GTM Marketing Strategies

Which is right for your business?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

There are various ways to find customers for your SaaS. Working out what makes most sense for your business and then what that means in terms of people and budgets is pretty key. Often, I see companies starting with one strategy (probably because it’s the cheapest), then realising that they need to adapt to another strategy and then failing because they haven’t got the right people and budgets in place.

Let’s dive into five categories of marketing approaches, looking at what they mean, where they are the most appropriately applied and what companies need to have to succeed.

1. Inbound Marketing

What is it?
Inbound marketing drives leads into your funnel by creating engaging content and experiences that encourage prospects to find out more.

Typically in-bound strategies will include writing blog posts, running webinars, attending events, producing explainer videos… that kind of thing.

There will be an emphasis on SEO, lead magnets and highly optimized landing pages that convert interest to taking some sort of action. Maybe downloading a white paper, maybe attending a webinar, starting a free trial or booking a sales call.

What types of companies adopt this strategy?
To be honest, everyone should have an element of this going on, but companies who adopt this as their primary GTM marketing strategy are often early stage and have a broad audience that needs education.

As an example, if your product helps a niche audience such as ‘pharmaceutical manufacturers’ to reduce production errors, it’s going to be harder to find a lot of content around that subject (“10 ways to reduce production-line waste in drug manufacturing” feels a bit contrived). Compare that to, say, ScreenCloud, the company I co-founded, where we wanted companies to consider ambient screens as a means of communication, with a large range of use cases, you can see how content can be really powerful.

What kind of team do you need?
Typically this type of marketing can be done by broad, entry-level marketers. Content creators, social media managers and SEO specialists are easier to hire and train. The risk here is that you can also mis-hire. The difference between a great content writer and a ‘meh’ content writer will have a massive impact on your business. We were very lucky to find an excellent content expert and I credit her with a lot of our early success at ScreenCloud.

What sorts of budgets do you need?
This approach is the least expensive. The people required tend to be more junior and have less specialist knowledge and so won’t demand as large a salary as others. And the cost of creating content is less than the cost of hiring SDRs or spending money on advertising.

Why is it effective?
It’s a low-cost, scalable strategy that builds long-term visibility and trust.

What are the drawbacks?
It takes a while to build a head of steam. It’s hard/impossible to simply ‘put your foot down on the accelerator’ when you have found something that works.

Preparation if you’re early stage

• Start with value-driven, evergreen content for your ICP.

• Implement basic SEO using tools like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs.

• Use simple lead magnets (e.g., guides or checklists) to capture contact details.

2. Self-Serve: Product Led Growth

What is it?
Product Led Growth (PLG), describes an approach where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. Customers discover, try, and purchase the product with minimal human intervention.

Companies use freemium or free trial offerings to get the prospect to understand the value the product provides. There is an emphasis on the onboarding experience, to give users that "Aha! moment". The product itself has to do the heavy lifting and therefore has to be well designed, with the right prompts and calls to action.

Avoiding the need for the customer to speak to a sales person reduces friction and, of course, costs. It also encourages viral growth through features like sharing, collaboration, or referrals.

What types of companies adopt this strategy?
This approach is best suited for simpler product offerings that can provide immediate value. If the product needs a lot of customization or a professional services layer, then PLG is going to be harder to achieve. Having said that, even complex solutions can demonstrate the value of their product by allowing people to access a sandbox version or play with dummy data.

Products that have lower contract values might look towards a PLG approach in part because the unit economics don’t support the use of expensive sales teams. Often, a PLG approach will be used in conjunction with Inbound Marketing. Both strategies work together to automate as much of the sales process as possible, keeping the costs and the time to conversion down.

What kind of team do you need?
For PLG to work effectively you need a strong UX and product design team. You also need people who can understand how to optimize the automations from content through to activation rates, usage patterns and ultimately conversion. It could be that the product growth strategies are handled by the leadership team with an emphasis on making sure the product ‘markets itself’ as much as possible.

There definitely needs to be someone analytical who can understand what is happening at scale. The key to making this work if your Average Revenue Per User is relatively low, is to keep your Customer Acquisition Costs down.

What sorts of budgets do you need?
Assuming you are running this alongside an Inbound approach, the costs are moderate. Most of the costs are going to go into product development and data analysis tools rather than high-salaried specialists. We did exactly this approach in the early days and we spent a disproportionately high amount on product development compared to sales and marketing. This was probably appropriate given where we were and our GTM approach at the time.

Why is it effective?
It encourages simple onboarding and immediate value. It has viral potential within teams or organizations. And it delivers a low-touch sales model supported by user-driven growth, which in turn keeps the Customer Acquisition Costs down.

