Finding the Right GTM Strategy for Your Startup

Introduction

Whether a budding startup or a long-standing enterprise, companies must launch new products and services from time to time to excite existing clients and entice new leads.

However, the difference is that a larger corporation may already have plenty of data to fall back on regarding what works and what doesn’t when they are preparing to go to market.

For startups, especially those with first-time founders, the process can involve a lot of trial and error in developing a go-to-market strategy that successfully encourages audiences to buy what they’re selling. Should you lead with sales or let the product speak for itself?

According to research by Gartner, 62% of survey respondents rely on product-led GTM over sales-led. But that doesn’t mean every startup should expect product-led GTM to work.

Nailing down a GTM strategy for startups may require some experimentation and creativity. At least, that’s how the founders of Clay were able to turn their idea into a problem-solving product in the SaaS industry.

A conversation with Varun Anand, COO of Clay

As the co-founder and COO of the data enrichment platform Clay, Varun Anand is an expert in go-to-market strategizing. Not only did he experiment successfully with GTM for his startup, but he has also helped other founders by sharing tips and advice for their GTM journeys.

Anand started his journey in politics working for Hillary Clinton before moving into the tech space, where he discovered a passion for no-code products. When he realized this deep appreciation for more accessible products that don’t require coding skills, he went on to assist companies of all sizes with their go-to-market strategies, no coding required, by developing Clay.

Today, Clay offers more than 75 enrichment tools all in one platform, which even incorporates AI for automation and increased productivity. More than 100K teams use Clay, including GTM teams at Anthropic, Notion, Pilot, ClickUp, Intercom, and more.

With these experiences, Anand has developed vast knowledge to share with other startup founders—and businesses of all sizes. From knowing what to focus on in a GTM strategy to hiring the right people for a GTM team, here are several insights Anand shared with HubSpot for Startups.

HSFS: How do you prioritize the different elements of a go-to-market strategy?

Varun Anand: I think it’s just about focus, and we focused on one particular audience. One thing that illustrated this point was that I was in this group called Modern Sales Pros, and I looked through the group’s archive to find out who had talked about data enrichment or outbound or things like that. I found a bunch of people who I thought had said intelligent things on this topic over the last few years. I just emailed them all, around 30 people; they were sales development representatives (SDRs), account executives (AEs), marketing people or salespeople. Many of them talked to me, and I realized that the only people who knew what I was talking about and who could really get Clay were agency owners. 

That was because they were technical and entrepreneurial. They felt the pain point acutely because they had lots of different clients dealing with the same thing. So, we always knew they were interested, but that was one element that helped us focus on them, serve their need, and ensure they were successful. 

Then, we noticed this innate content creation ability with the product. So, we encouraged and enabled some of these creators to make content about using Clay to do certain workflows or accomplish certain goals. Once we saw that, we asked, “How can we accelerate this?”

That gave us the original traction we were trying to capitalize on. Once we realized that this was how we could grow, we focused on that. 

Growing a business is not this thing where you’re sitting in a lab, and you’re like, “This is the perfect strategy and how we're going to do our go-to-market.” In some ways, it's a lot more chaotic than that. You're trying a bunch of things, usually randomly and arbitrarily, and this thing just starts working. So, let's just keep doing this, or just focus on this. You don't necessarily see everything until you just start doing it.

HSFS: What were some of the early wins during the launch phase that let you know you had the right target audience and strategy?

It was just very tactical at the time and not like, “Let me think about how this business grows,” and “Let me think about all the possible channels that are available to us and let me just focus on one channel at a time.” It was more just trying a bunch of things, instinctually feeling what's working, and doubling down on those things. 

I think Slack was a big highlight that helped us build a community. We got rid of our intercom widget. I was like, you want support? Don't try to talk to us. You have to join the Slack group and talk to us. That really forced a lot of engagement, and that's where we handled all of our support tickets. It was good for our customers because we were super responsive. It was delightful-level customer support. It was good for the internal team because they were able to get the feedback really directly, and it was good for the community because people were seeing what other people were asking. People were able to learn from each other. It created this flywheel, which was really cool.

At the end of the day, you're just trying to make some money and get some feedback from people so you can make more money. You're just trying to get customers, get feedback from them, and hopefully use that feedback to make more customers. That's all you're really trying to do.

When you think about this business building, like this B2B software building, that's pretty straightforward. There are only two ways you can grow. You can either build a self-serve motion where you get a bunch of attention, you get people to come to you, and they use the product to convert. Or, you can do a more traditional sales-led motion, and you go outbound, you find people, you talk to them, you convince them of the value of your product, and you get them to buy it. You just choose one, and then you make that work with these feedback loops. 

