A killer Go-to-Market slide for your company (template inside)

Collab with an investor based on 85 success stories

May 10, 2024

Clay kindly supports this Substack post. Ever since I mastered data enrichment for outbound, I screenshare it on my mentorship calls. The only way for people to understand how super-easy and useful Clay is is to see it in action in their cases ✌️.

This time, I will show you how straightforward it is to:

1. Build a list of VCs in your selected markets

2. Find decision makers and their contact data there

3. Use Claygent - an AI web scraper, to find portfolio companies of these VCs

4. How to write LinkedIn request messages to these VCs using Clay AI integration

See how I did it in 10 minutes using the FREE version of Clay

Beat me to it! :)

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Dear GTM Strategist!

Does your go-to-market slide look like ChatGPT hallucinated it?

A bit of a roadmap … why not?
Naming all the channels that could possibly make sense … just in case
Focusing almost exclusively on what will happen in the future after you get the money
Name-dropping some big names of media and partnerships … not too bad 😅

P.S. This proposal, of course, did not go through me … 😃

Here is a treat for you.

I spent 3 weeks working with Jonathan Crowder thinking about the “pitch perfect” go-to-market slide. Jonathan is an experienced VC, operator and fundraising advisor who has helped founders raise $125M+.

Jonathan and I analyzed 85 successful pitch decks that resulted in $375M raised in total. He found essential patterns and reverse-engineered these best practices in a GTM Slide template that we will share in this Substack. We aimed to make this content applicable even if you are raising pre-seed, seed, or Series A and still need to secure more traction.

Even if you are not actively fundraising at the moment, this knowledge will help you work your way toward an eventual fundraising round by knowing what it will take to succeed. Most of the same principles can apply to your sales decks, partnerships decks, and other go-to-market communications (building in public on social media, press releases, event content, and company updates).

Up for it? 🤠

Let’s go!

6 Lessons based on analysis of the Winning GTM Slides

Jonathan has seen over $3.75B of startup pitch decks in his career. He believes the best pitches don't have Product-Market Fit (PMF). They have 𝐏𝐈𝐅.💡 PIF = Pitch-Investor Fit

Startups sell different things to investors as they scale. Here are 6 lessons of the pitch-perfect GTM slide that will help you achieve PIF and win the minds of investors:

Lesson 1: A good GTM slide doesn't exist in a vacuum. An insightful problem/solution section queues up your GTM slide by showing the path to PMF. It makes your GTM claims more believable.
Lesson 2: Your primary GTM metrics point a VC toward what matters. You're telling them what to diligence. You need two elements: First, a leading indicator of success that can be supported with data (ex: $ pipeline at proposal stage); and second, the end results it drove.
Lesson 3: Your TAM slide should do more than state your market size. It's an opportunity to show your meticulous focus on your beachhead market and briefly articulate your long-term expansion path to capture adjacent segments.
Lesson 4: Show your weaknesses. Be sure to highlight existing weaknesses if you're positioned to do well in those areas when you give them the attention they deserve. (For example: "At a prior company, our CMO launched LinkedIn Ads channel from 0 to generate $15M ARR from our ICP at a very low CPA. Will test when we have budget.")
Lesson 5: Share clear, specific personas. Not all slide decks include buyer personas (especially for very early stage companies). But if they do, they should be very detailed.
Lesson 6: For Series A or later, you must be prepared for deep discussion about your acquisition channels: what they are, the approach to each, expected economics for each channel, and how they fit together to create a cohesive plan.

Confidence = Evidence

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of GTM slide-making, we must embrace a fundamental truth: What is the job to be done for a go-to-market slide?

In Jonathan’s words:

“A great go-to-market slide gives investors the confidence that you know what you’re doing. It shows them that you have done your homework, that you have a realistic picture of how to acquire customers in your market, and your assumptions are reasonable. It clearly illustrates your existing traction and your go-to-market plan, and why those will result in an interesting opportunity for them to be a part of.”

In Rick and Morty's words:

Ideally, you could communicate all the financials, LTV/CAC metrics, traction per channel growth, and other fantastic metrics that smell like money. But what if this is not the case?

If you are a pre-revenue or early-stage startup, you can signal the pre-seed and seed investors that you are on the right track even sooner.

We curated some Traction KPIs that can be used to prove traction even before you get to all the cool “hockey stick financials and user growth metrics.” Which one can you use?

The Anatomy of the Pitch-Perfect GTM Slide

The slide in which you present your GTM strategy is one of the most important parts of your pitch deck.

Your GTM slide has two jobs:

Communicate that you can predictably and successfully create traction.
To present the big opportunity you can pursue by securing funding.

In your GTM slide and pitch narrative, you should focus on presenting:

What is working: a few bullet points about currently effective growth channels, key customers won, etc.
Untapped opportunities: where are the opportunities that an additional round of funding could help unlock

Here is how we visualized it:

Instead of final thoughts, feel free to reach out to Jonathan if you are preparing to raise or actively fundraising. He helps companies raising Seed and Series A rounds between $2-15M raise capital more quickly, easily and on better terms.

Till next time,

Maja

📕 Reading recommendation

I usually do not make book recommendations, but when I do, they come from my favorite authors. I read Allan Dib's “1-Page Marketing Plan” a couple of years ago. It was one of the pivotal books in my career. I interviewed Allan last year for the GTM Strategist Podcast (listen here), where he announced that he was launching a new book.

Now it is finally live! “Lean Marketing” is a follow-up to the international bestselling phenomenon. It focuses more on scaling, and building processes, as the role of AI and automation is rapidly changing the marketing landscape. It can be yours for starting from $1.99 (Kindle version).

Every purchase comes with access to free training: https://leanmarketing.com/leanmarketing-bonus

Are you ready to dive deeper and work on your Go-To-Market strategy and execution?

Discover my solutions that support your journey from launching to scaling:

🛰️ Explorer: Understand Go-To-Market and develop a winning GTM plan.
Get best selling GTM Strategist book + 20 frameworks (workshops) + online course ($47). Tested by 6500+ companies
🚀 Doer: Leverage the 100-step GTM Checklist tested on 650+ launches with templates (emails, launch plans, posts, landing pages), which will guide you from getting ready to launch to an impactful launch and scaling stage.
Get the Checklist ($97)
💫 Leader: Guide your team to successfully choose ICP (target market), pricing, positioning & selection of best GTM Motion (channels, tactics). GTM Bootcamp includes 5 hours of applicable videos and a personal Miro board.
Get the Bootcamp ($347)
🏆 Ready to win: Tackle the most pressing Go-to-Market issues such as selection of ICP, positioning, how to get customers, build teams and select proven ways how to go to market. Book a 90-minute hands-on consultation with Maja, get personalized guidance, a Miro board, and reliable vendor contacts for further work.
Book here for $500