Jacob Smith - A Former Founder Talks GTM Strategy
Getting the growth strategy right is critical for startups once they’ve found product-market fit. But it’s not always that simple. We have to know when we actually have a repeatable go-to-market, when to bring in a sales leader, how to build out the team, select the right incentives and a whole bunch more. To learn more about how a leader did this, I spoke with Jacob Smith, Former Founder and CMO at Packet and former GTM leader at Equinix. Jacob has been on the series before with his twin brother Zac about leading through an acquisition.
This time, Jacob and I talked about:
How he thinks about GTM
How and why GTM orgs are changing
GTM culture and incentive structures
The difference between product-market fit and go-to-market fit
When to bring in a sales leader
Being a change agent at a corporation with well-established product-market fit
What he sees in the future for GTM strategy
I'm trying to think of when I had you and Zac on. A year or two ago?
It was at least a year ago, but it feels like time is very strange now, so let's call it a year.
Can you introduce yourself for others who don’t know you?
Absolutely. I'm Jacob. The only thing I know how to do really well is play the bassoon, because that's what I went to school for and spent a lot of time doing. But like most do, I went to earn a living outside of playing music. Mine was marketing. I think I started when someone asked, “Could you build me a website?” I had learned some HTML at Carnegie Mellon because it was required. So I was like, “I could figure that out. How much do you want to pay?” They said $200. I said, deal.
So I started doing that and got into the marketing world. I really loved it. So I grew my marketing business on the side into something that was pretty big and started doing a lot of business consulting as part of that, because usually it's not just marketing. You need to fix the product stuff, the brand stuff and all the other elements. So I spent a lot of time doing marketing things until my twin brother and I decided to stop helping each other on the side and do a formal business together. We built this business (Packet) together starting in late 2013. That was really fun and pretty wild. There’s some real highs and some real lows. Working with family is always interesting. Luckily you can't fire each other from that job. So we got through it.
I sold that company a couple of years ago and enjoyed an interesting stint in corporate. And I live in Vermont, as you can see from the snow. (gestures outside to piles of snow)
Yep. I had you and Zac on to talk about Packet getting acquired. I’ll add a link so folks can read that interview. Or listen to it. It’s the first and only joint interview I’ve ever done. It was super fun.
You gotta do like a series of twins. There's all kinds of brothers and twins and sisters out there doing things, so you know.
Definitely and you know I have a twin thing. I grew up on a block with four sets of twins and my best friends are identical twins. I've dated two twins, although not the same twin set.
I was waiting for that clarification. (laughs)
I like to think about (GTM) as what it is that you promise the market. You set your brand promise or your company promise, whatever that is. So it's a lot about why you do and what you do …and then how do you deliver on that promise? I think those are the three big buckets.
So today we’re going to talk about go-to-market (GTM). Can you set the stage for folks and how you think about it?
First of all, I think arguably the most important part of a company is where you meet customers. Sometimes in the technology world, we get a little product focused and technology focused, and that's totally exciting. But where the rubber meets the road is where you meet customers. I find that to be a super exciting area.
The way I like to break it down and the way maybe we'll frame some of our conversation because it is shifting and changing just like everything else. It’s becoming less simple and more nuanced and complicated. But at the end of the day, it's actually still a pretty simple process.
I like to think about (GTM) as what it is that you promise the market. You set your brand promise or your company promise, whatever that is. So it's a lot about why you do and what you do …and then how do you deliver on that promise? I think those are the three big buckets.
And what I mean that it's getting a little bit more complicated is that it used to be a handoff. Marketing does that promise stuff out there to the market. Sales does the negotiating, selling part and then you hand it over to the support people who do the delivery and “keep people happy thing” and maybe even the “not churn out later” thing. As you know, there are fairly siloed organizations – most big companies and even a lot of small companies because the tooling is built that way. There’s marketing tooling, sales tooling and support tooling. They cross over a little bit but the cultures are still looking for handoffs. They’re looking for, “I did my part, you do your part, okay?” Of course they all get to blame Product if it's wrong. (chuckles) It sounds like I'm describing a very siloed organization. I certainly spent some time in a Fortune 100 or 200 recently which has those constructs and for good reason. It's a highly efficient successful organization But it's changing.
