There are several Go To Market (GTM) methods for Business To Business (B2B) companies, such as Product-led growth. (PLG), Product-led sales (PLS), Community-led growth (CLG), and Account-based marketing (ABM). All of those seek to increase a product's sales and acceptance in a specific market, but they do so with an emphasis on different parts of launching a new product and positioning it in the market.

What do we want to achieve with this guide?

The objective is to see how all these methods are related and, more importantly, how and when they should be combined. We will try to place the main methods in a single framework to create a guide to modern GTM for new B2B business models.

This guide can be applied to most products, and especially to enterprise software, including those with complex data entry, process integration, or configuration challenges, assuming these products take advantage of the latest techniques such as MDS (Modern Data Stack), iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) or no-code/low code.

This guide proposes five phases to systematically build a new B2B business model from zero revenue to high annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth using the strategies and methodologies of today's most popular GTM models.

Phase 1: find the product-market fit (PMF)

The objective of the first phase is to build a community around the idea you have and the problem you address. It's important that this community is not only made up of enthusiastic buyers, these people have to become co-creators who help you find your product-market-fit (PMF). These users must also be fighting against the problem you solve. They should fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of your product and be potential buyers if the product existed. 

The community you create must be truly active, as they will help you find use cases, product designs, and prices that they would be willing to pay for the product you offer.

At this stage, the MVP, or minimum viable product, is also developed. You can leverage your community members to be prosumers of the product and use their contacts to get it out of the initial community and get new customers.

Phase 1 is achieved when your first users have become constant users and prosumers. To verify this, conduct a survey to ask users how disappointed they would be if the product did not exist. If 40% are very disappointed, you have achieved the PMF.

Phase 2: build a Product-led growth (PLG) flywheel

Phases 2 through 5 are focused on building and developing the growth engine.

In Phase 2, you need to build a product-driven growth flywheel. But what is a flywheel? It's a recursive model that amplifies itself after an initial investment, with fewer ongoing product and marketing activities. Users in your community will recommend your product to their peers, who will register on your website and do the onboarding themselves, without any human intervention from your team.

Some actions that you should implement in this phase two are

1. Create a brand: Design an attractive brand identity codified and presented consistently across all contact points.

2. Implement a freemium or free trial: This is great for converting active trial users into paying customers.

3. Add Collaboration Features: When someone using your product invites a colleague (who isn't a user) to collaborate with them within it, you're getting the best possible recommendation.

4. Be mindful of the community: The community is a micro version of your total market that gives you direct access to the topics, ideas, wants, and needs of your current and potential customers.

Phase 2 is a continuous optimization without a defined endpoint. In addition, it can be expanded to reach other markets or re-evaluated depending on the results.

Phase 3: add a Product-led sales (PLS) amplifier

PLS is based on strong user self-ratings with clear behavioral indicators that a group of users within an account is ready to buy.

To boost conversion rate in mid-markets and/or enable upselling to businesses, Phase 3 adds a Product-led Sales (PLS) booster to the PLG flywheel.

At this stage, the sales team has a more active role, since they are the ones who must address both the users of the free version who seem promising leads and develop the strategies that allow the software to be sold to companies. In addition, the software may need to be updated to create enterprise-level features.

Phase 4 – Add a field sales booster

Only field sales teams can expose, recognize and create the market for the product throughout the company. This can happen in multiple deals with ‘land & expand model’. The goal is to target these high ARR accounts strategically.

In phase 4 there are only 2 key actions:

1. Implement account-based marketing (ABM): Monitor the purchase intent of your key accounts even before they visit your website. The tools track all search behavior within these accounts to help you predict their purchase stage.

2. Establish a field sales team: Combining field sales with the self-service flywheel PLG comes into play when you start the proof of concept (POC) for your product. Field sales can be a real Annual Recurrent Revenue booster for PLG, but only for large clients or clients with significant potential. While you won't see a lot of new logos, you will get the logos with the highest ARR

Phase 5: Create a partners ecosystem

Now that you have a strong customer base, it may be interesting for other independent software vendors (ISVs) who offer side-by-side tools, or that can be integrated into your product. So they will also be able to reach your customers and you theirs.

The partner ecosystem leverages the customer base and brand you've built in the previous phases. But it is worth the effort: its associated system will further increase ARR growth.

In this case, application stores or spaces where you can reach many people who are not part of your community are very important. These spaces can have conversion rates of 1% – 2%. This doesn't sound like much, but if we're talking about a significant app store with 150,000 customers, it could generate 1,000 new accounts for your product.

Conclusion

This article aims to show a simplified version of Soluntech’s modern high-growth engine. Of course, all methods and techniques must be carefully reviewed in the context of each business model and an associated broad growth strategy.