S7E4 –  Why Your SaaS GTM Isn’t Working And How to Fix It with Operational Discipline with Garrath Robinson

Are you wondering why Your SaaS GTM Isn’t Working, And How to Fix It with Operational Discipline? In today’s competitive business environment, success depends not just on great products, but on how effectively you bring them to market. Yet, many companies struggle with go-to-market (GTM) strategies that fall apart under pressure. Why? Because marketing and sales often operate in silos, pulling in different directions instead of working as a unified force. Think of it this way: marketing should act as the recon team, gathering intelligence, identifying opportunities, and setting the stage. Sales, on the other hand, is the strike team—responsible for execution and closing. When these two functions are misaligned or overloaded with conflicting motions, the result is confusion, inefficiency, and missed revenue. In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, Joran Hofman sits down with Head of GTM Garrath Robinson to explore why most GTM strategies fail—and how a disciplined, military-inspired approach can help businesses stay focused, aligned, and ready to win.

Garrath Robinson’s Journey: From Combat Veteran to Growth Architect

Garrath Robinson is not your typical business strategist. A former combat veteran, he has translated his battlefield experience into building high-performance business operations. Today, he’s the creator of the Strike Operating System, a practical framework that helps startups and large enterprises bring order to chaos. Garrath’s unique perspective blends military precision with business strategy, offering companies a tactical path to scale sustainably.

The Anatomy of Go-To-Market Failures

Drawing from his work with a Swedish AI firm trying to expand into North America, Garrath shares a cautionary tale. The company’s rigid, top-down culture created internal friction, poor communication, and low morale. Without clear roles, frontline teams felt disconnected, and leadership lacked real-time feedback from the field. The result? A stalled GTM effort. This experience underscored a critical lesson: execution without operational command is like sending troops into battle without a plan.

Defining Go-To-Market Motion

GTM isn’t just about strategy decks or vision statements—it’s about execution. As Garrath explains, a GTM motion is the mechanism that transforms a product into measurable revenue and customer retention. It requires people taking action, not just planning. In a noisy marketplace, relying on outdated or generic tactics won’t cut it. Businesses need differentiated, agile approaches that adapt to customers’ needs in real time.

The Strike Operating System: A Framework for Success

The Strike Operating System was built with flexibility in mind. It’s not a rigid playbook—it’s a modular framework designed to meet a business where it is, regardless of size or stage. Whether a company is in growth mode or trying to regain focus, Strike offers clear operational levers that leaders can pull to build alignment and momentum across teams.

The Components of Strike

• Signal Calibration: Spot and respond to the signals that truly move the needle.
  
• Tempo Establishment: Set a consistent rhythm to avoid performance spikes and crashes.
  
• Rhythm Engineering: Keep sales, marketing, and customer success moving in sync.
  
• Impact Prioritization: Focus resources on what matters most and eliminate distractions.
  
• Kill Switch Discipline: Know when to stop what’s not working and pivot fast.
  
• Relentless Execution: Foster a culture of accountability where results matter more than excuses.
  

Implementing Strike: Where to Start

For teams feeling stuck—in what Garrath calls the “Oh, shit” phase—Strike offers a way out. It helps businesses reestablish command and redirect energy toward what works. Starting with the sales team’s performance, companies can apply Strike’s principles incrementally, layering in marketing and customer success as alignment grows.

Aligning Sales and Marketing: The Recon Team

Marketing isn’t just about branding—it’s about intelligence. Garrath emphasizes that marketing should act as the recon unit for the business, gathering insights and feeding them to sales. This creates a real-time feedback loop where both teams operate as one cohesive unit, increasing effectiveness and closing the gap between message and execution.

Common Pitfalls and Best Practices

Change is hard—especially when people are emotionally attached to old ways of working. Garrath stresses the need for a culture of trust and autonomy. When team members feel empowered to make decisions, innovation follows. Businesses that embrace adaptability and frontline insights are far better positioned to navigate complexity and uncertainty.

The Role of Gut Instinct

Even in the age of AI and data, Garrath argues that gut instinct still matters. He shares an example where trusting his instinct led to a highly successful marketing initiative—reminding us that while data informs decisions, human judgment can often see what the numbers miss.

Future-Proofing Your Business

Success today depends on timeless fundamentals: relationships, trust, and execution. Garrath encourages leaders to avoid over-relying on automation or buzzwords. Instead, focus on building real customer connections and delivering value consistently. These are the businesses that scale well—and last.

Conclusion: Discipline Over Dollars

Garrath Robinson leaves us with a powerful reminder: “Discipline will outperform dollars.” In other words, throwing money at a problem doesn’t guarantee results. Operational discipline, alignment, and focus are the real drivers of sustainable growth. By applying the Strike Operating System, companies can build a repeatable, reliable GTM engine that’s built to win.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – The Battlefield of Business
• (1:12) – Meet Garrath Robinson: From Combat Veteran to Growth Architect
• (1:39) – GTM Gone Wrong: Real-World Horror Stories
• (5:52) – What Is a Go-To-Market Motion, Really?
• (7:17) – When Motions Collide
• (8:33) – Leadership Fails and GTM Breakdown
• (13:26) – Inside the Strike Operating System
• (19:51) – Signal Calibration: Finding What Really Moves the Needle
• (22:47) – Marketing 2.0: From Arts & Crafts to Operational Powerhouse
• (26:09) – Avoiding the GTM Trap: Common Pitfalls to Watch For
• (31:43) – Give It Time: The Patience Behind Real Transformation
• (33:16) – The People Behind the Process
• (35:12) – Garrath’s Golden Rule: Discipline Over Dollars
• (36:41) – Building the Future: Gut Instinct, Fundamentals, and Human Connection
• (39:33) – Scaling Revenue: From 0 to $10K MRR and Beyond
• (44:15) – Wrapping Up: Key Takeaways + Connect with Garrath Robinson

