There are five Valleys of Death that every company faces when scaling their business. In Episode 42 of the B2B Podcast, Pit Stops to Podium, Sangram Vajre, co-founder of Terminus and best-selling author of “MOVE: The 4-Question Go-to-Market Framework”, shares the best methods that every company should know to avoid dying in these valleys. Sangram became a student of Go-to-Market while trying to answer the question - “What makes a company go from good to great?” Join us and learn from the best how to answer the questions that come up in each evolution of your business.
Take 20 minutes to listen and digest and then head back to the races! 🏁🏆
Pitstop Highlights
The 5 Valleys of Death
The 5 Valleys of Death deal with many issues throughout the stages of a business.
1. Created the product, but can’t market: As you’re just developing your company, you may have a hard time finding a category and market for your product. You may not know what the market you’re trying to sell to is.
2. Found a market, but can’t sell: You’ve found a market, but can’t sell a product that will retain customers.
3. Can sell your product, but can’t deliver: This is when sales and products start to have an issue. Sales is overpromising and the product is underdelivering.
4. Can deliver, but can’t renew: You are able to deliver your product to customers, but they aren’t loving the product enough to buy it again.
5. Can renew, but can’t expand: You have good retention in customers, but you’re not expanding the business to other platforms and technologies.
Who Are Your Stakeholders?
CEO: Own go-to-market
CMO: The “Galavizer” of the company, essentially the person who has all the data points and is able to align the teams
CRO: The “Orchestrator”, the person orchestrating behind the scenes of the business.
VC: The person who guides the company and sets the company on a path to where it should go.
Engage with Sangram and Terminus:
Full Transcript
Brendan: Hey everybody, Welcome to Pit Stops to Podium, the RevPartners podcast where we talked to execs who competed and won, taking the company from high growth to high scale. My name is Brian Tolleson I am the co-founder and CEO of RevPartners, and I'm delighted to have with me today, Sangram Vajre from Terminus. Welcome, Sangram.
Sangram: Hey, Brandon. Good to be here. New year, new idea. New excitement.
Brendan: Yeah, this is exciting for me. This is our first podcast of the year from a recording perspective, and it's great to start with you. I'm a big fan of what you've built for those who don't know who singer is. Sangram is the co-founder of Terminus. You are also a Wall Street Journal best selling author, and you are also the founder of Peak Community. What did I miss? What else are you doing that our audience should be aware of?
Sangram: You know, we were recording this the first week of January right now, so our flip on a podcast just hit 999 episodes. So the 1,000 episode, we're changing the name from flip my final to move. So like to me, that's the other part. Just like, it's fun having conversations and learning every day.
Brendan: That's great. Well, singing for those that don't know who or what flipped my funnel is or who or a terminus is or AVM. How about you give our audience an elevator pitch on who terminus is, what ABM is and why flip my funnel has been kind of that tagline for you. You and the brand?
Sangram: Sure thing. Well, I'll just give a story. That's that's what I love to do is just share stories, because that's hopefully we'll stick a lot more, a lot longer than the podcast. Like when I was running marketing at Bardot back in the day to the acquisition of ExactTarget and Salesforce, I remember Brendan, we hit every single record. There was a number of downloads, e-books and whatnot, everything. And I and the team were feeling super excited. We thought we did something really cool, high fives then to be now part of the Salesforce ecosystem. So we just felt really good. And then my head of sales partner comes in and says, sangram, you and the team did a phenomenal job. That's awesome. Could you generate 3,000 more leads starting next month? I'm telling you, man, I just say this. Yeah, right? Like, I just sank in my seat. I'm like, what about the 30,000 leagues that you know, we created last quarter? And it just made me realize that I wasn't anything better than a coin operated lead machine, and it was a really turning point for me to think about, like, well, as a marketer, as a leader, as a business leader. You know, people listening to this as revenue leaders like you got to really take the time to define our job and who we are. Otherwise everybody else can define you, and it's too late to come out of it. So to me, that's really led me to the exploration of what is a better way of as a marketer to do what I do that shows that I drive more than lead because I could just buy a lead machine and then go sleep for the next 30 days like this has got to be more. And that took me to the root of this whole idea of flip my funnel and ABM, which in a nutshell, is just nothing better marketing and sales. If you start with the best bit accounts that you can, you want to sell through that you think you can serve the most or the best. Then you focus on them, and the better you do that, the higher conversion rate, the higher results you get. And that's really the philosophy behind it, kind of just marketing and flip material and how terminus really got started.
