Is your business a “money-making machine”?
Is your business a “money-making machine”?
Exit the vicious cycle of constantly worrying about sales.
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Dear GTM Strategist,
Last week, I trained a group of companies to pitch to investors and VCs.
One of the most popular slides was “The Money-Making Machine”. 🎰
Most investors want you to prove that if you put X in your money-making machine, 5X, 10X, or more will come out in a certain time.
This is also important if you are bootstrapping. It gives you peace of mind when planning to grow the team, invest in new products, or simply go on vacation without worrying if the business will survive without you.
But the reality for most go-to-market companies is that our money-making machine still needs fine-tuning.
This is how my “money-making machine” looks like an ATM:
What did I miss?
The GTM Strategist book, of course: https://gtmstrategist.com/
Currently, my book is the only product-led part of my business, but not for very much longer. 🤠
Regarding resource allocation, I spend 90% of my time and investments doing marketing and demand generation, but the lion's share (70%+) of the revenue comes from my sales and business development activities.
Many entrepreneurs, advisors, and consultants would start optimizing the “Money making machine” at the top. They would say things like:
“Do more content.”
“Test another channel.”
“Let’s bring more traffic with ads.”
“Let’s create a content generation engine.”
I think differently.
Most often, we start by optimizing the Opportunities and Deal stages.
The logic: If we cannot confidently sell to the leads that we have in the pipeline, why on earth would we bring more leads into a broken sales pipeline?
Never underestimate sales-led
If I had a magic wand and could only choose one thing in business, I’d be incredible in:
I would choose sales.
No matter what happens- if you can sell, the business will survive and thrive if you sell a really good product.
Often, my mentees (mainly technical founders) cheer for product-led products.
How could they not—it sounds AMAZING that the product would just “sell itself.” Sadly, that rarely happens.
Most businesses bootstrap at the beginning of the go-to-market stage.
In other words, THEY NEED MONEY to re-invest in the product.
This is why we often sell productized services or co-create the product with a client (pilots) to gain valuable funding and insights that will later fuel our transition to product-led growth, which is a part of our original vision.
Of course, there is a natural order of things.
Some products require different approaches.
In plain terms, if you are selling a no-brainer product for $50, sales would be too expensive. It can be an impulse purchase.
On the other hand, if you are selling something more expensive and complex to understand, your prospect will probably want to talk to someone.
The best rule of thumb:
“If something is more expensive than a used car, sales are inevitable.”
Marketing-led, product-led, or sales-led businesses can happily co-exist. There can be more than one.
Here is how I applied this to my business.
Even best-in-class product-led companies such as Ampitude, Figma, Miro, and Zoom have sales teams to help monetize and serve larger accounts.
Getting (more) serious about sales
I had a sales challenge in my business.
I spent way too much time preparing offers and I was always late with them.
It took me way too long to embrace the fact that not every offer needs to be an a la carte masterpiece.
The only way how I could start scaling my consulting business was to work on productized services and have standard packages instead of treating each deal like special ops.
I mean, I enjoy solving business problems a lot, but a standardized sales deck became a necessity at this point so that I can react to opportunities quickly and efficiently.
I asked my colleague Matúš Kučera, Head of Delivery and Partner at SALESDOCk, to help me get “my house in order”. With his help, we optimized the offers and calculated the profitability of each deal I was making. The results were very, very useful - overall, I had too many one-of services in my portfolio, there was a very profitable offer that I have not been actively presenting, and there were some offers that were very work-intense and complex to execute as a service. Therefore they were underpriced.
I was so impressed with his work that I invited him to record a podcast episode and work together on the hero image for this substack.
Ta-da! 🎉
Listen to the latest episode of the GTM Strategist with Matuš Kučera here:
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I hope I managed to get you more excited about sales today.
It really, really matters and can make a massive difference in your traction.
Happy selling!
Maja