I like to say that every leader in a go-to-market organization is like a CRO now instead of the CRO is a CRO and everyone has their domain expertise. Increasingly, marketing needs to think about product -led growth and sales needs to think about how they interact with the ongoing nature of adding value to a customer, not just the transaction upfront. It's no longer, “I do the lead generation, you do the selling, you do the supporting.” I like to embrace that there's rough edges and everyone and every organization can approach it differently.
There's lots of recipes that can be made [with the different ingredients] in companies, but it helps if every leader at the top of that organization ( including the CRO) is thinking like a CRO. My background is in music, so I played a lot in orchestras. I like to think that in a company, you have a CEO who's probably more like an executive director or president than a conductor. Certainly for go-to-market, the CRO is the conductor. You've got to orchestrate the flow and the motion, but you need a principal violin and a principal cello and a principal bassoon, which was what I did – to know each other's parts really well. You can't just be like, you deliver me MQLs and I'll deliver the dollars. It no longer works that way. I think that [change] is accelerating.
For example, we have product-led growth and self-service. Customers are demanding a different role in it [the buying process]. So that's of course changing our technologies and clouds have done a lot with that. But it's just changing the value of each part of the transaction. It would be easy to say right now that product-led growth would be like the thing that's the answer. I don't believe that. I believe that you naturally have all of them. You have an omni-channel go-to-market and that shifts the roles. We can talk more about that as we kind of get through it, especially for sales. I think sales functions really stretch and change in new ways. I'm a marketer at heart, and I believe marketing changes a lot too. But those two really become different animals when you think about changing the flow and breaking down the silos.
Why do you think that the siloed nature of it is changing now?
I think it's because customers want it to change.
You know how it goes. Let's say you're buying something not cheap that you really care about. Something non-commoditized that you really care about, — it's important in your business. You tend to not enjoy getting handed off to people who don't have context throughout the process. You probably don't enjoy having to talk to people who can't help you, who don't have the information. Those kinds of things are just like “huh?” to clients. Engagement throughout the journey needs to be value add whether that's accelerating the process, helping to deepen your understanding of the product, or assisting in getting more value out of it.
As a customer, you want it all. I think that's because many experiences in your life work that way. You've gotten used to it in other areas so you apply it to your business stance. So I think customers are changing that.
And then, of course, product experiences are changing.People have gotten used to a mixture of usage based consumption alongside traditional commitments. That really changes the order of operations. A simple example is you'll find there's a big misunderstanding within an organization about when do we acquire a customer? As if that's a singular moment in time, like the moment someone signed a contract. Of course that is important, but usually, it’s far more complicated than that.
For instance, in a developer-led or self-service motion, you need to think about mindshare and adoption alongside more formal commitments like signed contracts. “Hey, let me use it and get a lot of value and trust you and see how you work. And then I'll commit.” You might want to do a lot of stuff early before you even think about using it. Like, “Why would I waste my time spooling up my IT department to do a security audit if I can't get it at the right price or whatever.” So when you acquire a customer is really shifting, and that impacts resources substantially. For a lot of customers, they sign up and start using, but are they committed? Is that really a deal? No, that's just them trying. This starts to change the roles and the relationships around generating durable revenue. I think that means the silos have to at least reevaluate how they work together. And frankly, if you need them to work in the same way.
It sounds like the company has to make a mindset shift about how they think about customers, product and acquisition.
That's why I say CRO, because if I say revenue, a lot of people think sales. Right? I believe revenue is the cumulative effect of setting the promise, and then transacting and delivering on it. And then making that more efficient and scalable. That means the right customer – they have to actually get value out of the product. So you're also product minded.
I think it's a very holistic mindset. That’s why I think we’re in the business of revenue, not in the business of marketing or sales or care. We’re all in that together in a real orchestra of revenue.
You know I love this because I work with leadership teams and org development. A big problem why companies fail or struggle is because they don’t work together as a team. They’re like, “I’m the leader of this area. It’s my domain. Stay out.” Or the incentives are misaligned. We don’t really think about the whole system.