Brendan: Yeah, I think It's fairly common practice now and everyone is familiar with it, but this is somewhat of a disruptive, revolutionary type of idea that to your point, it was all about volume and how people were measuring the marketing space in the past. And now it's looking at that conversion rates and quality, high quality type of leads less is more, et cetera. So thank you for what you've done and we're excited to continue to watch what you continue to build. So sanger, before we get to our big idea, I want to talk about your new book because it's an excellent book. But before we get there, one of the traditions we have here at the podium is to get to know our guests outside of work. So what are three fun facts that we should know about you?
Sangram: Well, you know, I got a wife and two kids, which is always fun. But what's fun about that? And we talked about this before we hit record was started terminus when we just had our second baby and it wasn't the best time to do it. So there was a lot of partnership at home and a lot of negotiations at home that happened when it did that. That was really fun in the hindsight, not during that time. I mean, I say I'm picking up guitar again, something that I used to play when I was, you know, back in India and I just stopped. And so this year, my resolution is not to play guitar. My my goal is to learn 10 songs this year to play on guitar. So that it's actionable, just taking some work lessons from home, like proper OK, as opposed to play guitar. It's really unmeasurable kind of thing that I've. We all have done at some point. What what genre of music for those 10 songs? I mean, a lot of it is like, you know, some of it is just pure Christian music, like the songs that me and my kids and family, we just sing and we have especially the Christian. The Christmastime really made me think about like, man, it'd be really cool if I could play hallelujah or play Mary now and brother right now. Just learn how to play melody now. So that's great. Well, do your kids think as cool as you think it's going to be? I mean, I'm so far the kids are like 7 and 11, so I'm still pursuing that. You're certainly cool zone. OK Yeah. And my son plays piano, so and my daughter loves to sing. So we kind of have a really home band that literally can stay only in our home if it goes outside. You know, it will be a bad thing. So, so we do that. And outside of that's quite the other part is that I have Grammarly. I don't know you use or other used grammarly, but I'm one of the top 10 people who uses grammar to lead them out, which I know it's like, man, please do not publish that fact publicly, but they just send me an email recently saying, hey, you are the most used. And I was like, is that a compliment? Yeah I'm not sure. Should I be proud of this?
Brendan: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, now we know what our social post will be for this podcast. Yeah well, thank you for being open about three fun facts about you. It's one of the things I appreciate. Let's move into the big idea. You were kind enough to send me this book a month or two ago, and I read over the weekend, wrote a bunch of notes, loved it. And I think it's a great topic for our community because we're talking to revenue leaders. And so the title of the book is moved. The four question go to market framework. I want to talk through that book for a little bit. But before we do that, I'd love to start with what caused you to write this. What did you see in the market that said, hey, I need to write a book on it?
Sangram: People can do this research now almost search for like fast Valley of death, and they will find tremendous amount of stuff written on it. And the fact that Mackenzie put out a study that says that companies literally die in the valleys of death. And as terminus as we have gone from 0 to 50, we have gone through that several times myself at terminus like, oh, we are over it and then we're like, in the valley, then we are over it. We're in the Valley and it really would. McKinsey in that study talked about is the fact that it's not that your product is the one in the early days. Maybe that is really good, but later on, you're going to have competitors and it's going to be challenging for you to just compete on a product or a feature set. Maybe it is your brand and you have personality and everything. That's great. You can make a lot of noise, but later on, at some point you again, are going to be competing and then also be compared across the board when people start putting you in a category. So what really gets companies companies to go from good to great? In many ways, at least from what I saw and we saw was this idea, which is very unsexy and very and talked about in many ways, which is go to market. It's really go to market like how do I go to market? How do I get in front of the right people at the right time? And if you go back and look at it, there's not a single company in the world that would say, I don't want to improve my go to market like not a single company or we got this. This is because there are just so many elements to go to market. And the more I became a student of it, the more I learn how important it is and how much I did not know about it. So this book honestly has been a fun, fun experience for me and the people that I got to interview to do this really enlighten me on this path.
