← Home

Go-to-Market for Technical Founders

businessreview

This post was adapted from an internal doc I wrote at TwentyTwo.

As someone with a technical background, I was always confused about the distinction between marketing, sales, and go-to-market (GTM). This is how I'd explain the basics to someone thinking about founding a startup, or already in the early stages (pre-seed/seed).

I start with GTM fundamentals and key definitions, then how to frame your product for customers. After that, I get into enterprise sales1 and the methodologies that come with it. I close with how to think about early-stage selling.

Go-to-market (GTM) = Sales + Marketing

Go-to-market (GTM) refers to how you get your product in front of buyers and convince them to pay for it. It encompasses everything from identifying who to sell to, to how to talk about your product, and how you close deals.

Marketing and sales fall within GTM, and form a tight loop with product.

The job of marketing is to attract potential buyers and qualify them (make sure they’re the right customer for your product, with the right pain point), forwarding only the most promising leads (potential customers who’ve shown interest in your product) to the next stage. Marketing creates awareness and generates demand for your product through ads, email campaigns, content, and outreach targeted to your specific audiences.

Sales converts demand into revenue: whether that demand comes from marketing (inbound) or from direct outreach to companies (outbound). Think of it as a funnel: you start with a broad set of potential accounts, and through progressively focused effort, you narrow down to the people who will actually buy.

Sales and marketing feedback informs product updates, which in turn shape your next sales and marketing efforts, creating a continuous improvement cycle.

To figure out who to sell to, people come up with an ideal customer profile (ICP). An ICP is a specific segment defined by company type, size, problem and even geography. Your goal is to figure out who has the pain, budget, and who can make a decision to buy your product. This is often what you may look for when doing your qualifying in marketing. To find these people, you often use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Apollo.

How to Frame Your Product for Customers

Once you’ve identified your ICP, you’ll want to understand the framing that appeals to them, and what would drive them to buy your product.

Positioning is the strategic foundation of how you compete. April Dunford defines positioning as the act of deliberately defining how you are the best in the world at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers care a lot about. Your core positioning stays consistent, but how you frame and communicate it adapts per audience: different ICPs care about different aspects of your value.

Differentiated value is the engine of good positioning. Once you nail your positioning, it translates directly into your sales narrative, your marketing materials, and how you pitch.

During your sales pitch, you often tell the prospect a cohesive story, also known as a sales narrative. It follows a structure: here is the world as it is, here is the pain that creates, here is what the world could look like, and here is how we get you there. A strong narrative makes your product feel inevitable rather than optional.

To help inform your sales narrative, you may often look at the sales funnel from the prospect’s perspective, also known as the buyer’s journey. Buyers move through stages: unaware of the problem, aware of the problem, exploring solutions, evaluating specific options, and making a decision. Your job is to figure out where they are and meet them there during your calls.

Zooming in on Enterprise Sales

Sales best practices are commonly divided into those for small & medium business (SMB), and enterprise (there is no common definition, just think a large business) as the skills required for selling to both are quite different.

One of the biggest differences between SMB and enterprise is stakeholder complexity: you usually sell to one person in SMB, whereas in enterprise you must build consensus among multiple people. In enterprise sales, there are often two critical roles: the champion (your internal advocate) and the key decision maker (KDM: the person who approves or rejects your offer).

Keeping this in mind, we can now look at the enterprise sales funnel2, where each of these steps can potentially be multiple calls:

  1. Discovery
    • 15-20 min
    • Often with Champion and not KDM
    • "Qualifying questions"
    • Take lots of notes, especially terminology/phrases (bring during presentation and demo stage)
    • Schedule the next call during the discovery if possible
  2. Presentation (& Demo)
    • 30-60 minutes
    • Sometimes combined with Discovery call
    • Ideally you want KDM on the call
    • 75% demo/25% slides
    • Q&A throughout is better than at the end
    • Use phrases & verbiage from discovery
  3. Pricing
    • Give a broad answer before this (can be as low as 50k, as high as 1m)
    • This can be a phone call or an email
    • Don't lead with discounts, try to even lead with multi-year contracts if you can
  4. Negotiation (this takes about 1 month)
    • Procurement/legal is usually slow and longest stage of entire sales process
    • Need a lawyer on call
  5. Procurement & security review
    • May need SOC2 audit
  6. Done
    • Hand off to CEO for customer success

When selling to enterprises, you want to sell the vision/opportunity and not the problem. Help them see where they are today and where you can take them. This also helps prevent clients from comparing you to other solutions as these solutions cannot sell vision, only a company can do that.

It’s also important to emphasize why the customer should buy now as enterprise buyers usually default to inaction. Your job is to articulate why waiting is costly: through regulatory pressure, scaling pain, competitive risk, or liability exposure.

When a prospect pushes back (on price, integration effort, startup risk, timing), that's usually a sign of interest. If they weren't interested, they'd go silent. So make sure to prepare for the most common objections before a call, and have clear, honest responses.

Sales Methodologies (And Why To Keep It Simple)

Every sales conversation can be thought of as two parts: discovery and pitching.

Discovery is where you learn about the customer. During discovery, you rarely talk: ask structured questions, listen, and let them describe their pain. The goal is to get them to articulate what's broken with their current approach and what a good solution would look like. Early calls should be heavily weighted toward discovery.

Pitching is where you show your product and map it to the problems they just told you about. This typically looks like some sales slides3 followed by a demo.

At an early stage, you should focus on good discovery questions, curiosity, and structured follow-up rather than formal sales methodologies. While various methodologies exist with official names (Challenger, SPIN, MEDDIC, Sandler), these are more suitable for scaled-up sales orgs. What you're doing is "founder-led sales" (search for that term if you want to read more). That said, if you were to study one methodology, I've heard the Challenger recommended several times (The Challenger Sale).

Formal methodologies also exist for qualifying leads: the process of determining whether a prospect is worth pursuing. Common frameworks include BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) and CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization). However, these frameworks may also be less relevant if you don't have enough potential customers to warrant structured lead qualification processes.

How to Think About Early-Stage Selling

At an early stage, every conversation with a potential customer is a chance to both learn and sell. Research the company before every call, tailor your language to their specific pain, and follow up promptly with something useful.

The best sales calls are ones where it doesn't feel like you're selling.4 As long as you're asking genuine questions and actually care about the problem, your passion will shine through.

And what you're selling is more than the technology. Your product is also the pricing, the opportunity you're providing, and the framing of the solution. Crafted well, it leaves clients with nothing to compare you to.

This is where founder-led sales pays off: the people on the call are the same people building the product. What you hear from prospects should directly inform what you build. That said, customer feedback is an input, not direct advice: it's still your job to hold the product vision and decide what to act on.

Closing a deal is just the beginning of the relationship. Onboarding should be seamless from day one, because how a customer experiences their first weeks determines whether they renew, expand, or refer others. At this stage, every customer is a reference customer, so the post-sale experience matters as much as the sale itself.

Footnotes

  1. I mainly focus on enterprise customers as that's where I have the most experience. ↩

  2. Adapted from Liz Wessel's internal YC content. ↩

  3. I don't know if this surprised you, but this definitely surprised me. ↩

  4. Remember that sales is also a numbers game: a certain number of outreach attempts produce a certain number of meetings, which produce a certain number of demos, which produce a certain number of closed deals. Understanding these conversion rates, even roughly, lets you diagnose what's working. ↩