MOVE: The 4-Question Go-to-Market Framework

Companies are born out of dreams.

Think about it. Someone had an amazing idea. They dreamed about making something better, newer, easier, more convenient. They dreamed about doing something that had never been done before, and they formed a company to make that dream a reality.

The people they hire along the way buy into the dream and want to help achieve it. Indeed, the thought of realizing that compelling vision energizes them when they come to work every day.

But doing business is messy and unpredictable.

Companies face challenges—competition, changing markets, limited resources, and more—that cause them to underachieve those dreams. There’s a relentless, ongoing pressure to grow the company, with employees to pay, customers to serve, and countless other funding needs.

To keep it all going, you have to keep growing.

But this stress leads to messy decision making and competing priorities. It becomes harder to answer the question, “What should we do next?” How do you keep a company growing when you don’t have clear alignment and don’t know exactly which direction to take?

As a result, the people who originally bought into it begin feeling a disconnect between what they believed was possible and what they’ve been consigned to. A divide grows between the vision, hopes, and aspirations that gave birth to the company and the realities of working there. Team members can no longer map their efforts to the company’s achievement of the dream. Work begins to lose purpose, and people begin to lose passion. Consequently, it becomes harder to keep people focused and aligned.

Look, even the greatest companies get stuck in this mire of confusion from time to time. Creating a product is easy enough, but building a great company and culture, having the discipline to take a product to market, is vastly more challenging.

The failure to achieve a big dream is a struggle as old as human history.

Before the Wright brothers achieved sustained flight with their motor-operated airplane in 1903, there were many wild and crazy inventors who dreamed up fabulous flying contraptions. Often, they put together talented teams and built those machines, with visions of soaring like an eagle dancing through their heads. And then the day came when they hauled it up to the top of a ramp, or a hill, or God forbid, a sheer cliff on top of a mountain, and they launched it.

Perhaps you’ve seen some of the old film footage of these failed early endeavors, where the strange winged machine sails down the ramp, briefly leaps into the air, then careens to the ground and breaks into pieces as the distraught inventor and team look on. Every single one of those failed machines started out as the wild-eyed vision of a talented team.

Of course, the original dream wasn’t to simply fling a machine off the end of the ramp and somehow keep it from crashing right away. No, the dream of those early inventors was to enable humans to fly like the birds. Successfully launching a plane was only the first big step to making the dream a reality.

For sustained flight to really achieve the vision, they had to figure out how to create vehicles that could reliably take people higher and higher, get them where they wanted to go, and return them to the ground safely every time. Mapping that dream to a practical reality took decades of hard work from talented, hardworking people who took a lot of risks and made smart decisions.

The struggle to achieve reliable air travel gives us a perfect picture of the struggle most companies face. Achieving the dream isn’t “one and done.” It’s an ongoing business transformation from ideation to transition to execution—also known as “the three Ps” of problem-market fit, product-market fit, and platform-market fit—and somehow, you have to navigate these stages without losing momentum and stalling out somewhere along the way.

You see, it doesn’t matter how long an airplane has been flying. At any moment, it’s possible for the plane to stall out and take a nosedive into the nearest field if wrong decisions are made. Or to be less dramatic, if the airline company doesn’t expand service to the right cities, its growth may stall because it fails to meet customer demand.

This failure happens in the business world all the time. Somewhere along the way—maybe just after launch or maybe after years of hard work—the company fails to fully deliver the company vision to the customer. Leaders don’t know which next growth step to take, so the company loses focus, stalls, and gradually down it goes!

But some succeed. What makes the difference? What separates the wild-eyed dreamers from the actual winners?

In a single phrase: Go-to-market. More precisely, a high-performing go-to-market (GTM) team and a process for making the dream a reality.

GTM does this by creating a practical path that aligns all of your people with the overarching mission, not just one time but many. It’s about ongoing transformation and continued growth. It’s about knowing what your next move should be—and your next, and your next, and so on.

But what exactly is GTM? GTM is a transformational process for accelerating your path to market where high-performing revenue teams (marketing, sales, customer success, product, revops, enablement) deliver a connected customer experience and every touchpoint reinforces the brand, values, and vision of your company.

In other words, your GTM process connects your company strategy to your customer outcomes, helping customers realize the dream that the company was built on and enjoy the benefits that dream promises to deliver.

It might be helpful to visualize company strategy, customer outcomes, and GTM as three gears that keep your company moving forward, with GTM acting as the connecting gear between the other two. It’s these three gears working together that makes extraordinary growth possible.

