It’s no secret that this has been a tough year in the software and technology industry.
However, there are companies excelling despite the challenging macro environment.
How are they doing it?
Is it their vertical? Are they simply ‘the lucky ones’?
Most often, it comes down to go-to-market (GTM) execution.
Take a peek behind the curtain with me on certain areas of insight into two companies that are excelling – let’s get into it.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Flex.
Behind the Curtains of 2 Companies Killing It
Take a peek behind the curtains at some of the go-to-market strategies and tactics behind these two companies excelling despite challenging times👇
Owner: Behind the curtains 👀
Year-to-date in 2023 (11 months) Owner has grown 2.6X with great economics.
Owner has created the ultimate recipe for growth:
Acquisition x Churn x Deal Size = 💥
- Increasing Acquisition Rate
- Decreasing Churn
- Growing Deal Size
Driving a super efficient BDR motion powered by great data.
Efficiency and data go hand-in-hand 🤝
The data enables direction for iterative improvements to efficiency.
Kyle Norton (VP Revenue at Owner) has been a force at the helm of the sales team, from layering in data through stages of iteration.
Leveraging data was a contributing factor in win rates improving by 20%. Leveraging Replayz played a pivotal role in this, analyzing sales calls on mass to inform where the biggest areas of opportunity were.
Funnel data also enabled the team to go from a tight ICP to a super tight ICP. They chose to hone in on their highest-likelihood customer with the biggest potential payoff.
In a world where efficiency is being prioritized, sacrificing some inbound is often required. Owner removed 40% of inbound volume, declining these customers to allow Account Executives to spend more time with higher-value customers. This has contributed to deal sizes increasing by over 30%.
Execution discipline.
If you want to drive an exciting result where the market isn’t going to freely give it to you, a lot of it comes down to execution discipline.
The discipline to do the little things that are not super exciting.
Now, ‘discipline’ isn’t novel. It’s something that’s easy to say, but far more difficult to execute. Particularly, to do so consistently.
A focus on disciplined execution permeates the company, from Adam Guild (Co-Founder and CEO) through to every team member. It’s in Owner’s DNA.
UserGems: Behind the curtains 👀
UserGems just had their best quarter in company history across GTM metrics – all revenue, logos, and brand metrics (organic growth, category creation, etc.).
Talk about something to warrant a big end-of-quarter fiesta.
Not to mention, many other highlights. For example, winning the Category Creator award from Pavilion and G2, and being in the list of Vendr Top Q3 Net New Purchases.
UserGems drinks their own champagne: they track their champions’ job changes.
Tracking and reaching out to previous customers, users and prospects when they start a new job at an ICP account is a driving force behind their success.
They automate the program from beginning to end: create the new contact in CRM, alert the SDR/AE/CSM, and add the contact to the right sequence/ playbook.
It’s always on for both marketing and Sales Development Representatives, which is helpful for lean efficient teams.
The result: This program contributes 12-16% of UserGems’ quarterly sales accepted pipeline and has contributed 22% of closed won revenue this year.
A focus on brand and putting out edu-tainment content across all formats.
As part of that content, UserGems leans into customer advocacy. The tales of customer successes inevitably become social proof, evoking feelings of trust in audiences.
The result: Prospects quote that they “see UserGems everywhere” and accordingly prefer to partner with them. In order to create even greater alignment with this objective, it has become a company OKR.
Efficiency around advertising audiences to optimize spend
Target prospects are all in the CRM. In order to drive efficiency, UserGems is maniacal about pruning audiences. Only after this is done are ad audiences created, so there is awareness of specifically who ad dollars are spent on. Those that qualify for ad spend are the same people that the sales team reaches out to.
The result: marketing efficiency has been between 11x-15x.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
Forbes announced their 30 Under 30 North America list. A huge congratulations to all recipients and a special shoutout to GTMfund’s portfolio company founders on the list:
- Quinn Favret & Hassaan Raza of Tavus.
- Alexander Whatley & Daniel Whatley of Vividly.
- Alexandra Griffon of Blue Cargo.
👂 More for your eardrums:
Ang McManamon is a tenured sales leader who puts culture first, helps build high-performing SaaS teams, and executes with urgency across all areas of an organization. She is currently the VP of Sales at Crunchbase, where she leads a high-growth team out of New York City. She previously served as a sales leader for Amazon, Knotel, and Stack Overflow.
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
Document Crunch released its latest product along with an exciting integration announcement: Document Crunch for Word. This new integration with Microsoft Word allows contract review professionals to streamline contract analysis, right in the environment where most redlining is done.
🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week:
- Founding Account Executive at Magical (Remote)
- Scale Customer Success Manager at Writer (San Francisco or Remote)
- Business Development Representative at Mutiny (Remote – US)
- Revenue Operations Manager at Vividly (Remote – US)
- Product Marketing Manager, Partnerships at Crossbeam (Remote – US)
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
I always love hearing what companies that are standing out in the sea are doing.
Sometimes it’s when others zig, they zag.
Sometimes it’s about doing the same things but better.
With it being December 1st, there’s officially one month of the year left – one month of the gong being rung.
Rooting for you all, always!
Barker ✌️