Brendan: That's great. Yeah, we'll get into go to move in a second. Actually, I'll pause. When you talk about move, move also serves as an acronym. So, so what does move stand for you?
Sangram: Move is all my books. All this is the third book. All books are some sort of acronym. Flip is a graphic. The last book ABM is B2B was team. We're targeting get active measures. I love acronyms. I love frameworks for everybody who is listening to this. If it's not practical and if it's just inspirational, then I feel like you remember it for a day. But if it is practical, then you remember it forever and you use it. So I'm hoping that's what happens to this book. Some move stands for market operations, velocity and expansion. Really, the four questions every company asked, no matter what stage of the business they are in is what we discovered was who should I market to today? If you're early stage, you might say I want to market to do marketers of this stage or SMB. But as you grow as a company, at some point you will say, oh, now I want to go in different markets, so you need to figure out who you market to continually and figure that part out operations is where I think you really Excel in your organization talks about it, which is rep ops, the ability in the early days. Maybe the finance ops is doing it, maybe later on. You have marketing ops or sales ops doing what they need to do, but really the next generation of companies are going to really have. Rub UPS, as a matter of fact, we can talk about it a little bit of detail later on. I feel rebuffs the second most important role in any company. Most people don't even think about it as much. So we can share more about it. The third question is, can you repeat that for a second? Yeah yeah, no. I think this is people. People don't recognize it. And that terminus, we went through that for two years ago and continues to be the number one reason why we get to do our moves as a company. What our next move is ramp UPS. mean, it's the second most important job. And I say second, because if the ceos, their job is to drive the go to market process, they're the owners of go to market. That was another big aha moment. It wasn't a market or a sales, it was the CEO. Because, again, go to market is not about pitching a new product or going into a new market. It could mean M&A. It could mean creating a community it. It could mean go to your decision between do I invest in hiring a salesperson or do a partner program or going in a different location? So that all is a really big, big question. These are all go to market questions, but ramp UPS. So another way to think about it, Brendan, I've been talking to a bunch of CEOs and VCs on this. Is that the most pivotal question that most companies ask is hey, or especially visas that are notorious to ask this question. If I give you another 100 thousand? Where would you invest? I hate that question like, you know, really with passion. But everybody who's listening to at some point has been asked that question or at least wondered about that. What would I do with another 100 or million dollar, whatever? And the interesting is, it's a really fair question, but of unfair. If you are working in a particular silo, for example, if you're working in a sales organization, then you might say, oh, I need another salesperson. If you work in a marketing organization, you might say, I need a marketing or something like that. If you're an engineer, you might say, I need more engineers like who doesn't need more, more engineers. But the person the CEO can really ask this questions and have a proper answer is the rebels person. Because the DevOps person, literally, if they are the right person and if they are in the right place in the organization typically reporting to the CEO or CFO or CEO, then they will actually be looking at everything and say, you know what, I think we got, we need enablement or we need to invest in marketing, or they will be able to give a very clear response to that. And they are probably the best people to ask that question, which is why I feel like they are the second most person that is important in the company when it comes to go to market decisions.
Brendan: I love it. I didn't want you to a detour, but I did like your answer to that. Yeah, I think, well, selfishly, I think you're right and I think there is what I kind of capture that is they can make those data informed decisions to say, hey, what is the best use of that 100,000 for the organization in light of all the objectives and go to market strategy that you have in place? All right. So let's move to V.
Sangram: Yeah, so V is for velocity. This is a question. I'm sure, Brendan, you have asked several times yourself as a CEO of your company, which is when can we scale our business like, you know, what do I need? What are the metrics? And that's where you see my. And we hire a marketing. We are recruiting enough demand. We have sales. Are we creating enough acceleration? Do we have customer success? Are we creating more expansion? Do we have engineers? Are we getting more products faster than market? These are all the metrics that you need to figure out if they work, then that you can scale your business, you can hire more people. So it's very important part of growing your business. And the fourth one, this came in really interestingly. Initially, E was for experience when we started with market operations, velocity and experience. But then we had an interview with Scott Dorsey, who the CEO of exact target, this exact target to Salesforce, or $2.7 billion and many are struggling to start. He was like, man, look, Scott, when you were building, there were $250 million company like what kept you up at night? Like, what made you think about growth? How do you think about growth? And he said, you know, it's really expansion is what kept me up. It was really the idea that where can we grow the most? Where do I need to invest the most? Like Hubspot, for example, created agency program to grow the most. For example, exact target. They started to create a much more acquisition oriented strategy to grow the most. So every company has a different way. Like Salesforce, for example, start with sales cloud, and they have multiple different clouds as a way to get to multiple different personas in the company to grow. So you have to really figure out expansion at some point. So it was evolved from experience to expansion. So that those are the four ones market operations, velocity and expansion and to cap it out. What's interesting, Brendan, I found out, was when you look at any company of any size, the questions remain the same, but the answers to these questions will continue to change like early stage, for example, just using operations, early stage might be finance guy a little bit. Margaret said you might have a marketing op sales, but a platform market fit or a company that is moving in that direction will have RevOps. So the answer is in the book, we really go in length and detail that it could be different, but the questions surprisingly are the same.
