“I need to find the right marketing channel so I can scale it, fast.”

— Every startup founder for all of eternity.

What does it really mean to scale your startup growth strategy?

Founders need to know what marketing and sales strategy is right for their product and business model so they can identify it, hire for it, and scale it — as fast as possible.

Once they figure it out, the focus turns into a consistent, scalable quest to find the golden ticket. Remember Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka? Instead of buying one chocolate bar at a time, her (rich af) father bought entire pallets of chocolate bars and hired a fleet to open every single one until a golden ticket was found.

Founders want to know the exact recipe for finding prospects and converting them into closed won deals.

But how do you figure out what growth strategy makes sense for your product and business?

The cold start problem

Early stage founders have a cold start problem. You have a product that nobody knows about. You have a website that nobody is viewing. As founders, we’re particularly good at recognizing patterns so we can scale them. But how do you scale what doesn’t exist?

There are two strategies I recommend founders run simultaneously to sell your product:

1. Look at your competition and market to identify potential growth strategies.

2. Understand what go-to-market (GTM) motions are and think about which one is right for you.

3. Identify and run growth experiments with the purpose of learning.

Let’s break both of these down into actions.

Identifying growth strategies off the market and competition

What to learn from your competition:

If there’s currently a product in market that you will compete with for market share, look closely and see if what they’re doing is working and if you should consider similar techniques.

Sure, it sounds crappy to steal what the competition is doing. But the point is to find a shortcut that you can adapt and make your own.

Find a competitor and ask yourself:

• What does their marketing presence look like? What channels (social, email, blog, podcast, events) do they use? How are they positioning these channels and to whom?

• Look at their LinkedIN company page. What are the titles of their team? Do they have a lot of sales reps? Or a heavy marketing org?

• What topics do they talk about?

• How is their website structured? Do they have pages for different personas?

• What does their founder talk about for thought leadership?

You will find a few things you could do just as good if not better than your competitor. And you may notice things they aren’t doing, like founder thought leadership, where you could set yourself apart.

What to learn from the market:

Do you know how your prospect wants to buy? Do you know what marketing messages will resonate with them?

Many founders skip this step and yet it is so important. You can identify the right growth strategy if you look at your prospects and truly think about their process to buy.

Let’s pick on healthcare. Selling into healthcare is hard. Typically you’re selling an expensive product that may involve sensitive data. Executives make the decisions and they’re busy people with lots of priorities. IT is involved, which is often a barrier.

If you are building a healthcare product and you’re pre-seed and seed stage, you’re probably not selling it through Instagram. You aren’t measuring website traffic to see who converts on a lead form.

My point it: the market can tell you what not to do. So don’t waste your time on strategies that truly don’t make sense.

Understanding GTM motions

GTM motions are the coordinated strategies used to generate and grow revenue:

• Marketing-led: Inbound, brand, and demand marketing generates leads.

• Sales-led: Sales teams (BDRs, SDRs, account reps) generate leads.

• Product-led: The product itself is responsible for account upsells, renewals, and customer referrals.

• Community-led: The startup hosts/runs a community and it drives leads.

• Partner-led: Channel and reseller partnerships drive leads.

• Ecosystem-led: A combination of strategic partnerships with products in your product’s ecosystem drive growth.

If you’re a founder, you may look at this list and say “Great! I’ll just pick one and scale it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

Wrong! So wrong. Over my dead body.

Instead, understand the core focus of each strategy and decide if your prospects would be receptive to the strategy.

• Are there potential referral and channel partners who could resell and market your product?

• What kind of marketing would your prospects be receptive to? What are they reading and watching?

• Does a community exist for your prospects? Would they value one?

• Are there products in your ecosystem who would benefit from marketing and selling you? And vice versa?

I honestly need to write a blog just about GTM motions to give examples for each. More on this topic later. Until then, this graphic from MKT1 that outlines GTM motion by purchase process:

Run a few growth experiments

Now that you’ve thought about your competition and market and potential GTM motions, pick a few growth experiments to run.

What’s a growth experiment? An activity you try with the focus of learning (aka, not scaling).

Here’s a growth experiment I run with Five Four clients: lead magnet panel webinars.

• Find a topic that resonates with your prospects. Host a panel discussion with industry experts that your prospects may recognize and want to hear from.

• Create a target list of accounts you wish were your customers. Invite them to the event.

• Include a clear CTA, like a demo request, a conference you’re going to or speaking at, something they can engage with next.

• Nurture attendees with a marketing newsletter post-webinar.

Do this and you’ll learn:

• What topics resonate with your audience.

• What their main pain points are (if you ask them during a poll)

• Patterns among those who reach out for a demo.

If you run a webinar and nobody comes, then you got something wrong - which is GOOD. Because you learned what NOT to do. Maybe the topic didn’t resonate. Maybe you targeted the wrong personas or accounts. You won’t know until you try.

Run an unsanctioned event during a popular trade show. Write an op-ed style LinkedIn post about the problem you solve and see who responds. Go to the city your prospects are in and meet them in person. When you’re in cold start phase, you just need to pick one and GO.

Do what doesn’t scale

Early stage founders MUST do what doesn’t scale. It’s your only option, because when you have the cold start problem, you don’t know what works to know what to scale.

My biggest challenge with founders is when they get too caught up in trying to identify the perfect, most best strategy — and sadly they end up doing nothing at all. Instead of trying something, they do nothing.

You won’t know exactly what to do. But you must try.

And as always, I’m here to help.