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Garrath Robinson

I like to call marketing the Recon team. Marketing is out there getting a lay of the land, giving you an idea of what the terrain looks like, identifying the highest value opportunities, the highest value targets, and getting that field-level intel, and then relaying that intel and communicating that with the sales team. And your sales team is your strategic strike force, your strategic task force that goes out and acts on that battle plan. A lot of times, these companies are actually running multiple motions at once. They don’t realize it, but they are. They might say they’re founder-led, but behind the walls of organization, and it’s very much cold, outbound lead, where they think they’re outbound lead, but what you find is, well, you guys are running more demos. You’re more of a PLG company, but you’re still running a cold, outbound motion. People get emotionally attached to what’s already being done because it really comes down to the behavioral dynamics of nobody wants to really take… Everybody loves to take ownership when things are going well. Nobody wants to take ownership when things are going bad. Today, we will be discussing why most go-to-market motions fail, but more importantly, how can you fix yours with operational discipline?

[00:01:12.830] – Joran

My guest today is Garrath Robinson, a former combat veteran turned growth architect and the creator of the Strike Operating System. Strike is a go-to-market operating system used by startups and global enterprises to engineer growth with speed and precision. Whether you’re trying to align sales or marketing, fix your broken go-to-market or just want to have tactical blueprint to scale, this episode will be packed with go-to-market insights. Let’s dive in. Welcome to the show, Gareth.

[00:01:39.600] – Garrath Robinson

Hey, it’s great to be on with you, Joran.

[00:01:41.540] – Joran

Cool. We’re going to dive right in. Do you have a big horror story you can share with the listeners when it comes to go-to-market?

[00:01:48.480] – Garrath Robinson

It’s interesting you asked that because the reason I started with my partner is I was being a little facetious. I’ve had a lot of great experiences in my career. I’ve been blessed to be around some great leadership teams. I’ve been in less to help market and take to market great products, great services. You almost become a little bit punch drunk around how things are actually done. Because when you’re in an organization, Everything becomes a seamless way of executing where you know what you’re doing on Monday, Tuesday, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Execution feels simple and easy. You become punch drunk to how things actually work in the real world because that’s the exception, not the rule. It wasn’t until I got into a company that was the complete opposite. I found myself pulling my hair. We constantly get in our own way. It was a Swedish AI company. I was leading go-to-market into the North American market. We found It’s been a bit difficult to find traction because we were trying to replicate our success in Europe and the North American market. Being one of the only Americans on the team, I was used to horizontal structures.

[00:02:59.800] – Garrath Robinson

I’ve been in marketing operations roles where after 60 days, my marketing CMO or director came to me and was like, Hey, we just want you to fully own this. You don’t have to ask for permission. If you think it’s what’s best for the business, we want you to spearhead that. Then coming into a culture where it was very much top-down. I remember a week or two in, I’m scheduling meetings with the sales team and getting a call from my CMO, Why are you meeting with sales? I’m like, That’s my job, to figure out their pain points so we can help serve them best so we can be that spiritive for sales. It was very much like, Well, we meet with sales and give you the information that you need to… We’ll tell you exactly what to do. It was a shut up and do what you told culture. I saw how this played out over almost 24 months. When I first got there, there was so much energy in the business with new team members and people switching their new roles. Within 12 months, it was almost like being in a mental health facility where everybody was depressed.

[00:04:01.590] – Garrath Robinson

Nobody really knew what they were owning. Nobody really knew what they were accountable for. A lot of meetings ended up being reporting. I almost ended up as a go-to-market therapist for the team, more than actually leading go-to-market. As miserable as I had gotten in that role at the time, I didn’t understand how important that experience was. When I decided to lead that company and start Dorindal, I took 60 days off to get my mind right, just meet with some friends, have conversations, talk through that experience. And talking through that experience, I realized there’s a story here that nobody talks about. It gave me the juxtaposition of how things go. When you do things the right way, you have some operational agency in command throughout the organization. When you have a middle-out leadership structure. And here’s what happens when you have a top-down leadership structure where that leadership might not really care to get the opinions or the input or that field-level intelligence of frontline teams. I realized that was actually the best experience of my career. You get a little bit punch drunk on being at these companies, some of these companies, and things are going really well and everything is smooth and easy.

[00:05:11.980] – Garrath Robinson

This was like getting punched in the face. Everything you knew about how good a market should be executed. It was almost like done in reverse. It gave me the ability to have this lens, this bifocal lens of, well, here’s the path you can go down if you continue to operate this way. But then here’s this better path if you’re willing to evolve and adapt to the way a modern business needs to operate.

[00:05:35.480] – Joran

Nice. It’s a really nice story. You’re going to find out after a month in an experience like this, how you need to do things sometimes. Certainly. I think it’s a good experience to have, even though it’s probably wasn’t the best one. It’s a good one to have at the beginning of your career so you can do things right later on.