Even when it comes to product prioritization, it's not like we had this really rigorous linear list of things that we wanted to get through or this quarterly plan of all the things we were going to prioritize. It was kind of whatever's top of mind. That doesn't feel scientific and it sometimes feels a little ridiculous, but if it's not top of mind, it's not important. If our customers aren't yelling about it in the Slack community, it's probably not important. Focus on those things. 

That can’t last you forever. At a certain scale, probably $1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), you probably have to move on from that. But for the earlier days, just doing what's top of mind is going to work nine times out of 10.

HSFS: Can you discuss your reverse demo idea and how it started?

We were trying to do a self-serve motion, and I would do normal demos. I only did it three or four times. Then I would realize after doing it three or four times that I have to keep answering their questions because they keep asking me for things. They're like, “Oh, can you do this?” I was like, I don't have time for this. And it's like, “Okay, well, how can I get them to learn? How can I teach a man to fish?” 

So what I would say is, “Can you come to the meeting with a problem?” Beforehand, I would send an automated email, and it'd be like just come to this meeting with a problem and maybe even a data set that you want enriched. So you'd come prepared. If you didn't come prepared, we'd probably have to spend the first five minutes or so kind of getting you on that. And then we'd be like, okay, sign up for Clay and share your screen. Then, I would use the Zoom annotations to basically draw on your screen and be like, “Click this button, click that button, do this, do that.” It was great because, first of all, they would learn, and they would get into the habit of using the product.

A lot of the time, if you've been using a self-serve product, the vast majority of issues are just signing in and getting into the very first activation moment. That’s a lot of the battle. But if you get them on that first activation moment in minute 14 of a 30-minute call, then you've already dramatically improved the chances that they're going to log back in and do it again because they've already gone through that mental barrier.

For me, it was also great because I watched them use the product every day, several times a day. So I could be like, “That button's wrong,” or “This copy is bad,” or “This was confusing UI,” or “This thing isn't working.” I would get a list of five bugs or problems after every call. I'd work with my team or Eric, who was one of our engineers, and just be like, “Let's fix this.”

It was just a really, really, really tight feedback loop, and that's what you try to do. You're trying to meet customers; you're trying to help them, enable them, hopefully get them to sign up for your product, get the feedback to do it again, improve, rinse, and repeat.

Over time, I was trying to reduce the number of demos that I would do from five to seven down to one, or hopefully zero.

HSFS: How has the sales flow changed over the past couple of years?

I'd say a lot of things have changed. A lot of 2022 was focused on what we just described. Then, by the beginning of 2023, we had a pretty reasonable self-serve motion. So, a lot of 2023 was getting the self-serve motion right. A lot of 2024 has been building the sales-led motion on top of the self-serve motion. So, it's building a sales team and go-to-market team that can do a couple of things: take existing customers that are in the funnel and expand them and do things with them and also go to customers that have never heard of you like OpenAI, Anthropic, Verkada, or Notion, and convince them to pay you a lot of money. So that's the motion that we've been focusing a lot on this year to get right.

HSFS: What was the hiring process like when growing Clay?

I would say we approach this differently. On the sales-led motion, I had done the sales for a long time, and I kept talking to salespeople, and I was like, these people are not our users. They don't get it. They're not going to be able to use Clay. I don't know how they're going to talk with our customers and sell this product. What I realized was what we need instead is more of a sales-engineer type. Again, I believe in this tight feedback loop concept, even within people. I don't like the idea of having salespeople who do the talking and then sales-engineer people who do the work—not the work, but it's just different.

I really hate when I talk to sales reps, and they're like, “Let me get a technical resource on the call to help you,” and it's like an embarrassment, you know?

So it's like, can we find this in one person? We kind of invented this role called GTM engineer, and it's basically people who look like our customers. They're like ops-y or growth-y, and they're tactical. They are really good at Clay, and they're really good at helping people with Clay. We teach them some of the sales stuff to help them win big deals. The core skillset is more about how good you are at Clay and being able to explain it to people and distill that down versus how good you are at sales.

I think for your first couple of sales hires, whether you go through my unconventional route or normal account executive route, I would opt for hiring people who either feel your product's pain quite a bit or are already super users of your product (or can be super users of your product).

What you do from there is a different question and is much more dependent on your business and your needs. But we've continued to scale that type of hire.

HSFS: Do you have insights for utilizing AI for GTM?

If you want to take advantage of all this stuff, you need people who actually can take advantage of it, right? So, if you want to take advantage of automation and AI, you need people who are technical. Most of our business hires are fairly technical, I would say. 

HSFS: It seems that GTM is happening much sooner while startups are still building the product. What was Clay's process of investing in marketing?

