Choose your GTM motion
What you’ll learn
The main go-to-market (GTM) motions and how to select the right one for your startup.
Why it’s important
Your choice of GTM motion will dictate what resources you need and the people you need to hire to sell your product.
Keep reading if...
- You’re still unclear how you will reach new customers.
- You don’t know how your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) actually buys products.
- You’re not sure if you need to have a product-led or sales-led GTM motion.
Don’t ship before you’ve engaged with your target buyer. Instead, find your community, figure out who in that community will buy your software, and then design a motion that will allow you to reach those buyers. That “motion” repeating itself and improving over time is your GTM motion—and nailing it is hard.
Pick a GTM motion to start with, but pivot to something else if you struggle to find product-market fit (PMF). As revenue grows and you figure out early PMF, you can start to layer on new GTM motions when you need to grow your audience or expand product lines.
To deep dive into this, we recommend Winning By Design.
When we started with B2C, there were a number of people who had been founders and entrepreneurs before, including VCs who recommended that we start with B2B enterprise selling. And we were like, ‘Doesn't sound that fun.’
Esha Joshi
Co-founder, Yoodli
Common GTM motions
Marketing-led growth
You design a comprehensive customer journey across channels and put significant resources into ensuring the product is aligned with market needs. Marketing has full-funnel responsibility—not just for generating leads. This approach works well for complex products or new categories where education and trust need to be built before the sale, e.g. HubSpot created educational and helpful content that drew readers in, essentially creating the concept of inbound marketing.
Community-led growth
You create an engaged community around your product with tactics like peer support, direct feedback, and shared learning. Notion and Figma are examples of startups that fostered their grassroots communities, helping to turn those users into advocates.
Product-led growth
The product itself drives acquisition and expansion through self-serve signups, freemium models, or free trials—without talking to sales. Slack and Dropbox grew rapidly as users invited teammates to collaborate, creating viral adoption.
Why would you hire more sales? You're losing money there. Well, truth is like most of the disciplines already lose money in a startup.
Enzo Avigo
Co-founder, June
Sales-led growth
Revenue comes through a direct sales team driving customer acquisition, typically for higher-value deals or complex products requiring customization. Salesforce pioneered this approach in SaaS, building a sales-driven GTM that became the blueprint for enterprise software.
Hybrid
Combines product-led and sales-led motions to serve different customer segments. Smaller customers self-serve while larger enterprise deals get sales support. Atlassian started pure product-led but added enterprise sales to capture bigger accounts, while Zoom offered free individual access alongside enterprise sales for company-wide deployments.
The most common motions in the software world today are sales-led growth (SLG), product-led growth (PLG), or a hybrid of the two. Let’s dive deeper into them with help from venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz:
For founders coming from an engineering and product development background, building feedback loops and upgrade paths in a product is going to seem much safer ground than jumping on to hundreds of calls with customers.
“I started PLG… but what we learned, after maybe three years, was that having some friction upfront and requiring people to talk with us was actually a better way to activate the best companies and then convert them,” says Enzo Avigo, co-founder of June.
PLG vs SLG isn’t a straight either/or choice, and often the best approach is a hybrid of the two. Just look at two of the companies most associated with PLG: Atlassian and Slack. Atlassian started out as a PLG company, based on its pricing and distribution models, but now has thousands of people reporting to its CRO and is effectively an enterprise sales organization. Similarly, Slack now has dedicated account teams and enterprise reps, and it is cross-sold within Salesforce's massive sales organization.
Clarify is a PLG company, but we still have salespeople to help customers with more complex use cases. We also want to be able to talk to customers, so we have that direct feedback loop.
Reflect
Have you ever worked on a PLG or sales-led product? Your past will affect the way you approach your own company.
If you're leaning toward PLG: Is it because your product genuinely lends itself to self-serve adoption? Or is it because you'd rather avoid picking up the phone?
If you have companies and entrepreneurs you admire, look up what their GTM motion actually was in year one (not year five). The origin story is almost always messier and more sales-heavy than the legend suggests.