[00:05:52.980] – Garrath Robinson

Absolutely.

[00:05:54.020] – Joran

We’re going to dive deeper into what went wrong there, but also how you’re doing things now. I want to start at the basics because we’re going to talk about go-to-market. We have SaaS founders who are just starting out. If we just really go basic-basic, what defined for you go-to-market motion? What is it? What are the common types? Can you explain in your own words?

[00:06:14.160] – Garrath Robinson

If go-to-market motion is it just about strategy. The way I like to look at it is it’s the way that your company is going to translate the potential that you have within your product to basically turn that into revenue and retention. That ultimately happens through real people with real stakes at hand and in the real world. I mentioned the real world for a specific reason because I think sometimes we get too caught up in visionary focus and strategy and how we’re going to execute. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to how you actually execute. I think that’s the biggest problem to solve in today’s go-to-market. Go-to-market has evolved. It’s no longer about five years ago. You could have got away with just running the same playbook as everybody else. Now you need to have a differentiated way of how you get in front of your customers, how you convey your value, and ultimately, how you sustain that relationship over time.

[00:07:11.060] – Joran

Do you use terminology like founder-led, sales-led, partner-led, outbound-led? How do you look at that?

[00:07:17.000] – Garrath Robinson

It’s interesting because I think we’re almost seeing a convergence of those different motions. At the end of the day, it’s not so much a focus on whether you’re going to be founder-led, whether you’re going to be sales It’s cold outbound lead because what you fight a lot of times is companies are actually running multiple motions at once. They don’t realize it, but they are. They might say they’re founder-led, but behind the walls of the organization, and it’s very much cold outbound lead, where they think they’re outbound-led, But what you find is, well, you guys are running more demos. You’re more of a PLG company, but you’re still running a cold up out motion. I think a lot of times you find that most teams think they’re doing one thing, but they’re actually doing another. You end up in this situation where you just have a fragmented set of tactics, but there’s really no operational backbone to sustain consistently executing on that.

[00:08:10.110] – Joran

Yeah, nice. Well, let’s dive deeper. So first we’re going to dive into the failures, then success. When we look at a failure pattern of why go-to-market often breaks down or simply fails, what are some of the top reasons? I mean, you already mentioned top-down leadership, not getting the information needed. What are and some other reasons it fails?

[00:08:33.280] – Garrath Robinson

I look at it through the lens of operational command. That’s how I look at go-to-market. I started out in the strategic space, designing customer lifecycle journeys for banks and credit unions, working with Chase, working with J. P. Morgan, working with Royal Bank of Canada. I used to look at it through this strategic lens, but I learned that if we don’t have operational command, if we don’t have some layer of enforcement, and these sound like dirty words in corporate America and almost militaristic. But when I talk about operational command, I look at it like this. A lot of companies, they’re tracking signals, but they don’t really know which signals they should be acting on, what are their highest value signals, and how do we act on that as a unified team. They lack a tempo in the business. They don’t have a heartbeat, and you end up in a situation where execution comes in these peaks and valleys. You don’t really have a sustainable model. When I We’re not talking about sustainable growth, I look at it as sustainable execution. Because the sustainable growth, so to speak, will come if you can actually sustainably execute as a company.

[00:09:40.220] – Garrath Robinson

Then you have your traditional disconnect when it comes to priorities where marketing and sales are running their own motions, and there’s not a lot of collaboration, there’s not a lot of communication, and ultimately, there’s a lack of trust, and there’s a lack of fidelity between those teams and the information that you have visibility into. Another interesting one is the fear of stopping. We put all our time and effort into building this campaign, getting it prepped, getting it launched, but then it comes out of the gates. We’re 30 days in, we’re 60 days in. There’s no real traction there, but yet it’s almost as if everybody is emotionally attached to some of these bad ideas. Having criteria in place for, Hey, we launched this campaign. We want to get 30 MQLs or 100 MQLs from it over the next 90 days. We’re 30 days in, we’re 60 days in, we’ve got 20. Is this really the best use of our resources? Probably not. You could easily kill that campaign, maybe have a backup in place, or have criteria in place for how we’re going to shift our resources to better opportunities, higher value opportunities for the business.

[00:10:47.660] – Garrath Robinson

I think a lot of times people get emotionally attached to what’s already being done because it really comes down to the behavioral dynamics of nobody wants to really take Everybody loves to take ownership when things are going well. Nobody wants to take ownership when things are going bad. Then I think ultimately, this all comes full circle on itself, too. There’s really no operating system. You have a strategic framework, you’ve got some RevOps in place, but it all feels a little disconnected, and there’s no operating rhythm to the business. You end up in a situation where people are working really hard. Everything feels fragmented. Nobody is in command. Leadership teams are fighting back and forth with each other. Frontline and middle management are fighting back and forth with each other, and there’s no real focus or control with how we’re actually operating as a company.

[00:11:39.100] – Joran

I like how you take the military background into the company, making sure you know who’s in command, what is happening What is the next step, I guess, if this happens? Because that’s what you’re being trained on.