Yeah, I like to use musical references. When things are in tune, they work better. I think you're right. Incentives are a big part of it and far more so than in other parts of an organization, especially big organizations. Incentives in go-to-market, mainly sales, but other parts as well is truly how you compel the behavior you need.
I mean, I know people respond to their bonuses and their salaries in engineering, but in go-to-market the incentives are why people choose to be there. I mean, there are, you know, what do people say, missionaries and mercenaries, right? There are different stripes within go-to-market, but the organization high fives around winning, right? That's usually related to dollars because it’s the easiest way to translate a very complex thing into something that everybody understands, and the company requires.
Yeah. My brother runs North America sales for a steel tube company so I’ve been around sales for a long time. It’s a whole culture that’s quite different and can be challenging to get all the parts working together.
Totally, yeah. Part of it's because there's a lag time. Any organization, they don't respond with the kind of agility that you might hope. But especially as you work in larger organizations, when I was at Equinix, we had almost 900 quota -bearing heads and then a three-to-one support wrapper around them. So you're talking about say 2,000 people to support the sales machine.
Wow.
Plus another 1,000 - 2,000 people to market it, product market, manage it, PR, comms and support. Suddenly you've got a full company. So tuning that machine is complex
I spent a year working on that at Equinix and it was a really good lesson for me. In some ways it’s much harder than changing engineering culture and practices which are fairly process oriented. There’s a culture of engineering that is a bit more structured. There’s a different aspect to go-to-market culture which is more winning, energizing, challenging. How you get people motivated and incentives are a big part of that.
I think it's a very holistic mindset. That’s why I think we’re in the business of revenue, not in the business of marketing or sales or care. We’re all in that together in a real orchestra of revenue.
Competition and winning are a big part of that culture. If we think about incentives and go back to breaking down silos, how do you begin to break those down? Are incentives part of it?
Yeah, I think you have to pay a lot of attention to compensation.
Traditionally compensation has either been a revenue operations function or within a sales department, right? Oftentimes sales leadership will define and set the sales plan for the sales team. As we expand our view of revenue beyond the sales function, you need to basically invite a bigger conversation.
Let’s give the easy example – land and expand. Everyone's into land and expand, right? Why would you want to spend all this money to get a new customer only to have them not grow? So how do you incentivize expansion? Who's involved in that? You could pretend that landing is a discrete number of people, although I would argue it's increasingly common for customers to engage with various non-sales functions as part of that process. For instance we’ve all heard potential customers share things like:went to look at the docs and I talked to someone on chat and I couldn't find the answer. So I was not happy.” That experience can be a huge part of landing or not landing a customer, and it requires execution across a range of functions to achieve it.
But let's just say that the act of landing a customer that grows over a long period of time is mainly an account team function. In reality, we know that it depends on what the customer is expecting. It depends which relationships were built through various touch points in their journey. Maybe the customer came through a marketing-led PLG process. This probably means that Customer Success has to come in very early, probably before Sales even knows it exists.. This is just to say that it's no longer, “Hey it’s your job now.” It’s a relationship that is ongoing, and very dynamic.
One result of these changes is that especially sales moves to higher value activities versus trying to claim and continue to claim the same body of work and frankly control over the relationship, which is a disincentive for everyone.
I think sales is the hardest job you can have, personally. So how do we not have some of our most expensive and hard to retain people doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing like trying to answer all the technical questions from a buyer. No, no, no. Instead, we want them orchestrating getting into a new different business line – that's high value!
We can do a lot with marketing automation. We can do a lot with AI, make a lot of things happen, but we can't build a trusting relationship that's going to get us over the line when frankly, shit hits the fan or when an opportunity arises — maybe through an acquisition or something external — these kind of “make it or break it” moments.
So this evolution of our product experiences shifts things around but especially moves sales into higher value activities and removes it from lower value ones. Demand gen, qualification – we’ve got the marketing and customer success parts of the world that can do this extremely well. And as we ask those functions to step into revenue-generating roles, we need to introduce incentives for those people. They may be different from traditional sales compensation plans. For instance they may not be total contract value based, but more about hitting adoption milestones or achieving quarterly growth in a diverse book of business.
