If I were starting over my GTM motion from scratch today, here's what I wish i set up in week 1
I’m 8 months into my GTM engineering journey and just signed my fifth paying customer. Looking back at the first 90 days I spent a lot of time building things that didn't matter and almost no time building the infrastructure that actually runs my GTM motion now.
Giving back to the community and for some good karma :) here's what i would do differently starting Monday if i had to start all over again:
Record every single call. i didn't start recording and reviewing calls until month 4, which means i had zero transcript data on my first 30 conversations. Those were the most important conversations i had with early prospects. Buildbetter went in at the end of month 4 and should've been day 1. The compounding effect of reviewing 30 calls worth of transcripts versus 0 is not small, I can tell you that.
Build the automation layer before you need it. i built relay into my stack in month 3 when things started slipping through the cracks. By then i had already lost at least two deals to follow-up lag. The automation should be there before you have enough pipeline to need it and building it under pressure means building it badly.
Have a prioritization model before you have accounts to prioritize. This sounds backwards but it isn't. I spent the first 3 months treating every account in my pipeline with roughly equal energy. Yalc forced me to build a scoring model i should've built on day 1 with fake accounts and no data, then refined it as real signals came in.
Now i have to say what i actually spent week 1 doing lol. I was obsessing over a website and rewriting positioning docs over and over again. I optimized for things that felt like building a company instead of things that would tell me whether i had a company worth building.
Infrastructure built late costs more than infrastructure built early because you spend the middle months flying blind.
if you're in the first 60 days of a GTM motion, i would genuinely prioritize these over almost everything else including the pretty website.
Has anyone gone through something similar? How were your early GTM days?