[00:11:50.620] – Garrath Robinson

It’s interesting because I never realized how much my military background would eventually play into my corporate career. I actually avoided for a long time. But as I was building this company, I started to look back on my leadership experience in the military. I wasn’t an NCO, I wasn’t an officer or anything like that. But I think about why our team was able to execute at a high level in combat. That was because everybody at the front lines had some agency when it came to making critical decisions in real-time. Here’s what you own, here’s what you focus on, here’s plan A, B, and C. Developing that level of agency with frontline teams, with your from the level managers, even through the executive layer, you start to see people don’t mind if something goes wayward or doesn’t get a plan. People will step up and take ownership in those instances because they know exactly what they own. It creates a culture where you’re not afraid of reprimand. It’s not a culture of reprimand for doing your job well, even though maybe something didn’t work out or go to plan. It’s a culture that celebrates, Hey, you’re developing that ability to really drive the business from your seat at the table.

[00:13:01.620] – Joran

Yeah. In the end, you all have a goal in mind and you want to get there. Things are not going to be perfect, but at least somebody can take responsibility for their part. They have ownership. Exactly. You mentioned the operating system. You created the strike framework, or I think you call it operating system, that founders can use to build a repeatable go-to-market motion. Can you explain the steps and then probably walk a bit deeper into every step for us?

[00:13:26.190] – Garrath Robinson

The way to look at Strike is this evolved over 24 months. What I was trying to solve for is, Hey, I’ve gotten certifications in some of these other go-to-market frameworks or some of these other RevOps frameworks, and tried implementing them. And what you find is it’s not sustainable for most businesses. For me, the evolution was what modern go-to-market needs is a modular operating system based on the maturity level of the business, resources, talent that you have in-house, and being able to have a system in place that you’re not so directly tied to, that you have to fully transform the business in order to move forward, but more so something that gives you levers to pull based on what’s happening in real-time within the business. I look at Strike as a doctrine more so than a strategic framework, a doctrine for how are we going to operate as a company. And ultimately, it’s essentially how you engineer the conditions for success in the company and how that looks on a daily, weekly, and quarterly. Strike really stands for. And Strike is made up of number one, signal calibration. This is really a focus on acting on what truly matters, on what truly drives the business forward.

[00:14:38.520] – Garrath Robinson

Tempo establishment. Again, coming back to that idea of how do we actually establish a heartbeat within the organization that we can consistently rely on. Rhythm engineering, which is how do we create some synchronicity between sales, marketing, and customer success, where it doesn’t feel like this fragment of effort, where it doesn’t feel like these teams are operating in silos, but they’re moving together as one team. Impact prioritization, which is killing the distractions that slow the business down and focusing on your highest leverage opportunities, again, that drive the business forward. I call it kill switch discipline, which is what we just talked about a couple of minutes ago, which is knowing when to quit, knowing when to hit the stop button, and doing that quickly. Having criteria in place. We launched this campaign, this go-to-market motion. How do we quickly identify whether this is where we need to put our resources, or when do we decide this isn’t going to work, kill it off, and focus on building something else, or pushing resources into higher value or higher leverage place for the business? For me, it’s not just about having acronyms to roll out a framework. It’s about getting you to a point where you can execute relentlessly, to where there’s no drift between those go-to-market teams.

[00:15:56.460] – Garrath Robinson

Nobody’s relying on excuses. There’s no thing reporting. And Ultimately, if you think of it as everybody being on the same boat or everybody being on the same bus, there’s no passengers on that boat. Everybody has their place at the wheel. That’s the lens I look at go-to-market through is, how do we develop that operational command throughout the entire go-to-market work.

[00:16:16.710] – Joran

Yeah, so in the end, it’s almost like creating your combat team that everybody has the same goal, everybody knows exactly what to do, and I guess, knows what to do in which situation and what is being expected of

[00:16:30.340] – SaaStock

This podcast episode is brought to you by my personal favorite SaaS event and community, SaaStock. The Europe event is taking place on the 14th and 15th of October in Dublin, and it’s going to be two full days of investor matchmaking, talk from other founders, and meetings, lots of meetings. I think they even had over 15,000 pre-scheduled meetings last year. As a listener to the podcast, you are getting an exclusive 30% discount through the link in the show notes. And even better, if your company is already doing above 1 million ARR, you might even qualify for a completely free ticket while they last plus up to €400 towards travel expenses. So it can’t get any better than that. The discounted tickets are going to be limited. Same with the free ones. So make sure you hit pause, hit the link, get your ticket, and then come back to the podcast. You will see us in Dublin as well as we do have a booth on the event.

[00:17:28.220] – Joran

So make sure to get your ticket. If somebody wants to implement this, where do we start? Is it a document you fill out and you then start filling it out together and you start agreeing on these six different things?

[00:17:43.320] – Garrath Robinson

Yeah. So the strike is really perfect fit for any organization that hit that, Oh, shit, phase, where it’s like, We’ve been scratching our heads for a year. We’ve been scratching our heads for six months. We can’t figure this out. It all comes back to that That theme of, Hey, we don’t have true operational demand. We don’t have a layer of enforcement here of how we actually execute, how we actually operate as a company. It’s very much fractured and disjointed, and there’s no clear communication channels. Cultures where people really struggle to face the hard truths, again, because there’s a culture of reprimand. If things don’t go to plan, somebody needs to own this, and somebody gets reprimanded for it. This could be post-product-market fit, for instance, where we’ve got product-market fit, but as we continue to scale, we feel like we’re drowning in activities that aren’t moving the needle forward. We’re stuck where we are at the moment. Ultimately, when you find yourself in that instance, it’s where you need the rhythm in the business. It’s where you need command. It’s where you need focus. That’s where I look at Strike is a doctrine for how we execute that’s backed up by a data layer to support how you’re actually planning to execute.