Friction in your incentive structure can be really good. You can have someone who wants to get it over the line and someone else says, only if it’s the right fit, the right time. That sort of dynamic creates a sense of teamwork where everyone wins or everyone’s got to win, right? It can be really compelling in the change process.
We might think we want to completely remove friction in incentives but what I hear you saying is that some amount of friction can create a more cohesive unit in the process of getting the customer to land and expand.
Yep. And figure out your proven process, what works for you.
At Equinix we were experimenting with some new products so we had specialist overlays to the general sales team that we trained up in a certain thing. We had to change their incentives. They had a very different and higher level target. Like, here’s a list of 100 accounts globally that I need you to go and get. That’s it.
That kind of duality is uncomfortable when it’s new to teams. But if you show how it can work by clarifying roles and responsibilities and get the incentives right, you can point folks towards the north star that it benefits everyone to break down the kind of silos where he wins and I lose kind of thing or “that’s my account”. It’s really tricky stuff that I think that as product people we can oversimplify and just say, salespeople get commissions, end of story. But it’s complicated. It’s not always clear, and it has a major impact on the people in the revenue organization.
Friction in your incentive structure can be really good. You can have someone who wants to get it over the line and someone else says, only if it’s the right fit, the right time. That sort of dynamic creates a sense of teamwork where everyone wins or everyone’s got to win, right? It can be really compelling in the change process.
Getting the engine tuned is pretty tricky and experimenting with it is very hard. We can’t be like, “We’re just going to give this a try this quarter to see how it works.”
Everyone's like, “That's 70 % of my money this year, you're messing with my livelihood.” So the experimentation increasingly happens around the setting of the promise and the delivery of the promise. You have to be more careful and intentional around the transaction — the sales— part of it.
PRODUCT MARKET FIT VS GO-TO-MARKET FIT
It’s a really good point. GTM is just a really different part of the org than others. It’s more complex. I think it can feel like a black box or magical sometimes to other parts of the org.
Yeah, let's talk about that for a second, because I think we could dive into that forever. Startups are a little easier when they're small because everyone's in everything. It's pretty easy. Right? We're all in it. Its founder led sales. There's like eight people or 20 people working together, it's all pretty team oriented. Simple!
The problems come when you get into Enterprise and you scale.
At that point you have to separate these things out to some degree. Having cross pollination and finding shared business goals is really important. And then, as you said, “the sales machine will do it, right?” Like, cool, we got some proof points, we built a good widget or product or feature and now we ship it on over. We set some revenue targets and we hope that everyone knows their part.
I don’t think Product people or founders actually just toss it over the fence but in a way, because it’s kind of opaque to them and they’re less connected to a revenue culture, it can feel that way.
So the thing I've been thinking a lot about is when to know you’re ready for “sales.”
I read a book recently called “Survival to Thrival” by Bob Tinker. It’s about the two phases of a company’s growth: the product market fit phase, and the go-to-market fit phase.
Thinking about a startup, we talk about product market fit a lot. There is a sense that once you have product market fit, then you should be good, right? It leaves out the nuances of how do you know when you have a strong go-to-market fit. They’re distinct and very different stages of a company. In the first phase, you're building, innovating and working together to get the customer to come with you, give feedback and all these things. And then in the other one, you have to have a whole bunch of people who aren't really involved in any of those things – sell it, support it, market it. It's sometimes a little hard to tell when you're ready for the next stage.
I think the most common mistake startups make around this area is that you do the product market fit phase with a bunch of your friends. You're like, “Oh, I built this cool tool. I knew a person when we worked together at XYZ corp, and now she's running things over at ABC corp, I'll give her a call and we'll get some feedback.” Due to your social connection, background, etc she will often give you encouraging feedback and maybe even be a first customer.
That’s the easiest sale ever. It's like, I'm going to ask my friend if they want to give us some feedback about being an early, influential customer. So there’s a lot of, “Oh yeah, that looks great.” But it’s not like asking the question early on, “What would you pay for it? Will you buy it?” Budget cycles are hard, especially if the person on the other side of the table isn’t a close friend..
Would you theoretically buy it is a very different thing than would you really buy it. Giving me a purchase order is a whole, complicated process. That’s what GTM often has to go through. They don’t get credit if it doesn’t actually happen.