What are the drawbacks?
It’s not easy for products that have to pair their product with a heavy dose of professional services. As with Inbound Marketing, you have less control when it comes to rapidly scaling something that has Product Market Fit. Improvements tend to be incremental.

Preparation if you’re early stage

• Focus on product experience and usability.

• Use analytics tools to track and optimize user flows.

• Create referral programs to encourage word-of-mouth growth.

3. Partnership and Channel Marketing

What is it?
A strategy that takes advantage of partnerships with complementary businesses, platforms or resellers. The focus is on forging relationships (either formal or informal) with others so you can benefit from access to their network. It may manifest itself in joint promotions, commissions, revenue-sharing or partner discounts.

For this to be effective your product needs to make sense strategically that it fits with the partner business and there has to be enough of an incentive for them to bother with you.

I’ve found that you can often put a load of effort into partnerships that on the face of it look like they will transform your business, but ultimately deliver nothing. When that happens it’s usually because the benefits to the partner don’t warrant them going above and beyond to push your service.

Having said that, I’ve also seen partnerships where a company’s fortunes were transformed overnight.

What types of companies adopt this strategy?
If your product sells through Value Added Resellers then the chances are it would have a high degree of complexity in its implementation. In this way, the reseller can charge a significant fee for their expertise. There is a massive market for Microsoft Resellers, for example, who make a margin on the sale of the Microsoft products and even more for the support and implementation expertise they bring along with it.

Any kind of reseller would need to be able to see that they can make significant returns on the effort they put into selling it, especially where the sale is complex.

Other types of partnerships might involve complementary products such as an agency reselling hosting to its clients.

Others might just be about being part of a wider ecosystem. A product that enhances the Shopify experience would clearly need to be seen as part of the suite of tools available to Shopify developers.

What kind of team do you need?
To pull off an effective partnership approach, it requires mid-level expertise with a focus on relationship-building, negotiation, and partner enablement. A partnership manager or business development professional is typical. If you haven’t done this yourself, then it pays to hire someone who has experienced scaling a business from where you are now to the next level. They don’t need to have been a founder, but an experienced partnerships person who has witnessed what happens at that stage of business is critical. You can’t afford to let someone learn on the job here.

You have to find skilled managers to identify, secure, and maintain mutually beneficial relationships. This generally requires more specific expertise than Inbound or PLG.

What sorts of budgets do you need?
The costs are moderate but variable. Partnerships are cost-effective if well-managed but they often need significant upfront investment in incentives or integrations. Plus the process of bringing a partner on board can be timely. If it’s a strategic partnership where one company is selling on behalf of your company, the negotiations can take months and pull in senior people and even external legal counsel.

Why is it effective?
You get access to a whole load of customers you haven’t had to go out and find yourself. This means your cost of acquisition can be kept low (although you might substitute some of your CAC for commissions or as part of the revenue-share).

Some partners might be able to get your product in front of people you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to get an audience with. This is especially the case when you are a startup and you need to sell to senior people within large organisations.

What are the drawbacks?
If you are reliant on your partners to drive your funnel, you are also reliant on that partnership not going wrong. If the partner either changes their mind about you, goes bust, changes their partnership policy or loses their clients, then it’s largely out of your hands.

Most businesses run a partnership strategy alongside other GTM strategies for precisely this reason.

Preparation if you’re early stage

• Identify and approach potential partners with aligned customer bases.

• Develop integrations or co-branded content.

• Offer incentives (e.g., revenue sharing) to make partnerships mutually beneficial.

Outbound Sales and Marketing

What is it?
A proactive strategy involving direct outreach to potential customers, typically through advertising, cold emails, calls, or LinkedIn messages. You would expect to see highly targeted prospect lists and personalized outreach campaigns.

Outbound switches the sales motion from a largely reactive approach (a lead comes in and asks for a demo), to a much more structured sales process. This often involves Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) for prospecting and Account Executives (AEs) for closing deals. It also requires the business to have a thorough understanding of their ICP.

In my direct experience, when a SaaS business shifts from predominantly Inbound to Outbound, it can buckle under the weight of inexperience. The sales and marketing teams are just not up to the job and despite best intentions it can fall flat on its face and waste a lot of money.

What types of companies adopt this strategy?
This approach works well for SaaS products with niche target markets and higher price points, with a more complex product that requires a lot of explanation and/or professional services. Typically, the buyers of the product will have multiple stakeholders and therefore need more meetings and a comprehensive approach to objection handling.

Because of the higher price point, they don’t need to worry so much about Customer Acquisition Costs as the unit economics can accommodate the extra efforts required to get the deal across the line.

What kind of team do you need?
Outbound strategies require highly skilled combination of junior prospectors (SDRs) and experienced closers (AEs). Often the SDR to AE journey is seen as a natural career progression.

