Jay Jamison

Growth Strategy Advisors is a boutique consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Our mission is to empower startup founders and early-stage companies as they navigate the complex landscape of Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies and sales acceleration. Here’s how we do it: Founder-Led Sales: We recognize that founders often play a pivotal role in the initial sales process. However, as companies scale and GTM motions become more intricate, a strategic shift is necessary. Our team steps in to guide founders through this transition, ensuring seamless growth without the typical pains associated with siloed teams and fragmented data1. GTM Strategy Definition: We work closely with founders to define their GTM strategy. This involves identifying target markets, customer segments, pricing models, and distribution channels. By aligning these elements, we create a cohesive plan that maximizes revenue potential. Sales Enablement: Our experts equip founders with the tools, training, and processes needed to build a high-performing sales engine. From lead generation to closing deals, we optimize every step of the sales cycle. Performance Tracking: Metrics matter! We help founders establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and track progress against them. Whether it’s pipeline growth, conversion rates, or customer lifetime value, we ensure data-driven decision-making. Cross-Functional Alignment: Effective GTM requires collaboration across departments. We bridge the gap between marketing, sales, finance, and legal teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page and working toward shared revenue goals.

8

from a CPO chat today, we were strategizing ways to explain to CFOs/finance folks why investors value real subscription revenue 10x higher than implementation and professional services revenue... https://lnkd.in/gxZs5CyE Of note, they tend to be less interested in the HOW: agile, backlogs, WIP, interrupts, SW architecture, bugs vs features... #leadership #executives #money #WhenDoWeIPO

73

10 Comments

AI-native companies need to embrace new pricing paradigms (price based on work done, on outcome vs hours, etc). Inevitably, new pricing models are accompanied by new workflows, new ways of invoicing, and new challenges around billing. This makes Sequence's modern billing platform particularly relevant: Sequence helps finance and commercial teams automate manual billing and stop revenue leakage. Sequence has just launched their CPQ Product for B2B software businesses with hybrid pricing, designed specifically for AI, B2B SaaS and Fintech startups. This release empowers B2B teams to create flexible pricing proposals or contracts, including teams selling custom deals with usage tiers, minimum commitments, or ramped pricing, Sequence CPQ works for any pricing model or deal term. As a customer says: "Sequence is like a notion page supercharged with pricing tools." Excited for Sequence to build the critical infrastructure needed to enable new, flexible paradigms that are critical for the AI revolution.

61

2 Comments

"One of the hardest things for growth-minded leaders is to acknowledge and accept that they cannot be everything to everyone," says our CEO David Keil in his latest Fast Company article. What does this mean in today's AI world? See for yourself in this compelling article.

1

Are you a SaaS leader looking for some valuable insights on how to help navigate the evolving landscape of B2B technology? I've found the article (& podcast) for you! Zapier CEO Wade Foster and SaaStr CEO Jason M. Lemkin discuss the future of B2B sales, emerging trends like the rise of AI, increased focus on customer success, and the importance of remote work. This article offers great perspectives on what lies ahead for SaaS in 2024 and beyond. #saas #b2b #ai #b2bsales #saasleadership

7

Jay Nathan and I's first podcast interview! I'll share clips and more details tomorrow. Check it out on your favorite podcast player 👇 #saas #enterprenuership #podcast

9

Very impressed with the Wevo Energy story and I share those feelings. It is never easy facing all challenges and complexities. #Podcast #StartupJourney #SolarEnergy #Entrepreneurship #WEVO #SolarEdge #Acquisition

7

In honor of Crossbeam's ELG conference this week, here’s a quick thought about territories and partners. Partners tend to cut across territory designs in complex ways—whether you have dedicated partner reps or not. They also represent long-term relationships, so ideally you keep the reps that are focused on a partner pretty stable to foster those. If you’re using a static territory model (geo, verticals, named accounts), you’ll usually have to accommodate for partners at carving or mid-year refresh time. This might mean: 1. A cascade of exceptions (e.g. if type = partner, then assign to this partner rep overlay) 2. Complex balancing logic that combines partner potential with standard account potential 3. If you have dedicated ecosystem reps, Integrating a whole secondary territory model for them This gets really tricky if you have a ton of ecosystem partners and if their growth is unpredictable. You can suddenly find yourself mid-year with a rep who’s spending 100% of their time with one partner, ignoring the rest of their territory—while other reps are starving. Dynamic books as a replacement for static territory makes this easier and less risky. Partner-specific logic can get factored into target book segments with specific capacities to ensure reps don’t get overloaded (or under-loaded). Plus, you don’t need a whole separate secondary model for dedicated ecosystem reps, you can just have a partner target book. Then, of course, if things change drastically throughout the year, you can load balance across your quota capacity without having to “recarve” the world. That’s the beauty of not locking yourself into a static model. Change isn’t disruptive—it’s assumed! Anyway, you can do all of the above without Gradient Works of course, but we don’t recommend it 😬 That said, there’s one challenge that comes up a lot for our customers. Partner relationships are crucial so there are some partner accounts you just never want to reassign. Even though you're not locked into static territories, some accounts may need to stay, well, locked up. In a dynamic model, it’s possible you might slip up and move something you didn’t mean to. That’s one of the many reasons we just added Locked Segments to Bookbuilder. Now when you’re designing a target book, you can make most of it dynamic but have a set of accounts that never move. It’s a great way to ensure partner accounts stick with the partner rep so they can build those relationships. (It’s also great for named accounts and customers for full-cycle reps, but that’s another post). I love this stuff, so if you’re interested in talking territory + ecosystem, ping me either at ELG or drop a comment. Happy 🔒ing!

