Unlocking Enterprise Growth: The Tools You Need for GTM Success
Hear from Drata CRO Adam Aarons as he shares real-world examples and expert insights to help you propel your enterprise GTM strategy.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So jumping into today's topic, unlocking enterprise growth.
You all must be here because you understand
that building a GTM strategy for enterprise buyers
can be pretty complex.
So the goal for the next 28 minutes
is to walk you through how you can overcome
some of those typical hurdles for shifting up
market to enterprise.
And we'll share how routes to market like Cloud GTM
can massively decrease sales cycles
and also cover how ensuring compliance and trust
doesn't always have to be difficult.
So without further ado, let's get to know our panelists today.
We'll start with you, Adam.
Can you please share a little bit more about yourself,
your company, and your role?
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Appreciate it, Michael.
My name is Adam Arons.
I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at DRAHDA.
My role is responsible for sales, presales, and customer
success.
At DRAHDA, we help companies automate their security,
risk and compliance journey through continuous monitoring
of their controls so it makes it easy for them to collect
the data and report on it.
Awesome.
Thank you, Adam.
Jake, you're up.
Hi, good, Michael.
And Adam, great to be here with you today.
Thanks for the time.
My name is Jake Simpson.
I'm the CR here at Tackle.
And I am leading the Go to Market strategy,
including our sales, our presales team, our operations
team, and our customer success team as well.
So thanks for having us.
For sure.
Thanks, Jake.
So we'll be going right back to you for this next first question.
When it comes to unlocking enterprise growth,
what does that journey look like for you at your org?
And just a little level setting here
for those in the audience.
DRAHDA and Tackle are on somewhat similar trajectories
shifting to scale up market.
So Jake, when it comes to how does that journey look like at Tackle?
Yeah, so I've been here for a little under a year, I guess.
And I think the Go to Market strategy prior to my time here
was a little bit more spread out.
We're kind of spread up up market.
And as the market is kind of matured, as well as tackles
matured, we've been in business for about 78 years.
I think there's a natural tendency
to want to focus more on the enterprise.
So that's our primary market segment.
And to do that, we analyzed our customer base.
We analyzed the market, a lot of third party data.
And we spent a lot of time and energy building out
our ideal customer profile.
So that came to about 2,000 accounts
that we felt were pretty good profiles for us.
And so that's what we call our enterprise segment.
We have a fair amount of acquisition costs in that.
But what we found through our research and our history
is that over time, those customers
scale with us better, they're stickier.
They can leverage our platform because they're more mature.
And then we consider that non-ICP base, our growth segment,
that we feel will be great customers of the future.
So we've basically simplified down to two segments.
That's super helpful.
I mean, figure out your ICP is huge.
And kind of like a step one task before you even
jump into shifting up market or even figure out
if up market is the move for you.
So thanks, Jake.
Adam, we'd love to hear more about Jada's story.
Yeah, look, I second the ICP comment.
I think if you want to understand what your SAM is,
you've got to understand what your ICP looks like
to be able to move up market.
And so we've done a lot of work on that.
I work with my partner in marketing.
She's awesome about understanding that,
and how to really be intentful, like having tent
on what you're going to go do, and put leadership in place,
functional leadership, not just on the sales team,
but in other places so that you can have a focus on moving.
It's different, right?
Like the enablement's different.
What we do in our roles a lot most of the time
is I'm inspecting and I'm enabling.
I'm trying to make sure that we're doing the things
that we say we're going to do, and then try to continually
just get better and better at it.
And the motion is different.
When you can define that ICP and you look at enterprise
and the buying criteria that they're going to go through,
it takes longer.
There's often many more people that you need to get to.
There's multiple champions.
There could be multiple stakeholders
who the economic buyer is.
And that takes more time.
That takes more strategy.
And it takes a different thought process.
So I think having really good intent
and then aligning the organization.
And these are in our KPIs on the executive leadership team.
We look at it every week.
