Nothing shapes go-to-market strategy more than sales cycle length
How long does it take for your company to close a client?
How far in advance do you need to start generating interest?
How many stakeholders do you have to convince?
Questions that can only be answered by your sales and marketing teams
And don’t be an arrogant prick, every company needs sales AND marketing, your product won’t sell itself. If you don’t have a sales or marketing lead, go find one
The earlier you can figure out how to make these two work in sync, the faster you’ll be able to generate exponential growth
Customer journeys change from business to business, there is no secret formula
The only recipe for success is to test as many configurations as fast as possible
This is why ‘growth’ has been so relevant with b2c companies, short sales cycles. Easy to iterate fast
Mistakes are quickly forgotten, you can make as much mess as you need to find the perfect growth recipe
Low LTVs make it a volume game and with volumes comes automation
This enables teams of ‘full-stack’ sales and marketing talent to be agile and successful even if small/scrappy
On the other hand b2b is not as forgiving, with higher LTVs opportunities are far more valuable than volumes
If on one side it won’t hurt to loose a 1/1000 $10 customer in b2b you can’t afford to loose a 1/10 $1000 opportunity
Longer sales cycles allow you to take your time to build more complex growth machines.
My measuring stick is 1 month for every 100k of revenue -if you average 1m contracts you can expect at 10m cycle to sway clients your way
Are you going to cold-call for 10m straight?
b2b success is achieving precision at scale, something you can only get with well coordinated multidisciplinary teams
b2c = (growth lead) + (full-stack growth execs)
b2b = (growth pm) + (content + marketing + AE/AM + …)
👋🏼fabri here, former founder and consultant
working with startups, helping them grow
