Ben Rawnsley-Johnson

A go-to-market strategy is at its heart, an exercise in alignment. A good B2B GTM plan maximizes your exposure to growth by drawing a through-line across your market and its needs, your company, and its offerings in the most efficient way possible. It is built around 3 pillars: Market Opportunity: Expressed as TAM/SAM/SOM, outlining where the fertile areas of opportunity exist where you can make money (Segments, industry verticals, buying centers/Line of Business) Positioning: Your company's pro ...Read More

Philosophically, I think Marketers can be very insecure, and use metrics and KPIs to demonstrate capability or establish credibility. The truth is, no one is questioning the role of marketing. And if they are, a dashboard of metrics is not the solution. In my experience, there are two categories of KPI that actually matter... As marketers, its up to you to build the connection of all of your work to these things.1. Revenue & Growth. The buck stops here, it is the great unifier, it is the com ...Read More

Too often I see folks trying to assemble the broadest ICP possible. The logic is that by inflating my TAM/SAM/SOM to the biggest number possible, I am increasing my odds of success. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE big markets. I want markets big enough, that even if we f*ck it up, we can still be successful. It is infinitely easier to build a healthy business that is 1-5% of an enormous market than it is to build the same size business by capturing 80% of a much smaller market. The value of an ICP is ...Read More

The best companies understand that delivering value isn’t a one-time event; it’s a continuous process. Marketing ongoing innovation means evolving how you position the product as new capabilities emerge. It’s about weaving your innovation story into the fabric of your customer experience. At Dropbox, we focus on three key strategies to market ongoing innovation: Build a narrative of progress: Customers don’t just want updates—they want to see that the product is evolving to meet their changing n ...Read More

For new products especially, pricing and packaging should inform, and be informed by the broader GTM strategy (it's why I'm so bullish about the role PMMs play in contributing to P&P decisions). For example: Our GTM strategy answers "Who is the market, persona?" how do they prefer to buy? (PLG vs. direct sales), How long is the deal cycle? How senior is the economic buyer? and how formalized is the procurement process? Does the customer need implementation services, integrations or infrastru ...Read More

PMM don't own outcomes the way some other teams like sales (meetings, deals) and engineering (shipped code) - but we do own the pursuit of the metrics that matter, and the alignment of teams that contribute to metrics that span teams - CAC, CLTV etc. Any marketer knows that our value is reflected in the growth and health of the business, even if we don't own that processes end-to-end. Like it or not, we have to measure our success in those terms, but also share some drivers of that outcome. Reve ...Read More

GTM at an early-stage venture is hard to describe - it's probably almost never described as GTM, and is almost universally not led by a marketer. With anything prior to Product-Market-Fit, and even for a good while afterward - the act of positioning the solution, speaking with prospects and users, establishing the value drivers, and driving revenue is such a valuable learning exercise for the rest of the business that you can expect that Founders, CEOs, CPO and Head of Engineering may be either ...Read More

Companies, particularly those that take a portfolio of products or solutions to market need to establish pricing and packaging principles. These foundational values and practices of what we do, or don't do, and why? help us to move faster, eliminate anecdotal opinions, and set teams up for a predictable approach to pricing and packaging decisions. Getting there can be easier than it sounds: Be explicit about the values that should inform your P&P decisions. For example, at Atlassian, one of ...Read More

Driving upsell is all about real value. Be real about your positioning, and test the underlying hypothesis for your up-sell play. Is there value? Are the features locked in enterprise editions meaningful? do they unlock speed/revenue/margin for the customer? If all of these are true, great! Its a problem of articulating and communicating that value. If not, you have some tough conversations with your product and sales teams to identify where you are falling short of customer expectations. Have y ...Read More

In earlier stage companies, small teams of generalists tend to drive great results with their expansive understanding that comes from being in the weeds of product alignment, customer insight, research, and campaign execution and sales enablement. As the company grows, and progresses into multi-product, that starts to break down as teams get bigger and the work becomes more specialized. Initial Phase (Small Team): Structure: Generalists who handle multiple functions, such as market research, con ...Read More