One piece of practical advice for many early GTM enterprise startup CEOs
Gil Dibner

I was recently part of a conversation with an early-stage portfolio company and one of their advisors, a more experienced CEO. His advice was simple, useful, and very practical — and I want to share it here.

The company — like most early-stage companies in the normal (and therefore very challenging) environment we find ourselves in today — was struggling to drive sales. Their efforts were split across a range of marketing and sales activities — all the way from lead-gen efforts to customer onboarding and success. After hearing all this in detail, the experienced CEO simply said (I’m paraphrasing): “just nail the bottom of the funnel, don’t worry about the rest.”

This advice may not be appropriate for all companies, but for most enterprise founders at the early-stages, it’s pretty good advice. The early phases of go-to-market (GTM) experimentation can rapidly slip out of control. Founders want to nail messaging, positioning, marketing, lead-gen, acquisition, conversion, pricing, onboarding, support, etc. We often convince ourselves that parts of the funnel are working, so we double down on those and then focus efforts elsewhere, only to find that the things we thought were working are not working quite as well as we thought. We also often feel a pressure to prove success throughout the funnel, or a need to ensure a robust enough pipeline to enable us to meet our future growth targets. We chase every lead, reluctant to let any potential revenue go. We need every dollar, so we burn every candle from both ends. There are a lot of reasons when early-stage founders end up trying to do too much at the same time — and whenever you are trying to do too much, you will start screwing stuff up.

So the advice given is brilliant advice for most founders of enterprise companies that find themselves overwhelmed with too many action items, goals, missed targets, and follow-ups: “nail the bottom of the funnel.”

This advice is helpful for a number of reasons:

• Highest ROI. The bottom of the funnel is where the customers most likely to convert and pay are. This is therefore where you as a founder can have the most direct impact on your bottom line: your runway and your net burn rate.

• Product. The bottom of the funnel is where customers and product meet. By focusing your attention there, you are most likely to uncover opportunities to improve your product and/or fix product gaps. You rarely get those sorts of insights from top-of-funnel activities. Spending time with bottom-of-funnel customers is the activity most likely to benefit your entire operation.

• Follow-through. The funnel doesn’t really end with conversion to a sale. It continues from there to customer success, engagement, expansion, and upsell. Devoting time and energy to bottom-of-funnel customers means you are likely to positively impact all of those things as well.

• Reference customers. You can’t really have customers that are too happy. In other words, the closer you get to your most advanced leads, the more likely they are to end up as absolutely delighted customers. These are the ones who will pay the most, give you the most product insight, provide the most referrals, and — crucially — act as the most enthusiastic reviewers when investors or customers come to ask about your product. Even customers who do not pay much can be very impactful if they become impassioned evangelists.

• Upsell. The bottom-of-funnel is where upsell opportunity lies — and upsell opportunity is going to be the best possible validation (to your own team and to external investors) that you are really and truly onto something. (By the same token, at early stages key customer churn can be deadly, so getting close to your customers is crucial for that reason as well.)

• Qualification. Founders often struggle to qualify leads. The truth is, you may not really learn how to qualify leads for some time. But the bottom of the funnel is most likely to contain qualified leads, even if you don’t know for sure why exactly they qualify. Spending time with them is much more likely to help you learn to quality your top-of-funnel leads than spending time with the top-of-funnel itself.

• Less waste from leaky funnels. As an early-stage founder-led GTM company, your funnel is leaky for sure. You are probably losing leads for a number of unknown reasons at every stage in the funnel. Even if you nailed the top of funnel, you’d lose a lot of those prospects as they worked their way down your leaky yet-to-be-perfected funnel. By focusing on the bottom-of-funnel, you know that your energy is least likely to be wasted.

As a practical matter, what this usually means is just engaging more with the customers that are furthest along and de-emphasizing some of the top-of-funnel activities such as lead-gen. It means going the extra mile to offer more time on the phone or even site visits to customers. As the CEO/founder, you may find you have the ability to get a customer on the phone in a way that the sales people you will hire later may not be able to. This can also mean being more flexible with pricing, product roadmap, or implementation help to make sure that your most likely customers turn into your biggest advocates. The more conversations you have with them — and the more intimate they are — the faster you will learn and the faster your product (and funnel!) will improve.

So for a lot of founders — and you may be one of them — the right advice for navigating the chaos of founder-led GTM might be pretty simple: if you are overwhelmed with how much you have to do, consider how you can shift your energy to the bottom-of-funnel customers, even if means sacrificing some top-of-funnel gains. You can’t do everything and you can’t fix everything, but make sure your bottom-of-funnel processes are strong and your best customers are happy. Nail that, and the rest will follow.

Good luck,
Gil

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