So understanding when you're ready for a go-to-market phase, you have to put yourself in the mindset to delegate, process and scale – even if it’s like two salespeople that aren’t the product leader and founder, it’s a totally different ball game.
Often startups start investing in sales and marketing and go, “Why isn’t it working? I guess we have the wrong sales people” or something like that. Or they hire a sales leader too early. They think “we got some great proof points. We’re going to bring in the big guns now.” That’s not usually when you want a sales leader because they’re good at running a machine, not building it from scratch.
PACKET PRODUCT MARKET FIT AND GTM FIT
Can I go back to the startup phase? How did you figure out product market fit and go-to-market fit at Packet?
In retrospect, quite badly! Packet was an upstart. It’s easy to play the challenger and to find passionate people who are looking for what’s next or what’s new or different. That is fairly doable. Even to get our first dollars was from early adopters. It was from the people who had a burning pain, people who just had to buy it. They need it and you’re one who has it. That’s a great place to be. That can sound like product market fit. It can feel like it.
We certainly felt that and we're like, “Oh my gosh, look how far we got without any salespeople or look how far we got without spending anything on marketing. Imagine if we spent something!”
Now, unlike most startups, we had a marketing and go-to-market founder. Most startups don’t. Most have technical founders. So I was at least at the table to say, “Let’s put our money over here or our energy over here in activities that are durable, such as brand equity We over-indexed on that. Knowing when to add sales, when to add (customer) success, are not things a lot of technical founders have explored before. So they try to find someone who did it well before and bring them in. It often comes from a sense of a deficit and they do it too early.
When you’re succeeding with founder-led sales, that’s a good thing. Get out there and sell! You’re the only one in the company who can change the product roadmap, rally the team, and orchestrate an impossible win. So get out there and make the big deals, you know? And that's okay for a long time.
The tricky part is recognizing when you are ready to have that run more on its own. In my opinion, you need to have people who you don’t know coming at you wanting to do big deals before you really have go-to-market fit. The market has to be sucking you in for that machine to just flow and that’s a really hard thing to get going.
It seems hard to know when we’re at that point when it’s time to bring in a sales leader.
To organize the sales part of it is changing recipes. You need to have a sense of what you’re trying to orchestrate. What do you want it to look like? What does success really look like?
There are some interesting models out there that don't involve scaling up sales early. Open source and cloud based businesses are good examples.
I was listening to a podcast about the development of the Porsche Cayenne. Porsche makes sports cars, so when making a SUV it would be logical for them to design a beautiful SUV in the spirit of Porsche and see if people bought it. Instead they brought in a bunch of Porsche customers. They didn’t say, it’s amazing, will you buy it? They said, how much would you pay for a Porsche SUV? Then they put down everything that’s in a Cayenne (which is something like 50% of Porsche’s operating profit) and asked would you pay for it? One example I loved was about the cup holder. A designer would be like, “I’m not going to ruin my beautiful Porsche SUV with a tacky cup holder, like a huge Stanley cup.” But guess what? People were like, “I would totally pay for that. Here’s how much.” Injecting the commercial conversation early is scary to a lot of product people, but essential if you want to have an effective GTM machine.
To organize the sales part of it is changing recipes. You need to have a sense of what you’re trying to orchestrate. What do you want it to look like? What does success really look like?
Often we segment off product and sales rather than build together.
Yeah, for sure. If you’re a product manager, asking customers commercial questions early versus feature questions is powerful. Too often we do the packaging and the pricing later. My guidance is: do it early. It's an important muscle to build and it creates a lot of trust with the GTM team. As a person who loves building products, it can be natural to delay that part because you love that thing that you're building, and you avoid asking “What would you pay for it?” What's it going to take for you to buy it today?
My guess is that bringing in a sales leader too soon is a pretty common mistake.
I think so. I mean, funders and venture capital folks often want it. Usually they say, “Okay, time to get an adult in the room.” Like I mentioned before, most people translate revenue to sales. But you’re seeing more people who are CROs of big, successful, interesting companies, a lot of them have sales backgrounds but increasingly they have other backgrounds.That's because it's a very holistic machine so they might come with a revenue operations, financial, analytical, marketing or even product background if a big part of their thing is changing the market.