[00:18:57.800] – Garrath Robinson

Again, so this comes back to modularity. It’s not like, Hey, we come and install this standardized data model in your CRM, and it’s just plug and play. We look at how your team executes. We start on the sales side, getting your sales team to perform at a high level, figuring out what works, and then designing the system to support what’s actually working, versus saying, Oh, your system is broken. We have a better system, and now we’re forcing your employees and your teams to execute against the system that isn’t really designed for them. It’s just designed for masses.

[00:19:31.380] – Joran

You started at sales, and the first step you mentioned is signal collaboration. Know what to act on. The first place where you can identify what really matters. I mean, it’s the sales side, so it’s the first line of revenue you can get in. Maybe some advice here. If people are listening and they want to do things for themselves, what do you look at when you’re going to start at sales?

[00:19:51.760] – Garrath Robinson

I think the big thing is, especially when you’re building on a marketing team, you’re building on a sales team, not looking at marketing as the support function sales, but looking at marketing as an extension of sales to a point where I like to call marketing the recon team. Marketing is out there getting a lay of the land, giving you an idea of what the terrain looks like, identifying the highest value opportunities, the highest value targets, and getting that field-level intel, and then relaying that intel and communicating that with the sales team. Your sales team is your strategic strike force, your strategic task force that goes out and acts on that battle plan. But marketing and sales have to be truly integrated, acting as one team team moving as one team in order for that to work. But what you find is if you look at marketing as a support function, especially as the business goes through its maturity phases, marketing starts to evolve more into that support function. This is why you have so many CEOs and CFOs where when it comes to the budget time and marketing or the CMO is struggling to actually communicate and create a story around marketing’s impact on sales, well, hey, we’re just going to cut budget from marketing because what you’re telling For me, it doesn’t really resonate with how the business is performing.

[00:21:03.360] – Garrath Robinson

A lot of times, marketing is acting on lagging indicators. When you look at a lot of pipelines, you look at a lot of dashboards, it looks like real-time signal, it looks like real-time data. But behind that, below the surface, it’s lagging indicators. When you get stuck in a loop of acting on lagging indicators, when you look at the overall market, you ultimately feel like you’re constantly behind the eightfold.

[00:21:27.000] – Joran

In the end, how would you fix that aligned sales or marketing? Probably have to look at different metrics, not lagging indicators, but look at different things to really be able to figure out what is going on and are we moving the needle?

[00:21:38.520] – Garrath Robinson

I was talking to somebody about this the other day, and this is where marketers really have to step up. Having been in marketing my whole career and going from this lead gen and demand gen mindset to more of a conversion catalyst mindset. How are we helping sales convert deals or opportunities in their revenue? How are we helping customer success, retain, expand, nurture the relationships with our existing clients or customers? And not so much of the… A good example of this is my partner went to an event, a huge event, Money 2020. Thousands of people there. And the first thing he came back to me, he’s like, Hey, I’ve been walking the floor for 2 hours. 90% of the marketers here are literally just sitting in their booths, playing on their phones, waiting for inbound leads to come to them. That’s an example of where, Hey, maybe you have a couple of salespeople with you. It’s not just sales job to walk the floor and have conversations. That’s a very good point where marketing could be out on the floor having those conversations, generating interest, generating that demand per se. And bringing those people back to sales.

[00:22:47.920] – Garrath Robinson

Again, it’s more of that spiritive mentality versus support function mentality. I think the biggest shift in marketing that’s happening right now, and that I don’t see talked about a lot is is while brand is still a very important piece of marketing, too many marketers are still focused on the arts and craft of brand awareness and brand design, building awesome experiences in that life. But what many CEOs need and what many CFOs are looking for now is marketing to act like an operational function. How are you actually helping the business operate at a high level and convert interest, that awareness, and that demand into sustainable revenue? I think that’s the big shift that needs to happen with a lot of marketers in order for the business to properly evolve to the way modern business is done.

[00:23:38.850] – Joran

Because I think that’s step number four of the operating system, impact prioritization. So we’re really focused on what moves the needle. What would you typically then put into that phase? Is it then we need to have SQL? What does it contain?

[00:23:52.940] – Garrath Robinson

That’s a great question because it’s really use case dependent, because every team is different. It’s easy to look at SaaS overall, for instance, and say, and we don’t just work on SaaS, we work across Fintech, we work across GovTech. We serve a lot of different types of businesses. It’s easy to say, Hey, you need to focus on SQLs. You need to focus on demo conversion rates. But a lot of times, the issues that you see in the reports that you see in the dashboards or in the metrics, they’re not operational issues as much as their political social dynamic issues within the organization, where nobody’s taking ownership, there’s There’s a lack of accountability, and again, this lack of command. We’ve all seen this end of quarter where it’s like, screw the ICP, we’re not getting the results we want. We’re just going to fill the funnel with as many MQLs as we can, and we’re going to play the numbers game, and sales is going to convert a bunch of those people. But then 12 months later, we’re going to see a high churn rate start to creep in because of that. That’s a lagging indicator of what the real problem is.