And we have intent about what we're going to do.
And then if we're wrong, it gives us the ability also
to be focused on to be able to make good decisions
on what we need to do next and to continue to iterate
and get better.
- Adam, from a timing standpoint,
I know that drought is moving fast, but one's the right time
for where you figured that now is the time to move up market.
- You start feeling like it's good, for me,
it's like there's poll.
Like we have companies that are upmarket
that are asking for the solution.
They see, and there's like,
if you've read in the tornado or crossing the chasm, right?
You have those first movers.
They're usually their software company.
Like they're, they're guys like you and I
that have grown up and are a little bit older,
but they see the value of doing things differently.
And they've got a more complex environment,
but they're more willing to help you understand
how to go tackle that together, no pun intended.
(laughing)
Like for me, it's when I start seeing signals in the noise
and then I'll go have conversations.
You and I have been around this game for a long time.
And so I'll go talk to people that are senior leaders
in the market and ask them,
hey, if we were gonna, what would you buy?
Like what do you think?
Would this add value?
And then just try to get my own references along the way.
But I'm looking for Paul.
Like it's part of push into that space
unless you do a lot of homework and you talk to dozens,
a hundred different to define how you can go service that.
When you're getting Paul,
it's much more natural, in my opinion, to go up market.
- Totally agree.
- No, I love that.
Great question, Jake.
Thanks for sharing that, Adam.
So let's dig into a little bit more
on some of those hurdles.
So like you said, Adam,
selling to the enterprise market
is complicated and enterprise SaaS is no exception.
Your software has to be robust enough to handle
all the enterprises workload while also supporting a,
usually a lot more users across the enterprise
and the company's goals with your platform.
So we'll start up with you on this one, Adam.
What challenges have you faced selling up market
and how have you overcome them?
- Yeah, I think you need to realize who you are
and then who you wanna be, right?
So like when you go into selling,
like you can't sell things
that you're not gonna deliver in the enterprise.
Even if like you gotta figure out
what your land is going to be,
unless your solution has a natural fit
and you go up with, you know,
the suite of tools that you have
and solution set or platform,
you really need to decide
on what can you make people successful with?
Because those aren't bridges that you wanna burn.
Those are people that you wanna make successful.
And so I try to be really,
saying no is one of my favorite things
in those conversations and to see what happens.
And if what we deliver from a value perspective is enough
so that they'll make a decision to go,
like versus having to have everything
'cause that's the problem is there's complexity,
there's legacy, there's things that they wanna be able to do
that especially with SaaS tools, right?
We can configure the heck out of this thing,
but we can't customize it for you.
So we have to be, and even if the things that you wanna do
are standard across the industry,
we need the opportunity to understand them
so we can build them the right way.
We don't already have them to help you go solve those problems.
But that may not mean that I can provide
a lot of value to you today
and help you with a part of that journey.
It's what's my strategy to get up there?
Is it a land and expand?
Is it to land and coexist with the tools that you use today?
Is it to go in and try to take over the whole estate
which I find to be, that's where like a work day
or you have to go in and just like,
those are really big long cycle times,
but really big deals.
If it worked, they started in the enterprise
and then move down market with companies like DRADA
and I'll be interested to ask you the same question, Jake,
we're moving up.
And so in order to do that, we're again,
just back to like being focused and intent
on where we can win so that we don't underperform
for those companies and we continually add value
and grow with them.
Like Jake, I'll turn it over to you.
- Yeah, similar.
I think you said you had KPIs and so we have OKRs,
very similar structure in regards to making sure
that all tides rides in the pursuit of the enterprise.
And so like you had said before Adam,
like we had some really good case studies
for some customers that pulled us up markets.
So I was fortunate enough by the time I got here
that we had some pretty solid customers partnering
with us and pushing us.
And we wanna win in the market by being the best
ready enterprise class, go to cloud go to market platform
and partner there is in the market.