Brendan: Yeah, I love that and we'll get into that in a second in terms of that because I think it fits into a great framework to talk about the three P's in terms of problem, product, and then performance. And I think the framework we talked about in terms of the questions are the same, but it looks like in those different seasons or phases, those inflection points certainly looks different. Before we get there, though, I do want to take a step back. So you say you start with go to market? Yeah, I don't know why, but what are the six truths that you unpack in the book that our audience should be aware of that will then inform the tactics, if you will, within that question framework?
Sangram: You know, the six truths are really, really interesting. One but since we have, I've done like probably 100 since the book has come out, and I'm realizing that a better one that people would remember because of six truths really have a lot like retention in your acquisition, the flywheel. Those are really good for people to jump in and think through those, and it takes some time to digest it. But the one that the better way for people to remember what we're really talking about are the five valleys of death kind of connecting back to it. And we mentioned that in the book a little bit. But here, here, here are the five valleys of depth that every company is going through At least one or two of these. One is either you can have created a product so you create but can't market. You've got a marketing problem. You don't know what the market is, how you don't. You can't get enough. At bats. Then either you can market but can sell. That means your sale or sell those motions. So your positioning is off. You are able to get more people, but you just can't close those damn deals like you have that problem. Then maybe you find that, then you have sell, but you can deliver. This is where sales and product have an issue. The sales is overpromising and under-delivering, and that leads to the next one, which is deliver but can't win you at the end of the year. These people are saying, hey, you do you like the product? Yeah, like it. But I'm not sure if I love it. I don't know how to show how to wait for it, so I don't think I can renew. And that leads to the fifth one, which is the new but can't expand. This is really where the NRA and Jr. are. What makes companies great are those numbers. If your net retention rate is below 100 percent, at some point you're going to really get hit with the wall because you really can't grow the business as fast as you can sell, create but can't market but can sell, sell that can deliver, deliver, but can't renew or renew, but can expand. These are literally those valleys where you can just it's just like a sinkhole. If you don't get out of it quick enough, you will be just continue to drag below into it.
Brendan: I love that, and that's I remember what I was reading your book, and I actually that was my post about your book was thinking through, yes, what? These five valleys. It really resonated with me. And I think that's also where I think about rev ops, like, what are the levers that we can pull to help drive this engine? I mean, those are all speak to different areas of funnel or flywheel, depending on how you look at it. So that's great. One thing is, I love that you already mentioned with move, and it's something that Andy talks about is what's portable is memorable. And I think when you talk about your acronyms with move or with five valleys, it really just helps me to remember those. And you you said something that was really interesting that you said, most companies are dealing with, too. What in your research or these interviews have caused you to come up with that two number?
