Some startups are able to launch a product and get some early traction without sales or marketing. There are two common situations where this happens.

The first is if there is incredible product-market fit and some virality or network effect built into the product itself. A few users beget a few more users, and so on, and the company grows organically. You see this most often in a product-led company where the product is intended to be purchased via self-service without interacting with a salesperson (at least initially).

The second case where initial sales & marketing aren’t needed to launch a product is when a founder has a built-in network of ready buyers and lands initial customers through their own efforts. Even founders who aren't comfortable selling can usually land the first 10 customers themselves, if not the first 50, or have an early employee who is able to do some selling like this.

Regardless of how a company lands its first batch of customers, there comes an inflection point when it’s time to build a go-to-market machine to grow beyond what can happen organically or via a founder’s efforts. When that moment happens is unique to each company—it might be $2m, $20 m, or even $100m in ARR. But that moment always comes.

If you’ve grown thus far based on organic network effects or founder-led selling, how should you go about launching your sales & marketing efforts? Some founding teams instinctively know how to get their go-to-market programs off the ground. And others recruit experienced team members who have done it before.

No matter how you go about launching your sales & marketing efforts, it’s important to understand a few fundamental concepts in order to scale successfully. Mastering the building blocks will help pave the way for success and indicate spot potential problems before they throw you too far off course.

If you’re product-led and growing organically, there are numerous ways to build a scalable GTM machine, including layering in some product-led sales motions. But if you are sales-led, then the approach to building your scalable GTM machine is fairly straightforward.

Fundamentals of Building a Successful Sales-Led Machine

Everything about a sales-driven growth motion comes down to funnel math. If you are going to grow via a sales team, you’ll need to fill your funnel with leads.

There are two ways to fill your funnel—outbound lead gen and inbound lead gen.

Outbound Lead Generation

Outbound is the process of proactively reaching out to target accounts in order to gain their attention and interest in your product.

Outbound takes effort & patience to launch, and there are nuances for each industry you are targeting. But at the end of the day, outbound is outbound, and the steps are the same:

• Create highly targeted lists of prospects based on your ideal customer profile. There are many tools and websites to help create these lists at scale.
• Conduct outreach to the list of prospects. This is normally called a cadence or sequence and might involve a series of 8-14 calls, emails, and social touches over a period of 4-8 weeks.
• When you get a prospect interested, take them through a process to bring them into your sales funnel. If they aren’t ready to actively explore or evaluate your product, continue to nurture them and keep them engaged over time so that when they are ready, they think of you and reach out.

Outbound is very quantitative. The qualitative part comes down to executing well—having an accurate list of prospects, great messaging in your cadence, and smart, buyer-centric team members conducting the outreach.

The quantitative outbound math might look something like this:

• Conduct outreach to 200 contacts running a cadence of 12 touches over 8 weeks to the contacts.
  • Book 10 meetings from the outreach.
    • If the prospects are qualified and the salesperson is skilled, perhaps four of the meetings will lead to qualified opportunities.
      • If you have a 25% win rate on qualified opportunities, you land one new customer from the initial outbound list of 200 contacts.

You can use this basic math to model what it will take to land X new outbound customers. The math above is just an example. Every company’s math will be slightly different depending on what and to whom they are selling.