20

1 Comment

If you’re an early-stage founder, finding out what your customers *really* want so you can build the right product is critical. I’m excited to share some of First Round Capital's PMF Method program with Gagan Biyani on Friday! Gagan has founded 3 companies including Udemy, Sprig, and Maven. We’re hosting this live conversation for product leaders & founders on how to reach PMF. You’ll learn: - How to identify your customers' real problems - How to test demand by selling before building - When to write code vs. build a no-code MVP RSVP to join on June 14th (it’s free): https://bit.ly/3VBAK69

43

3 Comments

Seismic leads the way in G2's Spring 2024 Grid® Report for Sales Enablement for Enterprise Businesses — for the ninth year in a row! 🏆 The best part? Rankings are based solely on real reviews from real customers. If you're curious about how we stack up against the competition, check out the G2 Enterprise Spring 2024 Grid® Report at the link below.

1

As part of a recent #SaaSTalks session, I had the pleasure of speaking to two seasoned #GTM experts, Girish and Charanyan, and we had a very engaging discussion on GTM for SaaS firms focused on SMBs. Our discussion inspired me to put down a few thoughts of my own to guide startup founders venturing into the SMB space. If you’re a SaaS founder looking to get started on GTM, here are some suggestions! Arpit Maheshwari Sayantan Sarkar Naman Jain

37

1 Comment

Great RevOps Council meeting at the Scale Venture Partners Summit last week led by the talented Ben L. with great contributions from several RevOps champions including 💌Andy Mowat, Somrat Niyogi, Michael Hargis and David Brock. We discussed today’s #RevOps mission, team functions, the attributes of a modern RevOps leader and the future of RevOps, workshopping a framework for the ‘RevOps Hierarchy of Needs’. Great RevOps teams: - Represent more than just a glorified rebranding of Sales Ops or a consolidation of Ops functions - Support the customer journey and customer outcomes vs. myopic focus on supporting teams and individuals - Understand what the numbers mean rather than just managing to the number

30

5 Comments

“The deal team tends to forget about the ambers and greens, even though they often outweigh the reds”🚦 That was the feedback shared with me by a seasoned CEO who is now running his third PE-backed company. He was making the point that traffic light (or “RAG”) ratings for diligence findings are usually effective for helping to focus the mind of the deal team on the single-most impactful diligence findings (usually those flagged as red risks). And this is often what is required to get deals across the line⏩ ⚡However, when it comes to operating / integrating the newly acquired asset post-closing, in the aggregate, it is often the lower-order issues identified in due diligence that require the most attention and are those that are most neglected by the deal teams. 🔰 With a degree of compassion, he acknowledged that “you can’t really blame the deal teams. Investment committees and boards rarely have any interest in discussing ambers and greens”. 📄 It is for this reason that some of the more sophisticated corporates and financial sponsors are now broadening their internal reporting and dashboards. 🖼 The goal being to expand the viewing pane through which diligence issues are considered holistically and integrating feedback from the management teams / PMI advisors earlier in the diligence process. One Head of Corporate Development told me that “we used to include a list of the top ten (or so) risks and their mitigants in our board submissions. Now we share a dashboard of all of the findings and we make sure we take into account the feedback of our ops team before we do so”. No doubt to the relief of management teams and PMI advisors, this approach seems to be increasingly common. Although, by way of contrast / light relief, I was also recently talking to the Global Head of Corporate of a large advisory firm about their innovations in the space of diligence. One example he gave – with surprising enthusiasm - was the recent introduction of a traffic light system into their DD reports… Fortunately for them (and their clients) this was not the only (so-called) innovation… #manda #dd #duediligence #pmi #ragreports #dontforgettheambersandgreens

62

1 Comment

Our revamped newsletter, The Angle by Angular Ventures, officially launched today! We hope this new format will make it easier to read, share, and subscribe. Back to it, in this week's column, Gil Dibner covered the spirit of risk-taking that inspired Angular to venture into unusual spaces. While, of course, we invest in AI and SaaS, as of late, we have been investing in more and more contrarian spaces - from quantum, to spacetech, to energy, etc. in search of the supposedly impossible - the truly contrarian. Read the full column via the link.

17

Love this point from Chris Walker on how SaaS companies will increasingly need to build and offer professional services (and price accordingly) to recognize customer patterns and ensure customer success. This was the model we had at Pivotal with Pivotal Labs and it drove tremendous depth of insight into what worked (and didn't work) for customers. This didn't mean an ecosystem of systems integrators weren't essential. They were, particularly as customers were ready to scale. But owning the day 1 experience is critical. This doesn't mean PLG doesn't have a place. But as SaaS companies increasingly focus on enterprise buyers, they quickly find the edges of what PLG can solve for. Thanks to Bryon Kroger for pointing me in the direction of the Refine Labs podcast! https://lnkd.in/gg7SN9QE

40

4 Comments

What I appreciate most about how we designed the SMArtX Advisory Solutions platform is that we provide software to Turnkey Asset Management Programs as a FinTech, but we prove out every piece of our technology platform by using it to run a TAMP and servicing advisors ourselves. In tech this is called "Eating your own dogfood" or simply "dogfooding". Wikipedia says: "Eating your own dog food or "dogfooding" is the practice of using one's own products or services. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers' confidence in their own products." No matter how you cut it, whether we are servicing them directly or through our enterprise clients; the end consumer is the advisor. And servicing them through an "out-of-the-box" TAMP gives us the unique opportunity to hear the clients needs directly and hone our product and make it a better experience for everyone using it. So let's be both a TAMP and a FinTech while we sing along with Dierks Bentley and agree that SMArtX is "little bit of holy water, but still a little bit burning man"

11