The “revenue equals sales” mindset can be a big risk because you often hire someone who’s not a holistic builder. They may be a hugely successful sales leader but asking them to stretch into marketing and customer success, let alone product and operational implications, is really challenging.
I have such enthusiasm for technical founders and startup people. My message to them is: go-to-market is exciting. Get involved, ask the questions. If a customer tells you no, that's a great opportunity to say, why not? It’s not a failure! Just like in other areas of growth, grow around the customer experience. Usually they want you to succeed if you’re trying to do the right thing. As leaders, our job is not to always be right. Our job is to learn and grow and show people that it’s ok.
LESSONS LEARNED AT PACKET
If there was a mistake you made or something you wish you’d done differently, what would that be?
Yeah, well, a couple.
First, I didn't put enough energy when we did bring on what I would call sales. They were team members who often didn’t know anything about sales. It was like, “You seem like a people person and love our product. Let’s get you in the seat.” It was as simple as that. We didn’t think enough about the incentive structure and the tools they needed to be successful.
As it relates to customer success, I think a lot of companies make their first impression on customers is a really great customer success investment. They’ve got the mission right out front, helping them use it and be happy. We were pretty good at that. Our misstep was that we didn’t really commit to it over the long run. We let that become second fiddle. You know, time to grow up now!
The other part is we didn't listen to our customers about what they wanted enough. You can always give customers everything they want. That’s not really the play. But they were pretty insistent that the key to their growth, especially the ones who are spending real money (six figures a year at the beginning, then six figures a month) wanted technical expertise who understood their account. They wanted an account team around them that was really aware, that was savvy. That’s hard. You’ve got to pay for that. You can’t do it cheaply.
As we all know, it's easy when you have just a couple of customers, but things break when you have 20 good ones. We didn't make all of the investments that we needed to continue scaling that engine because most of the time it was working well on the surface..
Suzan, you're an ops person, you’ve run the numbers. Acquiring the customer who spends more and more money for five years is the best one. They refer you. You can't even quantify the referral. You can't even quantify whether or not you made it into their next platform redo or upgrade or vendor evaluation. You don't even know until after. So it really is important to invest in the customer experience and whether that's a sales led account management function or it's a customer success led motion, it’s got to be good, especially in high value products and services.
We definitely let that slip. We saw the results. We just saw them like a year after we made the mistake.
That's hard. Sometimes the feedback loop is long and it’s hard to course correct quickly.
A mistake I made is that we should be talking about a buying cycle not a sales cycle.
When I hired my first product marketer, she’s a great one who came from Puppet and before that IBM, she was like, “Jacob, you got it all wrong. It’s not sales enablement, it’s buyer enablement. How do we help people buy?.” She was totally right!
I remember being so upset. I was really angry because I had this great guy on the team named Sam who was the king of pricing. He was the deal desk. No deals got done without Sam so he was the de facto sales boss for a while and I was everything else. He was like, “This can work out great, Jacob. You bring me customers who are ready to sign a contract and I’ll close them.” But there’s all this other work that has to get done. I’m like, you’ve got to do more of it. He’s like, “No, you get them 100% ready to buy and I’ll get the deal done.” I didn’t have an appreciation about how important that part of the deal process was to get right.
He was signaling to me, “Look you're better equipped to get through the noise of all the people who might want to buy and efficiently get it down to the people who actually want to sign.” Everyone's a “maybe” customer. like, “Put your energy towards getting me a new customer each month and then a new one each week who is ready to really sign a contract.”
He was redirecting the attention to finding motivated buyers instead of pushing on sales people to pull rabbits out of a hat. I misunderstood that totally. I thought, What, sales doesn’t want to do the work? They just want to sign contracts all day? That was a mistake, an immaturity on my side because I hadn’t lived in a sales organization and understood the dynamics.
So that’s a couple of mistakes for you. Just keep me talking and I’ll get you more! (chuckles)
LESSONS FROM INTEGRATING PACKET INTO EQUINIX
What did you learn when you went to Equinix?
First of all, change is super hard.
So people understand the journey, we were acquired in March 2020. For a period of time we worked as a business unit. We were on our own. It felt like a startup but with more resources, which was amazing. We did that for a while until we began to integrate our teams into the broader corporate structure.