[00:24:54.120] – Garrath Robinson

We have to come in and identify what the real issues are with how the marketing sales and CS teams operating and identify where those break points, where those failure points are in that go-to-market operating doctrine. Then we can provide almost like a doctor. We look at it through the lens of when we come into a company, we’re diagnosing a patient. Our number one goal is to help you develop a health plan to get you to your highest state of health possible. It has to be modular. It has to be unique to each business because there’s some fundamentals that you can go and implement in any business, and it’s help them. But I think the days of these prescriptive frameworks, I think they’re starting to go away because each business is unique. With business being much more reliant on relationships and accelerating those relationships and staying engaged, it’s going to be unique to each market. It’s going to be unique to each customer base and perhaps each ICP as well.

[00:25:53.850] – Joran

Every business is unique, but you probably encountered the same problems. What are some of the most common problems you see, I guess I can maybe some advice here, how our listeners avoid walking into the same problems.

[00:26:09.700] – Garrath Robinson

That’s interesting because we talked about that a little bit beforehand in the sense that people become emotionally attached to what currently works. And this is across all business sizes, all business maturity levels. People become so emotionally attached to, Well, it’s always worked this way. They think that that they’re ready to evolve the business, but they don’t have the patience to evolve the business. They’re thinking, Hey, this is going to be a 90-day transformation. This is why I get upset when other consulting, RevOps consulting groups are going to market Consulting groups talk about these 90-day acceleration plans. It doesn’t work like that. You might see some lift in 90 days, but really, you’re looking at a 6-12 months cycle of truly evolving the business because you’re asking a lot of people to adapt the way they work, communicate the way they collaborate, and ultimately, how they take ownership in their day-to-day role. That’s not a 90-day process. I think we’ve had a full decade where there’s been a lot of promising and a lot of underdeliver when it comes to that. I think what we look for when working with a client is when we’re asking them questions, it’s not just about how we’re going to help you in your business.

[00:27:25.260] – Garrath Robinson

We’re trying to evaluate, can we trust you to evolve and adapt like you to? Or are you going to get impatient at day 90 or at day 120 and say, This isn’t working for us. We’re going to scratch it, and we’re going to go back to what we’re doing? That happens in a lot of cases. I talk to a lot of CROs, CMOs, et cetera, and a lot of Sometimes there’s this theme of, Well, we’ve gone through consulting agency after consulting agency or freelancer after freelancer, and they could just never figure it out. After you talk to hundreds of CROs, you start to realize, Okay, either I believe this, and 99% consultants and agencies are just really bad at what they do, or there’s a misinterpretation, a miscommunication on expectations of what it’s going to take to actually evolve the business. I come to, Hey, I think most people are great at what they do. We all bring a different level of value and experiences to the table. But ultimately, the business and the leadership has to be willing to evolve, and that tends to be the hardest sticking point. I think number two, again, developing a culture of of trust with your employees where you’re giving them that agency where they can make those critical decisions in real-time and know that, Hey, if this doesn’t work out like I believe it to, what we’re really asking Here is people that rely on their gut instincts.

[00:28:47.380] – Garrath Robinson

With AI being adopted in the conversation around AI, we’ve totally forgot about the fact that gut instincts play such a large role in the success of a business because this is where your frontline employees. Here’s a good example. I was working for a data center company, a new market to me, and I did everything to learn about who our end users were, who the buyers were, et cetera. Now, I remember we were coming out with this March Madness campaign, and we had a nice landing page. We had these beautiful emails, the whole nine yards. After I got to know our customers really well, I’m thinking, these guys are software engineers. These guys are tech nerds. They don’t care about all this flashy shit. They just want to know what they’re going to get out of it. I called my marketing director the night before the campaign goes live and said, I want to A/B test this campaign. I don’t want to do subject lines. I actually want to do a plain text email versus this beautiful HTML email that we built. We had a conversation around it. He said, Why? It was basically on my gut instincts.

[00:29:48.400] – Garrath Robinson

He said, Okay, listen, test it to 5,000. Because this was going out to a list of almost 50,000 people. Test it up to 5,000 contacts. We’ll see how it performs. If that email works, then run it. I was given that agency to rely on my gut instincts. Guess what? I came up with a plain text email. The open rate was… The difference between the HTML open rate was like 22, 25%, the plain text email open rate and conversion rate ended up being about 45%, and we converted 15% of those contacts into meetings from the people that opened. This was a campaign that they’d been running for about four or five years, year after year. The previous high on pipeline in revenue was $3 million. This generated $4. 8 million in pipeline and close $2. 7 million in revenue. People are like, Oh, my God, this is amazing. This is the best it’s ever performed. Literally nothing in the CRM would have told me this. This was literally relying on my gut instinct saying, These people just want to know what they’re getting out of it. They don’t need all the bells and whistles. That’s not to tube my own horn.

[00:30:55.280] – Garrath Robinson

If anything, that’s to tube my leadership’s horn at the time of giving me that agency to, Hey, this might not work out like we plan, but if it does, that this is a high leverage play that gets us an outsized impact compared to what we’ve done in the past.

[00:31:13.540] – Joran

I like it. This is an example where you’re changing something in the marketing campaign which has instant impact. You need 6-9 months, maybe even 12 months time to change the business. I see a lot of struggle with companies here, even for myself. If I wanted to set up a new operating system. I don’t know if I have the patience to really go through such a long process to figure out if it’s going to work or not. If I look at my perspective.