Sangram: Yeah, so it also depends on the stage of the business. So typically in the early stage, you're probably in the first two, you have created something and you can't market it. You're like, you're finding yourself. Don't need to create a category. Do I exist in the category? We all sound like the same. You look at your competitors website and make it same as that. And now clearly, you know, you both have the same, but they have better brand. So you really are in the Create button can market or market, but can sell stage in the early stage of your business growth typically sub 10 million or maybe even 50 20 million or so. But then later on, you start getting into this different stage. And this is really the product market fit stages where you now you have figured out like, oh, you can sell it, you can sell it, but your retention is not there, which means that the marketing is there, the market is there, the people wanted and you are putting something out of the market. People are using it, but you just can't get customers to do to renew it, and you just can't get customers to retain it. And therefore, a lot of the early stage companies will have high who are really good at marketing and sales will have a high retention rate because they are low retention rate, because they just can't retain great customers. So those are typically the two that come in. And then as you get into a platform market fit, which is the third the problem product platform, that's really I remember this conversation with Jeffrey more like, quite frankly, if somebody has 10 bucks and if you want to buy a book, don't buy my book like, go buy Jeff. Mars book Crossing the chasm, it's one of the best books you should read in marketing or leadership way. And he talked about this. He said I just came spending five days with Marc Benioff and his entire leadership team talking about the next stage, next evolution, all that stuff. And I was having this conversation with him like Monday, nine AM in the morning. And he just fresh off from that place. And I'm going through all this and he said, sangram, you got this whole framework wrong. And I'm like, we're about to publish this book like, what are you doing? All I need is an endorsement and I need to move on. I don't need to hear that this is wrong, like, I'm like. But so I mean, I was expecting to say, like, you know, this whole thing is wrong. Like, no, you got it wrong. He said, if you are moving and I don't want people to miss this because this was so important. And you might remember this in the book, Brendan, that in the end, when you have the entire book and a page slide, you will see that in there. We said that your go to market team should evolve from just sales, which is founder led typically or that just going out and selling to marketing and sales, working together in a product market fit. But here's the thing, he said, if you ever truly want to become a platform market fit, you have to have customer success come before sales and marketing. So we flipped it. So if you remember in the book, when you have the entire book, you have sales, sales plus marketing. And then we said customer success plus sales, post marketing. You said, unless you get that thing right, it's really hard for you to become a platform market fit because majority of your business should be driven from your base. That's how Salesforce does it. They already know that they're going to get 80% of the way from their existing base, and the 20% is what they do from all the net new stuff that they have. That was mind blowing to me, so I'm glad he didn't like completely, and I'll say this is all wrong. But the way he said it made me like sweat like crazy for a minute.
Brendan: Yeah and it goes back to one of the six truths when you talk about retention is a new acquisition, and that's something that terminus was very focused on. And it's great. I mean, to your point, that's where the leverage is and not to for my audience that is listening to audio, I'm going to share my screen on video because I loved your book so much. I actually did a very immature grid of what you just talked about the one page framework around move. So this is a Google Sheet. Not pretty. But the point here, as I'm trying to capture that kind of frameworks, I love frameworks. So when we talk about were just talking about product market fit, product market fit, performance, market fit and how move from the questions that you should be asking yourself within these or the things to be mindful of when you talked about two out of the five that the companies are dealing with, maybe that's where we should for this time, folks. Do you see that as in the ideation transition execution, that their common themes are what those to look like in each one of these phases?
Sangram: Yeah, I'm in the part is that these things to evolve. So for example, I'll just use terminus as an example, right? We started with a our product initially was an advertising product. That's what we did. We said we could do targeted advertising for your list of accounts that you think you can serve the best. Why do Google Ads where you're just finding some, you randomly finding people who are probably searching for you instead of that? Why don't just directly put your ads in front of them? That's really was the genesis of terminus, but that was that's the if you looked at the product, it was an advertising product. Since then, we have acquired four other companies. And how do we accomplish analytics account based cdp? We do so much more now than that. So but what happens which each one of these evolutions of your business is that you have to figure out who you market to again? So the question that's why the question remains the same. So all of a sudden, what we were really good at marketing, which was like, hey, we're able to create this great product and we're marketing well, we're selling well. As soon as our product became platform, as soon as it became a product suite, it became complicated. All of a sudden we were not selling to a digital marketing manager. Now we are selling to a CMO and let's do a CMO. We need to have a new positioning statement. We have a new way of talking about these things, so we have to go back into the same problem that no longer existed is a problem now that we can. Now we have a platform, but we can't market. So I don't want anybody to think that you can get through one and then you would never meet the same problem as a matter of fact, because the questions are the same. You will meet the same problem over and over again because you should in order for you to have to grow your business because you'll be targeting multiple personas and you should go in different markets. And the same question should be the ones that you should start with.
