First principles: Your product is your GTM strategy
Your Product Is Your Go-to-Market Strategy. Here’s Why. ATTACH
Atlassian, a maker of tools that help software developers collaborate with each other, grew from nothing to $100 million in revenue without ever hiring a salesperson.
The Evolution of Tech Marketing
Field Sales: Oracle mastered this in the 1980s and 1990s, with an enormous, aggressive, highly competent field sales force that spent most of its time on the road, calling on customers, wining and dining them until there was enough trust and mutual understanding to close six- and seven-figure contracts.
Inside Sales: more telephone-based…pioneered by Oracle and others in the late 1990s and embraced by Salesforce.com in its earliest days, salespeople spend less time on the road. The focus shifts to the inside sales force, calling lists of cold and warm prospects and closing many sales on the phone.
Marketing: As sales organizations began to understand the virtues of large numbers of prospects, the industry evolved into a third, more marketing-driven stage. HubSpot (content marketing), ExactTarget (broad marketing mix) Constant Contact (broad marketing mix including radio spots), and Barracuda Networks (creative marketing including the use of airport billboards) exemplify this approach.
Product-Led Growth: In this stage, the product itself is the go-to-market strategy for your company. Atlassian is probably the most successful example of this, but there are many others including OpenView portfolio investments Expensify, Datadog, FieldLens and Lesson.ly to name a few.
Dramatic Simplification
But the old ways of selling have never disappeared: They’ve simply become equally valid options on an increasingly broad spectrum of possibilities.
If you have a complex product and multiple/high level buyers, it generally requires field sales to educate the buyers and help them move down their buying journey over multiple meetings.
The buying process is one of being convinced that the value of using the product, net of what you’re going to pay, is positive. The sales team does this by communicating value. If the product itself can communicate its own positive value, then that equation works with very little additional sales effort needed.