[00:31:43.780] – Garrath Robinson

Yeah, especially if you’re a founder or startup stage A, C, A, B, C company, it’s a lot harder because that net revenue generation has an outsize impact on the business. If you’re a late stage company, you’re an enterprise company, you have the revenue to backfill and wait for that transformation to really stick and take place. I think you have to figure out a way with each client we work with. It’s a very unique process. This is why we don’t do out-of-the-box installs. We do very much bespoke solution design because of that very reason of everybody has a different to implement. Sometimes you need proof of concept with a founder. Let’s do 25% of this. Develop that proof of concept and that trust together. Once we have that established, now you have trust with us that we’re leading you in the right direction. We can go full transformation mode at that point. Again, it’s all about understanding. Again, this is not necessarily about the technicals. Strike is very little about the technicals. It’s much more about the behaviorals. It’s much more about changing the perception around how we think about executing go-to-market, how we think about enforcing some operating doctrine within the organization and having clear standards for how that doctrine is enforced.

[00:32:58.920] – Joran

Nice. When we’re going to talk about go-to-market strategy or a company who implemented a strike, how would a good go-to-market motion look like? Could you give a best practice example where we could learn from how should we be doing it the right way?

[00:33:16.800] – Garrath Robinson

Yeah. Getting out of the tools in tech and having a keen understanding of your people, their capabilities, what they actually enjoy doing, and having a sense of awareness of The fundamentals in business are not sexy. They’re just not. There’s nothing sexy about them. But also understanding that, Okay, we have these fundamentals within the business. I know what I’m doing on Monday. Going back to the example I used at one of my past companies, I know what I’m doing Monday, I know what I’m doing Tuesday. That can become a little boring and monotonous, but that makes up… That level of monotony makes up the 80% where the Pareto principle really applies. It’s like 80% of that work is going to be boring, but it’s be the 20% highest leverage operations that drive the business. From a foundational perspective, we have to identify how are we going to execute as a company. Now, if you’re an early-stage founder, you’re an early-stage company, This can quickly turn into, Well, hey, you wear 12 hats. As the business matures, if I’m wearing 12 hats, what do I actually own? What am I actually accountable for? This is where we see startups really start to slow down and really start to reverse, hit reverse on their growth trajectory is because those questions never get identified.

[00:34:36.320] – Garrath Robinson

The strategy probably works. The strategy is probably perfectly fine. It’s rarely that. It’s really changing the perception of how the business is going to grow through these different maturity levels. That always happens at the people there. You have great people. As the business evolves, we need to give them the tools, resources, and agency to start making critical to business decisions and start owning 2-3 outcomes versus trying to own 10 or 12.

[00:35:01.620] – Joran

If I would ask you to summarize your best advice on go-to-market motion strategy in one sentence, what should that be?

[00:35:12.660] – Garrath Robinson

Discipline will outperform dollars. What I mean by that is your go-to-market strategy, at the core of your go-to-market strategy, is your promise to your customer of how you’re going to execute value, how you’re going to deliver, how you’re going to support, and how you’re going to sustain that relationship. That requires focus and discipline. Without that, you don’t have any focus and discipline in the company or in the organization around that mission, around that vision. What starts to happen? Things fall apart. You lose focus on the customer side and to make up for a high churn rate or low adoption rate. We start to make up for that by sales volume. We lose a total grasp on what drives the business. I think in today’s environment where everybody wants to get to a million, everybody wants to get to 10 million, et cetera, a lot of times you see that erosion of that focus on the customer and more so about the metrics, the vanity metrics, as we call them, of how much revenue are we doing? Or, Hey, if I have a board of investors, the focus becomes on impressing them and skewing the numbers in a way that shows we’re doing really well went below the surface.

[00:36:27.960] – Garrath Robinson

You’re not. Discipline over dollars.

[00:36:30.000] – Joran

Nice. Love it. If we’re going to look at the future, you mentioned AI a little bit. Not sure if that’s going to be your answer, but what should founders should prepare for the next, let’s say, 2-3 years?

[00:36:41.910] – Garrath Robinson

Fundamentals. They’re not sexy, but even in the era of AI, they’re going to matter more than ever. Your ability to get in front of your customers and really develop a relationship there is going to matter more than ever. I can’t tell you how many CROs, CMO executives I talk to where we’re having a coffee chat, and it’s just like, I will literally not answer a cold email. I will literally not answer one of these generic, templated cold DMs. Everybody sees it. Everybody does. That’s not what people want. What they really want is somebody who shows that they actually give a shit about helping them solve their problems. A lot of times, that’s not done through an ebook, that’s not done through a PDF, that’s not done through a webinar. It’s doing the nitty-gritty, dirty work of enabling your sales team to actually develop those relationships in a real way, not necessarily through automated emails like, Hey, John, just check. We all see through that. We’re getting back to the era where it’s like, Hey, go meet with your client face-to-face. Go meet with your prospect face-to-face. Ask them how they’re doing, even in their personal life.

[00:37:52.280] – Garrath Robinson

Show them that you understand that there’s nuances to their role outside of work that could be impacting their work. How can I help you solve all that? How would this tool or this service or this solution actually help alleviate some of that pain to where you can better focus on performing at work? We’ve lost so much sight of that because, and I look back at my career, starting off in marketing automation, going to marketing operations, et cetera, you’ve seen this proliferation of the relationship. Everybody talks about sales as relationships, but now those relationships are a bunch of clay tables with automated emails that everybody gets. And while those are great, clay is a great tool, we have to get away from that mindset. We have to get back to… Especially in a large work, you can’t necessarily develop all these one-to-one relationships, but we have to actually show people we care, and we’re not just running templated playbooks. As a founder, this is the nitty-gritty work of getting everything off the ground and developing those one-to-one relationships because those will scale. Regardless of what you see on LinkedIn with instantly and smart lead and outbound campaigns, those one-to-one relationships will eventually scale.

