At the early stage, you need to iterate on your go-to-market (GTM) as fast, if not faster, than you’re iterating on your product. Here’s why: before investing a ton of engineering resources into building a product, it’s critical that you validate there’s a market for what you’re building. Customer feedback is crucial.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with over 100 portfolio companies in my time as an Operating Partner at Gradient and I’ve seen many early-stage, technical founders struggle with how to approach prospective customers and land design partners. Some common mistakes include building the product before getting sufficient feedback from prospective customers, conducting outreach that’s not targeted, and simply not doing enough activity to hit your GTM goals.
That’s where GTM Sprints come in. This agile methodology forces early-stage companies to embrace experimentation and quick iteration to validate product-market fit and generate sales leads faster.
What are GTM Sprints?
GTM Sprints are short, highly focused bursts of activity centered around testing specific hypotheses related to your:
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Ideal customer profile (ICP)
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Buyer persona
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Value prop message
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Pricing
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Sales channels
I’ve seen that by confining these experiments to a concise timeframe (typically 1-2 weeks), founders can stay accountable to goals and accelerate the feedback loop. This allows for quick learnings based on real customer data, rather than relying on gut feelings or outdated market research.
Advantages of Adopting GTM Sprints
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Accountability: GTM Sprints provide a framework to set goals and help keep you and your team accountable to those goals. I’ve seen this is especially helpful for founders who aren’t comfortable talking to customers or haven’t done it before – the sprint structure prevents indefinite postponement of crucial customer interactions.
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Structure: A spray-and-pray GTM approach doesn’t work. GTM Sprints force you to be intentional around who you’re targeting, your messaging, your channel strategy, and what success looks like.
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Speed: Just like rapid prototyping, GTM Sprints enable you to learn quickly from customer feedback, refine your GTM and product strategy. Fail fast and learn from it.
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Experiment-driven mindset: The sprint framework encourages you and your team to try new approaches, move on quickly from what isn’t working, and build a culture of data-driven decision making.
GTM Sprint Example
Let’s see this in action. Here is an example of what a GTM Sprint could look like for a seed-stage startup in the healthcare space. Their GTM goals for the next quarter are to have 50 prospective customer conversations, narrow their ICP, and find early design partners. Here’s a high-level example of what a sprint might look like:
| Phase | Description |
|---|---|
| Foundation | Test early ICP hypotheses to narrow who to target as their first customer. |
| Hypothesis | Our ICP for the near term is health care companies with 1,000 to 2,000 employees located in the U.S. |
| Experiment Design |
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| Goals |
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| Execution |
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| Retrospective | At the end of the sprint, review the data and determine if you met your goals. If no, why not? At the early stage, it can be hard to determine if you’re having success or not. If you’re seeing any traction in a certain area, that’s generally a success. Many of your early sprints will be learning more about what doesn’t work vs. what does work. For example, maybe this sprint recognized that health care companies on the bigger side of the initial hypothesis had more to gain from your solution. Design the next sprint using what you learned, maybe in this case that would be to test health care companies with up to 5,000 employees. |
Best Practices for Success
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Start sooner than later: Even if your product is not fully baked, the early customer feedback will provide an important input as you’re building so don’t wait too long to start GTM Sprints.
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Don’t boil the ocean: Narrow your focus, it will help you avoid overcomplicating your initial sprints. As you become more comfortable with the process, you can gradually expand the scope of your experiments.
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Define ownership and collaborate across stakeholders: For companies that have yet to find product-market fit, the founder(s) should be driving the process. At any early-stage company, GTM Sprints require input and participation from the founders as well as your marketing, sales, product, and customer success counterparts. Encourage open communication and collaboration to ensure everyone is on the same page.
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Document everything: Document every aspect of your sprints, from the initial hypothesis to the final results, even if it's just a simple spreadsheet. This creates a valuable knowledge repository that you can refer to as you refine your GTM strategy over time.
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Embrace Setbacks: Not every experiment will yield positive results. View failures as learning opportunities, allowing you to pivot, iterate, and ultimately improve your approach.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, successful GTM Sprints come down to treating them with the same rigor as you do with technical sprints. You wouldn’t build features without testing technical assumptions, so why would you build your GTM strategy without regular market validation?
Remember, the goal isn’t perfection – it’s learning. Each sprint should give you a clearer picture of who your customers are, what they care about, how to reach them, etc. The journey to product-market fit and go-to-market fit is an ongoing process, and GTM Sprints provide a framework to experiment and iterate quickly.