Brendan: I love that. Let's let's start a wrap up here talking about the third leg here. We talked a little bit about the six truths or the valley, as you do valleys, you know, the valleys. Then we talked a little bit about those three phases. I loved it. And in terms of how you drive those behaviors, meaning who are the stakeholders? What so what are those you talk about in the book about? There's four, there's the CEO, there's the investor. There's a crow, and I think the CMO, right, so what are their priorities and what are keeping them up at night as it relates to the go to market and making sure those questions are getting answered?
Sangram: This is this is good stuff in the book. We interviewed every like at every level. We interviewed Kelly ford, who had 200 plus exits as a bc to CEOs like Brian Halligan, the HubSpot CEO, and Nick metagame CEO, or Marc Roberge, who is now a Harvard Business School professor. Do Geoffrey Moore, Sydney Sloan and Megan Eisenberg, the CMO. So we interviewed CMO cross. We everybody before we even came up with all of this, like we literally spent two months of just interviews before we did that. And what's interesting in all of this is that the CEOs knew exactly that they owned go to market every year where I talked to Brian Halligan is a public company CEO, right? Yeah, I own it. Nik Mehta, I own it. Manny Medina from outreach. I own it. And as soon as I talk to CMO and cios, they're like, I'm not sure. I think that I own it. Maybe the CRA said. Maybe it was really interesting that the ownership of it needs to rest with the CEO. And that has to be very clear because a lot of times people would think go to market. So maybe marketing own set or go to market. That means it's all about product launch. It's way bigger than that. And that's really what we cover in the book. So that's the CEO is the owner, the CMO. If you're a marketer listening to it, you are the galvanized. You are the one who has all these data points and all of that stuff, and we provide a ton of questions that you could ask to get company that gets your team to align on where you are, what stage of the business you are in and where you need to go. So you are the galvanizing of the idea, the message, the narrative and the company. If you're a CIO, this is really interesting because CRM is a lot of times would become the default execution layer for the business when it comes to driving revenue, right? So when the see are a lot of times people think it's the CEO, but CRO is typically an orchestrator. They are the ones who are saying, I need more marketing here. I need more stylist here and in more brand here and in more product support here. So you're the orchestrator of that and the VCs who are notorious again for trying to tell where to go, they need to be the guide their job is to create centers of excellence for go to market, tell them that, hey, look, here are four ways to go about it pick your lane because go to market is different. If you're a category builder, you're go to market might be to build a community first and then go and drive that. That's what HubSpot terminus Salesforce all of us did. Right? if you're a product lead company, then maybe it is. You have to create a product led growth margin. That's very different. That's what Calendly did as an example, right? If if you are a channel lead, there are lots of companies who did incredibly well channel there. So Bambara is a great example. They cross past US and many other companies after coming later than us because they said we will sell on other people's paper. So so they have started to sell and they have grown past 50 million just purely because, you know, they're able to create a channel for all the market companies out there. So you have to first figure out what go to market motion I need in order to figure out what go to market motion. You have got to figure out what business you are in and start there. So there's a lot to unpack in that, just that part of it.
Brendan: Yeah, I like that. So just to summarize investors, the guide the CEO is the owner. The marketing is a galvanizer and the CRO is the orchestrator.
Sangram: Absolutely right.
Brendan: Great well, to your point, there is a lot more to unpack. And candidly, we're not going to get to that. not going to cover your whole book in a podcast, but I think it's good just to give our audience a blueprint, if you will. It's the framework and the beautiful aspects of this framework is there's freedom and framework, meaning your business is unique. Your go to market strategy is unique, but there are certain principles that regardless of how you go to market and what phase of season of life you're in, this will help you navigate those inflection points, if you will, and make sure that you are intentional to ultimately move it forward as opposed to hitting those valleys and not being able to get out so. Sangram, thank you so much for making the time to be with us today. If our audience wants to engage with you with Terminus and read this book. What are the next steps they can take?
Sangram: Well, I mean, I'll tell you, I love where you guys are going. So if anybody does, any of this stuff attracts you. If there was something you'd learn, just DM me on LinkedIn and I'll send you a signed copy of the book. How's that?
Brendan: I love that. All right, you heard that. That means, reach out to Sangram from this podcast and you will get a personalized gift from Sangram. As always, thank you for your contribution both to the market. And for your investment in us. And to me, I really do appreciate it. It's not deserved, but it is something that I really do.
Sangram: Any time. I love what you guys do.
Brendan: All right, talk to you later.