VA: We invested in the brand very early, before there was any revenue. Most SaaS companies from zero to $2M in ARR have a generic-looking website, and that's it. That's just not our approach. I don't think that's who we are. I also think to our advantage, we have a good name for our company, and we have a product that matches that. So there's some thought put into the naming of the company, what we're trying to build, and the type of solution we're trying. So it enables that. 

I think if your company's name is something fairly generic, it would be really difficult to build and invest in the brand so early on in a way that feels authentic. 

But for SaaS businesses that are trying to grow, it's fairly straightforward. You're trying to get money from customers, and you have two ways you can do it: inbound or outbound motion. I would just stick to one thing. Don't try to do both, and don't think you would layer it on.

If we just look at the past, a lot of companies start at sales-led, and then at some point—definitely not series A—but at some point, they add a self-serve motion. And it takes a while, and it's a whole investment to get right.

It may not be possible, and it may not make sense for your business, but if you do, it's usually not in series A. It's usually much later. So, this is usually your go-to-market motion for a while. Self-serve businesses, on the other hand, have been able to add in sales-led motions earlier. There are a lot of self-serve businesses that usually add in sales-led around series B or something like that when they're trying to scale. That makes more sense because it's also a little easier, especially if it's a seed-based motion to do that. 

You pick one way to grow, and then when you pick the one way to grow, there's only a certain number of things. Then, how do you do that? With sales-led, marketing is trying to drive pipeline generation. On inbound, you're trying to drive qualified lead signups, and hopefully, they become activated and start converting. 

For each of those goals, there's only a certain number of ways you can do that, right? For self-serve, it's going to be a mix of advertising, content, and events. For sales-led, it's a mix of, again, events and also advertising, out-of-home, billboards, account-based marketing, outbound, gifting campaigns, targeted outreach, investor intros, and things like that. There's only a handful of weapons in your arsenal for each of those things. So, how do you go about it? 

And SEO obviously is another channel. You basically just put out a bunch of experiments or bets across these different channels, see what's working, and then instinctually listen here, and then go from there. 

Where do your customers live? How can you get to them? For example, even before we could do content, I knew a bunch of our customers were agency owners who lived in WhatsApp groups. I noticed a bunch of them lived in Slack groups, like Wizards of Ops and RevGenius. What I would do is join all these groups and message people as I heard them talk about things. I would set up social listening tools and change preferences in Slack to get notified. Anytime anyone in these communities would mention something about us, or not about us, but about our problem space, I would jump in and I would post on Reddit or the Slack community or whatever, and I'd answer their question. I learned how they're talking about our problem, which informs the marketing positioning that I have on the website.

I wouldn't say those were significant drivers [for customers]. I think the WhatsApp group actually was more significant because those were smaller, more intimate WhatsApp groups. We actually hired someone who made one of those WhatsApp groups. So we really invested in that. Over time, those became big Clay-enthusiast groups. The Slack communities were less so; that was more about just meeting people where they were, listening to them, and converting a couple of things. But for the WhatsApp groups, it was more tactical and more in a community itself. So it worked a little bit more authentically that way.

And you're not always trying to sell them. You're just trying to understand the problem. If you solve their problem, that's fine. You're participating and engaging. For us, LinkedIn is also a component. I would post a bunch on LinkedIn. I would try to curate things. That's how I learned, “Oh, this is working for me. If it's working for me, it's going to work for these content creators. This is how I can enable them.”

But again, these are just different bets, these are different experiments, these are different things that we're trying out. You see what's working, you double down on those, and you kind of go from there.

HSFS: What are you working on next for Clay?

One bigger thing that we're doing is out-of-home, billboard campaigns for the first time in September. We're getting a bunch of billboards in San Francisco during a bunch of sales conferences in September.

Another big thing is we're doing a lot of events. So we're doing community events all around the world now. We're having events in Warsaw, Buenos Aires, London, Sydney, and Toronto. They're hosted by our experts and our creators all around the world, where they're helping people with Clay, and then they're getting together, stuff like that.

Conclusion

There’s not one single way to accomplish your go-to-market strategy as a startup. Individual circumstances, your industry, and the specific products or services you are trying to launch will all determine what steps to take for GTM.

But as Anand advises, choose a path and follow it through. That might mean getting creative with a self-serve motion or hiring knowledgeable, technical people who love your product for sales-led GTM (rather than just hiring people with strong sales backgrounds). Either way, once you choose product- or sales-led, stick to one strategy rather than trying to go down multiple avenues at once. 

Within that selected strategy, you can experiment more with your approach to GTM. Track what works and repeat it as needed.

The result? A successful GTM could look like launching multiple billboards and hosting global events for people who need and love your product.