTM-strategies or conquering new markets.