In today's โ๏ธ ๐ ๐งต, we explore different GTM strategies that vendors employ to reach their customers & some of the advantages & disadvantages to each. How security vendors build a relationship w/ the market is important to the overall health of the industry. Let's dive in ๐!
Direct Sales:
This strategy involves directly selling products or services to end customers through a sales team.
Advantages -
It allows companies to have direct relationships with their customers and tailor their solutions to specific needs.
Direct Sales (cont):
Disadvantages -
It can be time-consuming & costly to build & maintain a sales team, & it may not be effective in reaching a large # of potential customers & scaling the business.
Initial sales tactics don't translate into long-term value for customers.
Channel Sales:
Popular in cloud security due to existing relationships between customers & MSSPs, this strategy uses partners (resellers, distributors, service providers) to scale with network effects.
CAC is another advantage of this GTM approach.
Channel Sales (cont):
Disadvantages -
Finding and maintaining partnerships.
You have less control of the end customer experience.
Misalignment between established professional services w/ customers & cloud native security needs of new markets means don't always have SMEs.
Online Sales:
This strategy involves selling products or services directly to customers through an online platform, such as CSP marketplaces.
Advantages - it allows companies to reach a large number of potential customers at a relatively low cost.
Online Sales (cont):
Disadvantages - it can be difficult to differentiate in an online environment, & there may be increased competition from other orgs. There is little marketing automation capabilities w/i those platforms to reach customers w/ differentiated messaging.
Product-Led Growth (PLG):
PLG is a GTM route that involves using the company's product as the primary driver of CAC & revenue. This approach typically involves offering a free or open source version of the product that customers can demo & then upgrading to a paid version.
PLG (Cont):
Advantages include low CAC, better sales efficiency and spend metrics, and customer lifetime value and retention.
Disadvantages include lack of fit of traditional PLG tactics in โ๏ธ ๐ spaces, heavy competition, & revenue limitation based on upgrade %.
Many vendors will utilize a diverse set of GTM strategies and tactics. The best of them will focus on one or two GTM channels and go "hard in the paint" to use a basketball reference.
Make sure what you're looking for as a customer aligns to what the vendor offers.
And as always, if you found this ๐งต useful, want to see more content, please ๐ and retweet this thread!
If you'd like to see @deepfence's platform in action, sign up for a free cloud trial today:
deepfence.cloud/auth/signup
Deepfence
@deepfence
Securing your apps in production across the entire cloud native continuum โ clouds, Kubernetes, containers, serverless, and more