Product & GTM Need Couples Therapy: Fixing Growth from the Inside Out

The alarm bells have been ringing for a year straight. GTM is broken, the experts say, and point to a damning metric: GTM Efficiency – which looks at the sales & marketing costs required to generate $1 of Net New ARR – has plummeted by 58% since 2019. This is pricey growth, and hard to bear for too much longer.

The GTM experts frame this as a GTM problem, and there’s some merit to that – most GTM teams can indeed be staffed, structured, and run far better than they are today. But do these fixes actually fix the core problem? Or are we treating a flesh wound while bleeding out elsewhere?

See, some problems are multi-causal, and I think that’s the case here. Worsening GTM metrics clearly tell us something about GTM, but they could also be telling us something about how the market is vibing with our product.

We can test this hypothesis by looking at companies that have “Extreme Product-Market Fit,” and what you’ll find there is that they have a much easier time with GTM metrics. That’s why Nikesh Arora’s big GTM takeaway (he led that department for Google from $3B-$60B) was “it’s all about the product.”

Very few companies ever build the type of product that makes a customer go “wow.” But if you believe that distribution will continue to get harder, then aligning your GTM chops with Product teams that can build such stuff is critical. Break the current siloed structure, and the “wow” surface area expands.

A burning platform
In 2007, Nokia owned half of the smartphone market, generated $67B in revenue and boasted a $150B market cap. Then a guy in a black turtleneck strode onto the stage and introduced the iPhone.

In 2011, Nokia’s CEO warned that they were “standing on a burning platform,” crediting the lack of internal alignment as the reason for their pain. By 2012, Nokia’s market share dropped to 3.5%, and its market cap to $8B. Two years later, Nokia’s phone division was sold to Microsoft for $7.2B.

In contrast, Tony Fadell (co-creator of the iPhone and then founder of Nest) credited the fact that at Apple everybody worked together, as the reason for them creating a world-changing product.

Better together
Products that wow are not built in a vacuum. People bump and bounce and play off each other in a process of relentless iteration, and customer feedback plays into every step of the process.

Product teams have historically relied on tools like surveys, customer interviews and focus groups to develop customer empathy. Occasionally, they got some feature requests sheepishly passed along by a GTM leader, and perhaps a more forward-thinking GTM leader might have stack-ranked these requests.

While this rarely led to wow products, the reality is that some companies got by doing this. That era is now behind us and our new reality includes increasingly competitive markets and customers with much higher expectations. To thrive, we need to change the interplay between Product and GTM.

If GTM leaders think of solutions for this problem without the shackles of the past, and with their commercial skills in mind, they will be able to help Product teams in ways that will feel magical for them. Bi-weekly syncs between the two leaders, shared customer feedback portals, rapid hypothesis validation and constant competitor awareness will become the norm. New ideas that my brain isn’t advanced enough to conceive will show up.

The result will be two of the most important teams in a tech company – the one that builds the thing and the one that sells the thing – working together to achieve a common goal: winning the market.