GTM Efficiency by Design

Keynote Presentation to Marlin Equity Portfolio Execs

In October, Marlin Equity gathered the GTM executives from their portfolio companies—Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Revenue Operations—to embrace a standard of excellence established by AJ Ghandi and the rest of the performance team at Marlin. I was invited to kick off the two-day event with the following remarks on GTM Efficiency.

Major points from the presentation:

• Public markets are getting impatient for IPOs—this window will open up

  • …but public markets have a ruthless appetite for efficient growth

• Public SaaS companies are struggling in general, paying over $2.50 for each incremental $1 of ARR

  • …but the best companies pay less than $1, and are getting better

• We can learn lessons from lean manufacturing when it comes to efficient operations

• Applying these lessons to GTM, we do things like:

  • Organize GTMs into production lines

  • Establish a data model as a measurement framework

  • Optimize inputs, throughput, outputs

• All this we integrate into a Growth Model

• The system is called Revenue Architecture, and it is designed to create efficient growth by demand

XOXO,

-db