Marketing teams tend to be more specialized with experts in Demand Generation, Performance Marketing and Product Marketing fulfilling discreet parts of the marketing mix,

Campaigns require properly defined positioning, polished messaging, deep customer insights and the ability to handle rejection. It demands a clear hierarchy of junior and senior roles for lead generation, nurturing, and closing deals.

What’s more, a highly analytical approach to measuring and understanding measurements of success through metrics like weighted pipelines, response rates, meetings booked, and deals closed (and time to close).

Like with partnerships, unless you have these skills yourself, you probably need to find a few people who have been there and done that to help define the approaches you want to take. Having said that, early on, it’s always best to do founder-led sales so you can define what your GTM strategy is. A VP Sales, however experienced, is unlikely to solve that bit of the jigsaw for you.

What sorts of budgets do you need?
The costs are high. outbound campaigns are resource-intensive, with substantial human capital costs and ongoing campaign expenses. As mentioned, this is only feasible if your Average Revenue Per User justifies it. If your subscription cost is $20 per user per month and it your outbound activities end up costing you $15k per customer to acquire them, clearly the numbers don’t stack up.

What’s more, the sales cycles are longer, so the total upfront investment is higher.

Superstar sales leaders can be really expensive. They will probably be the highest paid people in the company. If they are delivering multi-million dollars worth of revenue, then the expense is worth it. but if they’re not, then it can blow a big hole in your accounts.

Why is it effective?
Unlike the previous strategies outlined, an outbound sales and marketing approach can be scaled up and down as needed. If you find a repeatable way of identifying and converting customers, even if it is complex, then you can scale it. Doubling your ad spend, doubling your SDRs etc might not immediately double your sales revenue, but it should have a more correlated effect than, say, doubling the number of blogs you write.

An outbound approach should be about creating a machine where you know that if you put $1 at the top, it delivers $3 (or more) at the bottom.

What are the drawbacks?
The main drawbacks are that it’s expensive and hiring and training the right people is hard. Really hard. It’s why, once you’ve established what your GTM needs to be, you need an experienced sales leader to define the sales team structure and compensation plan, as well as managing people in and out of the business depending on performance.

The clichéd advice here is ‘get your first VP Sales hire out of the way because it will always be a disaster’. I’m not sure if that really stands up to scrutiny, but hiring the right person is hard. Especially if you’ve never done it before.

Preparation if you’re early stage

• Build a prospect list using tools like Apollo.io or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

• Create compelling, personalized messaging based on ICP pain points.

• Leverage email automation tools (e.g., Mailshake) to scale outreach.

Account Based Marketing

What is it?
Highly personalized marketing and sales for high-value accounts. It requires much deeper research and insights into each individual’s company, rather than just an ICP. It often results in a targeted list of specific individuals at hand-picked target companies.

This then means tailored messaging and outreach to individuals and much higher collaboration between sales and marketing.

You might see a highly coordinated plan that would include:

• Detailed research information for each target company prepared for the sales team

• Stakeholder maps, showing who reports to who within the company

• Activity history of each target within a company

Campaigns might include:

• Customized messaging

• Personalized landing pages

• Personalized merchandise with handwritten notes

• VIP events and dinners

• Retargeting efforts

What types of companies adopt this strategy?
Ideally suited to enterprise clients in organizations with long sales cycles and high Customer Lifetime Value. This is especially true if you have a relatively small Addressable Market, where every potential customer is gold dust. If your market is huge then you can maybe afford to spread your net wider, but if there are only a handful of companies that could realistically use your product, then you need every connection to count.

What sorts of budgets do you need?
ABM is the most resource-intensive approach, requiring coordination across multiple teams to develop and execute personalized, high-impact strategies for specific accounts. Costs are therefore very high – both in terms of salaries for experienced staff and the high-touch nature of campaigns targeting enterprise clients.

Why is it effective?
It stands to reason, if you put a lot of thought into winning one customer, you are more likely to win them than applying a blanket approach to lots of them. A truly well thought through approach will help you stand out from the noise. It also demonstrates a level of detail and care that they may reasonably think would carry though were they to become a customer.

What are the drawbacks?
It’s super expensive. It will send your Customer Acquisition Costs sky high - in the tens of thousands per customer, maybe even more. And it’s hard to scale. It also requires experienced staff who know what they’re doing. It only works where the Average Revenue Per Customer can support it.

Preparation if you’re early stage

• Identify a small list of high-value accounts.

• Personalize outreach and leverage founder-led sales to establish trust.

• Use affordable tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator for research.

This has been a longer piece than usual, but I hope it was helpful!