• Left gear: Company Strategy — Purpose & Dreams (corporate and product strategy, positioning, messaging, and funding).

• Center gear: GTM Delivery — Brand Experience (create a connected customer experience across Marketing, Sales, and Success).

• Right gear: Customer Outcomes — Benefits Realized (advocacy, Net Promoter Score, retention, and expansion).

For most companies, the missing link is that middle gear. They have a company strategy and they have customers, but they lack a high-performing GTM function. Consequently, they underperform and underachieve, and the dream gets further and further away from achievable. As a result, customers become increasingly unhappy, and retention declines.

If customer retention is suffering, if customers are complaining more and more, if employee turnover is high, then you are underachieving. Maybe there’s messiness inside of your business. Sales hit their number, but it wasn’t pretty. People are so fatigued that it feels like losing even when they win. Maybe momentum has stalled, so even though everyone is still working hard, no one feels like they’re getting ahead.

Whatever the case, you want to know how to course correct and get your company on track, don’t you?

Well, it’s simple. You just need a clear GTM process to ensure that your company continues to deliver the promise of your vision to both employees and customers. In this book, we intend to give you just that.

But first, let’s be crystal clear. Your company strategy is not your GTM strategy. GTM operates in the service of your company strategy in order to drive your business forward faster and further—not just once but reliably and repeatedly.

If you’re a big online retailer like Amazon, your company strategy is to make your products and services readily accessible on the internet. That is your ongoing mission. Your GTM process, then, is how you plan to achieve some of those elements in the short term.

As you probably recall, Amazon started off with one service: selling books online. Over time, they added other products and services, such as music, videos, groceries, self-publishing services, and cloud computing. Amazon is truly a well-oiled GTM machine!

After all, what use is your amazing company strategy if you can’t deliver it to customers? Or to use our opening story, what use are wings if you can’t make them fly, and what good is flying if you can’t go higher, faster, and farther more reliably?

This isn’t a guide for creating your company strategy, mission, or vision, and it’s not a handbook for building great products. We’re here to provide a framework for your GTM process that will help you unlock your potential so you can deliver your unique value proposition to customers and create an enduring company with a sustainable ability to keep growing and scaling.

So many companies struggle with this. Why is it such a problem? We believe it’s because leaders don’t know what questions to ask. If you want better answers, ask better questions, as the old saying goes.

Adding to the difficulty, GTM is cross-functional and ever changing, so you need to ask those questions over and over again. It’s one thing to disrupt the market with a new product. It’s another thing altogether to keep disrupting the market every few years by reinventing your GTM process. No wonder companies are struggling.

The good news is, you can implement a framework for your GTM strategy by answering just four questions. It all comes down to these:

• Whom should we market to? (Market)

• What do we need in order to operate effectively? (Operations)

• When can we scale our business? (Velocity)

• Where can we grow the most? (Expansion)

We can summarize these questions as your Market, Operations, Velocity, and Expansion, or MOVE. As it turns out, finding and aligning on the answers to these four questions is a lot more difficult than it seems when you don’t have a clear framework for doing so.

Sadly, most companies lack a centralized GTM process. They’re not thinking holistically, and there’s no one who owns the GTM process. Doing business feels messy, and there’s a distinct lack of alignment. Often, each team has their own key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success, but they’re all answering different questions with different data and getting different answers, which means they also have misaligned incentives along the customer journey.

For example, the marketing team may be focused entirely on leads, but some of those are the wrong leads. Sales is trying hard to close deals with some of those bad leads. Customer success is working hard, with increasing frustration, to retain some customers who should never have been sold to in the first place.

A telltale sign that your GTM is broken: Having to resell to customers during onboarding.

If you sell but can’t deliver, deliver but can’t renew, or renew but can’t expand, then there’s a growth stall ahead!

When we encourage business leaders to figure out their GTM approach, they often set about fixing it with tremendous enthusiasm, but the way they go about it is all wrong.

They’ll bring together their executive team and announce, “Hey, we’re having trouble reselling to customers. What we’re selling them is not what they were promised. We need to fix our GTM strategy here, so let’s plan a two-day offsite and build our strategy as a team. We’ll make it really memorable so we can put it on a poster.”

Here’s the problem. You can’t approach GTM as if it were your company strategy, vision, or mission. It’s not a trite saying you post on the wall to collect dust. Rather, GTM is an iterative process that ensures what you’re selling is what you’re delivering, and you have to approach it in that way in order to make sure it is always working for you.