That doesn't happen in every acquisition, but it was clear it was going to happen in ours and it was the right thing. For a long time I was accountable for marketing, customer success, developer relations and for a good while, sales. Even if I wasn’t holding the bag, I was running the team and doing all that stuff in collaboration with someone who came over from the Equinix mothership to help.
After about 1.5 years we finally integrated it all so I didn’t have a role. My whole team was gone because they moved into different leaders. I was like, What will I do? I still need to have a job. I hadn’t planned on that. So I asked my CRO, Karl, if I could take an interim role to help bring new motions into our extremely scaled and successful sales machine. Equinix’s core business has this amazing product-market fit, which has helped to drive 20 years of straight quarterly revenue of growth. It’s a pretty amazing machine. But I was interested in how we might evolve to do something really new — in this case introducing self-service digital infrastructure — and how we would make that happen.
As part of this role, I got to sit at the leadership team level which was super fun. It was eight or nine people, including the CRO who had big, big numbers. I mean, we're talking about $2 billion quarters. You know, that the public market really reacts to. So it was an interesting place to be a change agent.
What I learned is that in a matrixed organization where there are a lot of dotted lines, you spend an enormous amount of time building deep relationships across a very big org. That is really hard. There’s a lot of complexity.
It was a global organization with regional presidents and regional sales leaders and 40% of the revenue going through channel partners. The main thing I learned, aside from the complexity and the importance of relationships, was that we’re entering a future that will be an omni-channel world.
Modern businesses, especially in SaaS and cloud, will be doing sell-to and sell-through channel, cloud marketplaces, reimagining our direct sales motion, and tapping into self-service and product-led motions. It’s all going to be in the mix. Some companies are further along than others but this “omni channel” GTM is coming for sure.
At Equinix we spent some time exploring how we were going to add product-led growth to a sales led motion. That alone was a big body of work. It required understanding deeply the impact of such a change on, for instance, those 900 quota bearing heads. Because if you adjust that machine the wrong way, you'll get the wrong behavior. Even if it's all positive intent, folks can easily get the wrong signals. So the signals you send through incentives but also through mechanisms like sales kickoffs reverberate for a long time. You gotta be intentional about those.
What I learned is that in a matrixed organization where there are a lot of dotted lines, you spend an enormous amount of time building deep relationships across a very big org. That is really hard. There’s a lot of complexity.
ADVICE FOR FOUNDERS
Was there anything that we didn't cover that we should?
Well, I have a few tricks to reinforce and share.
First, keep it simple where you can. There’s a lot of complexity in go-to-market but at the foundation it's a pretty clear formula: What do you promise and how do you deliver upon that promise. There’s transaction stuff in the middle, but if you keep the customer experience in mind, you can really short circuit a lot of the mess, confusion and heartache.
Second, write it down. The words really matter and you need to get a shared understanding, just like in code reviews and operational runbooks. One thing I love is how Amazon writes the press release for the product before they build it. They really imagine it and it’s a formal part of their process.
At Equinix we were having trouble in the go-to-market transformation helping people understand our strategy and what we were asking them to do. It was clear that we just weren’t speaking the same language. So we started writing the quarterly earnings press release internally as if we were some magical future state organization. So we would take a HashiCorp quarterly earnings report, which is all about things like net dollar retention and SaaS measurements and we would write our quarterly earnings report with that in mind. It was a really interesting exercise that helped people imagine the financial outcome of the work we were trying to do, and creating a common language across the organization. It was a fun kind of hack.
I have such enthusiasm for technical founders and startup people. My message to them is: go-to-market is exciting. Get involved, ask the questions. If a customer tells you no, that's a great opportunity to say, why not? It’s not a failure! Just like in other areas of growth, grow around the customer experience. Usually they want you to succeed if you’re trying to do the right thing. As leaders, our job is not to always be right. Our job is to learn and grow and show people that it’s ok.
There’s a lot of growth and change in go-to-market. I expect if we were back talking in a couple of years we’ll have so many more startup founders and technical people talking about go-to-market because they’ll be innovating software for it and building new businesses in it.