[00:39:04.440] – Garrath Robinson

For founders, it’s no longer about how quickly you can get to a million ARR. It’s about the social capital you’ve built in your market.

[00:39:12.530] – Joran

Nice. We are going to talk We’re going to talk about the revenue stages, though. It is going to be about social capital, but I’m going to ask you super specific questions on how to get to a certain revenue stage. Talking about the nitty-gritty, going from 0 to 10K monthly recurring value. What What advice would you give a SaaS founder here?

[00:39:33.160] – Garrath Robinson

Talk to your market. Talk to your buyers, not just the people using your product. Figure out what’s happening in real-time. Figure out what perceptions are changing in real-time. Don’t just get into It is, again, don’t just get into this place where you’re seeing signals in Apollo or you’re seeing signals in clay, and you’re trying to automate those relationships. You’re trying to automate that. Really, what you’re doing there is you’re running your gut instincts. I think the focus needs to be on how do we develop one-to-one relationships and understanding that after 12 or 18 months, those one-to-one relationships will really scale your business, and focusing on getting one motion to work really well versus trying to have outbound, inbound PLG, all these different tactics and all these different motions that eventually just bog down your time, your energy, and your resources. Focus on nailing the one thing that’s going to work for your business. Get to a good a lot for you and then build out from there.

[00:40:31.790] – Joran

Nice. Let’s assume we passed 10K MRR, and I know we’re going to make a huge jump. We’re going to grow towards 10 million ARR. What advice would you give SaaS founders here?

[00:40:42.340] – Garrath Robinson

The biggest piece of advice, especially as you scale past one million, you start to get that 5 to 10 million range. This is where founders have ultimately become the roadblock in the business. Your job is no longer just about sales and relationships. It It really comes down to creating the systems, enforcing a rhythm, and really having command of the business, and at the same time, delegating that execution and getting out of the way and letting your people do what they do best. I think when you look at it that way, it’s not about just owning the vision of the business at that point. It’s about owning the tempo of the business and putting the right things in place to where you’re developing a leadership culture that starts at the middle out and not the top down, where everything relies on you. Nice.

[00:41:32.540] – Joran

Let me try to summarize. If we take it all the way to the beginning, a go-to-market motion is basically translating the potential of product into revenue. It is going to matter how you execute, have a differentiated way to be in front of your customers. You can have different motions at the same time. When we talk about a failing go-to-market motion, don’t become punch drunk as you mentioned it, getting too comfortable, not having an operational command. Which signals do you need to act on? Lacking a tempo, not having a lot of collaboration, no trust in the organization. If you are going to make changes, you need to take the time to evolve, to actually change the business. If you’re thinking about Strike, it’s a modular operating system. It’s good for companies who face the shit phase, as you call it. It’s going to help you operate as a company and get everybody on the same boat. No excuses, no finger-pointing. When we talk about the steps, step one, signal collaboration, know what to act on, what really matters. Step two, tempo establishment, create a sustainable, fast, repeatable, go-to-market rhythm. Then you have step three, rhythm engineering, align the organization’s timing and priorities.

[00:42:43.420] – Joran

Step four, impact prioritization, ruthless focus on what moves the needle. Five, kill switch. Discipline, know when to stop, pivot or shut down. To go to market experiment completely. Step six, execute and relentedly, drive the plan forward every day across all teams. If you are in marketing, make sure you always keep reminding yourself, how are we helping sales to close deals? How are we helping CES to retain and expand? Don’t always look at the data. Keep trusting your gut instinct and act on that and have full understanding of your people as well. Know their capabilities. Your quote, discipline will outperform dollar. Keep focusing on the fundamentals and your customers and not always on the data as you mentioned. When we look about 10K MR, talk to your market and buyers. Don’t automate relationships. Focus on one motion. Ideally, 10 million ARR. Don’t be the roadblock as a founder after 5 million. Delegate and get out of the way.

[00:43:43.750] – Garrath Robinson

Yeah, I I said it better myself, man.

[00:43:47.020] – Joran

I mean, these are all your words. So full credit goes to you, Gareth. If people want to get in contact with you, what would be the best way? Or if they want to learn more about Strike, how can they do so?

[00:43:58.070] – Garrath Robinson

Yeah. First, you can find me at link LinkedIn, Gareth Robinson, G-A-R-R-A-T-H. I know that’s a little different than the Welsh spelling. So Gareth Robinson on LinkedIn. And then you can find us at durendal. Com, D-U-R-I-N-D-A-L.

[00:44:15.440] – Joran

Com. Cool. We’re going to add links to both of them in the show notes so people can just click on it and not make the spelling mistake. Cool. Well, for people listening on Spotify, make sure to leave us a review. It’s just going to help us to boost the algorithms. We’re going to also add a poll to this podcast. So let me know what you thought of this episode. And again, we’re going to add the link to the LinkedIn profile of Garret and durindol. Com to the show notes so you can find out more. Thanks again for coming on, Garret.

[00:44:43.820] – Garrath Robinson

Hey, thank you for having me on. This was a great conversation. I truly enjoyed it.

[00:44:47.470] – Joran

Nice. Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you liked this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.