Who owns GTM? Which leader is responsible for taking the reins? Our research shows that there is widespread disagreement about this. We asked this question to a thousand business leaders. But who should own it? We’re going to say this more than once in the book—it’s that important: GTM belongs to the CEO!

When you think about it, there are very few things in a company that a CEO owns. They make sure there’s enough money in the bank. They try to ensure that there’s a healthy culture and a vision for the future. They also own the company strategy. That’s about it.

For GTM to be iterative, it must become part of the rhythm of how you do business. It must be tweaked constantly as your company matures, grows, and evolves. As Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, points out, “Go-to-market is not a project.” A project is a temporary work effort with a clear start and end date, but an iterative process like GTM must continue.

It might be helpful to follow HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan’s advice and treat GTM like a product. With a product, you get feedback and iterate on it over time. Treat GTM like a product.

If we call this process GTM, then it must be about marketing, right? Nope. GTM certainly involves your marketing team, but it’s not a marketing process. However, this mistake has led many companies to limit GTM solely to their product launches. That’s only one small piece of a more complex puzzle.

In our previous book, ABM Is B2B, we presented the TEAM framework: target, engage, activate, and measure. That full-on strategy was intended to bring your marketing and sales teams together using the ABM mindset.

But now, with the addition of the GTM process, marketing and sales have a new roommate. Who is this new roommate? Customer success.

Yes, the core of GTM is about creating high-performing revenue teams that connect marketing, sales, and customer success. You have to bring all three to the table because GTM focuses on the entire revenue stream, from new acquisition to pipeline velocity, expansion, upsell, cross-sell, and more.

When most companies are about to go out into the marketplace, they sit down and excitedly talk about how big of a market they’re going after. “Should we go after this $5 billion market? We could potentially reach 100,000 people if we capture it!” The sheer size of the market entices them. In reality, they’re never going to sell to every customer in that $5 billion market. They’re aiming way too broadly. It’s like trying to wash your car with a water balloon. You’ll never get the whole thing wet.

Most businesses will be far better served by narrowing their focus from Total Addressable Market (TAM) to Total Relevant Market (TRM). In other words, instead of trying to reach every possible customer in the biggest market, focus on the customers that are most relevant for the product you have today in the market that is most relevant for you today.

As Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, put it: “If you’re selling hamburgers, it makes sense to put a hamburger stand on every street corner where there’s foot traffic, but that model doesn’t work for B2B.” In a B2B environment, you have to be agile. If you start big, you’re going to underserve all your customers. By starting small, focusing on your most relevant customers based on the product fit you have today, you can get it right and then punch out of that box into a bigger box when you’re ready.

Many companies lack a single source of truth. You’re in a meeting with a marketing leader, a sales leader, and a customer success leader, and somehow you have to make a decision about what is and isn’t working. But marketing, sales, and customer success all have their own data, and you spend thirty or forty minutes debating whose numbers are right. Quite frankly, questions about the business can’t be answered by isolated departments.

This is a clear indication that you need a RevOps team. The RevOps team solves the problem of competing and misaligned teams by becoming the “truth teller” of your organization.

Since they have no emotional attachment to any particular silo, they are able to look objectively at what is working and not working across the customer lifecycle. Teams can focus on solutions to problems instead of fighting over their own version of the truth.

Most B2B marketers have historically focused on the top of the funnel, assuming Sales and Customer Success would manage the middle and bottom. But that model is breaking down. In a tighter market, growth does not come only from adding new logos. It comes from keeping and growing the customers you already have.

That is why retention has become a go-to-market priority, not just a Customer Success metric. The question is no longer just, “How many new customers did we acquire?” The better question is, “What happened to the revenue from the customers we already won?”

Company A and Company B are competitors. They generate the exact same amount of new ARR over the year: $7,000. But Company A loses only $2,000 to churn, while Company B loses $6,000. That means Company A produces $5,000 in net new ARR, while Company B produces only $1,000.

Company A generates 5x more net new ARR simply by retaining more of its revenue base. When retention is paired with expansion, Net Revenue Retention (NRR) rises above 100%, turning your installed base into a compounding growth engine.

Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need a lead funnel. Most companies have them, but the ugly truth about a lead funnel is that, according to Forrester, less than 1 percent of those leads will come out of the other end of that funnel as loyal customers. You don’t become more efficient by cramming even more leads into the top of a leaking funnel.

We recommend tossing that lead funnel right in the garbage and getting yourself a revenue flywheel instead. Shift your focus from driving lead volume to efficient and effective revenue growth, where the goal is to progress opportunities with accounts that are a good fit. It’s quality over quantity.

In a flywheel model, when you bring a customer in the door the first time, you set them up for long-term success with your brand so they will come back around for more products, services, and value over time.

Let’s suppose we were giving you instructions for how to fly your plane higher, farther, and faster more reliably. Our advice would vary depending on where you are in the lifetime of your airplane company, wouldn’t it? Trying to get your flying machine off the end of the ramp and into the air for the first time is a very different process from trying to tweak your design so your air service can reach more cities.

In a similar way, in order to make your iterative GTM process work for you, you have to figure out the best way to implement it in your organization based on the stage of your business. To do that, you need to understand the GTM maturity curve so you can figure out where you are (and where you’re going).

Every company wants to grow, but in order to do so, you have to navigate several stages of business transformation. In this chapter, we’ll explain each of these stages and help you figure out where you are. That way, you can figure out what kind of transformation your business needs to go through in order to get unstuck and progress toward the next stage.

As it turns out, there are three stages of GTM business transformation (and their corresponding three Ps):

• Ideation (problem-market fit): lead-focused, sales-led, inefficient growth.

• Transition (product-market fit): account-focused, sales + marketing aligned, efficient growth.

• Execution (platform-market fit): customer-focused, integrated revenue team, efficient growth at scale.

Revenue is not the material indicator of your current stage. You can have $20 million in revenue and still be at the ideation stage, figuring things out, or you might race through to the transition stage with only $8 million in revenue. Similarly, you can have $150 million in revenue and still be in the transition stage, while another company navigates to the execution stage with much less revenue.

Why do so many companies fail to transform their GTM in time? The CEO hires a sales leader who builds a team and starts to see wins, but they get those wins on heroics alone. But eventually, they reach the end of the runway. You can’t scale without a process and repeatability, and you can’t hire heroics. The very things you need in order to get off the ground will bring you crashing back down if you don’t change them in time.

In the ideation stage, you don’t have a fully developed product yet. Instead, you are working hard to make sure that the problem your product is meant to solve is big enough (and the market is big enough) to achieve success.

That’s the primary focus at this stage: problem-market fit.

Your focus in this stage is on leads, so your team will typically be led by sales. It’s a sales-led effort, with people making a lot of outbound calls, but it’s inefficient growth. You’re very reactive at this stage. Since your focus is on leads, you will build GTM at this stage in terms of volume: lists, events, digital ads, inbound and outbound, calls and demos.

The second stage of business transformation is what we call the transition stage, and at this stage, most businesses are focused on product-market fit.

They know they need a set number of people buying their product or service, and by this point, they’ve had enough development and iterations that they’ve got the right product for the right market.

The test of product-market fit is simple: Same Offer + Same Buyer + Same Way + High Retention.

If you have to customize the product for every customer or if retention is low, you don’t have product-market fit yet.

Since your focus now is on accounts, your GTM process will focus on quality acquisition by design using segmentation: named accounts, prescriptive plays, better fit, happier customers, and higher annual contract value.

The third and final stage of business transformation is the execution stage, which is about platform-market fit.

You can’t become the next HubSpot or Salesforce without having a platform that fits your market. In other words, you have to go beyond the idea of a single product to become a multi-product company, and it’s all of those products together that comprise your company’s platform.

To make the final leap to the execution stage, you have to shift from trying to solely grow your business using new bookings to growing your business from an existing customer base. Your existing customer base will sow the seeds for new customers.

It all comes down to four simple questions:

• Whom should we market to? (Market)

• What do we need to operate effectively? (Operations)

• When can we scale our business? (Velocity)

• Where can we grow the most? (Expansion)

The MOVE framework of GTM transformation = Market + Operations + Velocity + Expansion. Regardless of the size of your company, your industry, or the nature of your products and services, if you can answer these four questions well, you will be able to orchestrate your next move with confidence.

First, you have to figure out whom you’re going to market to. That’s the obvious starting point.

Once you’ve selected a relevant market, you have to make sure you have the operations in place to effectively go after your chosen market. This is where RevOps comes into play: aligning the right people with the right repeatable processes driven by the right data, tech, and metrics to shepherd you into your chosen market and monitor things as you go.

Your velocity ramps create consistency and predictability for adding new people, ramping them up, and enabling teams to provide a consistent experience for customers.

Finally, you’re ready to grow and expand. This is taking what you’ve created and expanding it to new locations and new markets, with new products and services.

It’s not a start-and-stop process but a continuous, circular movement for your company. It’s a giant wheel that keeps turning, moving you forward from market to market.