And similar to compliance, we're in charge of revenue
and RevRec and we have to do that
with a very, very complete platform and support model.
And so similarly, when we're selling,
there's complexity, we're doing land and expand strategies.
We could start maybe in an alliance team
but ultimately to get to the level of scale you're at
or larger enterprises, we need to get to the revenue leaders.
We need to get to the operations leaders.
We need to get to the finance folks
depending on their go to market strategy.
We might even need to get to the product team.
And so we do a lot, women spend a lot of time
building up QBRs and account plans
and talking about executive sponsors and forecasting
and all the good things that you and I are used to
being in the enterprise space for so, so long.
So.
- Yeah, I agree.
I think the process of selling up there
and being really again like focused on how to do it right
and who the buying personas are
and how you're gonna sell to those different personas
to get consensus, like I totally buy into that.
I'm with you 110%.
- Well, that thanks for sharing y'all.
The next topic we have, we kind of covered a little bit
but love to open it up if you all have some more to add onto it.
When it comes to moving up market,
it really requires a cross-departmental efficiency
and getting everyone on the same page, right?
So it's not just a sales initiative
or a marketing initiative, it involves internally product,
engineering, CS, you name it.
So with that being said, would y'all like to share
any bit more on your approach to making this up market shift
really a company-wide initiative, Jake, we can lead up with you?
- Yeah, so like I said, maybe I jumped again a little bit there
but we put it in place our OKR strategy about a year ago
which is that we wanna be the best in the enterprise
and that pulls on all of our functions.
Pulls on certainly the product and engineering teams,
the marketing teams, the sales teams,
really had to figure out who our personas were,
what our value drivers are, not the easiest environment
to sell software to software companies right now.
So you need to be really, really crisp
on what you do and what you do well.
As well as we're practitioners in this now
that we've been doing it for seven, eight years
with over 500 customers and we really feel like
we can help customers get started and then really scale
to what their, where cloud go-to-market fits
and their overall company strategy and go-to-market strategy.
And so that's really focused, made us focus as a company
and really getting focused on what the top priority is
over the last year.
- Right on, thanks for sharing.
Adam, how about you?
- Yeah, I'll just give you guys a plug.
We're a very big, happy tackle customer.
I think selling in the marketplace,
like if you're not, you really need to ask yourself why.
And everybody should be, so selling in the marketplace
that is. For us, like it goes up to,
we have a strat team that one of the founders runs
around enterprise.
Like we, we meet on it on a weekly basis, monthly basis.
And we're talking with, we have product in the room,
marketing in the room, we have the sellers
are leading it with the deals that we're working through
and we're trying to define like,
what is the solution fit along the way?
And how do we make sure that everybody's following
in that cadence so that we don't lose track of it?
It's critical for us right now
'cause we're making that, that shift up marketed.
So that real time feedback mechanism so that you,
'cause we're also building a lot of product
for our customers today.
At Drought, we have 4,500 companies on the platform today.
And the vast majority of those
are not enterprise customers.
And so there's still a large desire to service them,
make them very, very successful on the platform.
So that can get diluted.
If you don't have a team that's just continually focusing,
you try to iterate on how to get better and better
at servicing that enterprise.
So that when we get it right, we can scale it.
And then we don't have to have this crap team
doing it all the time.
But we're really focused on it right now.
So that is something that one of our founders is leading
and I'm a part of.
- That's awesome.
Just setting aside just personnel to focus on it.
I know a lot of times it's easy to make an OKR
but then figuring out, okay,
who's actually gonna be putting in time
and effort into this?
So that's awesome.
The next topic we're gonna chat through for a little bit
is another potential hurdle to moving up market,
which is compliance and trust.
So now in 2024, they aren't simply a perk or nice to have
when you're selling its truly table stakes.
So we'll start up with you on this one, Adam.
What are some ways that ISVs can easily prepare
for enterprise level expectations
when it comes to compliance and trust?
- Okay.
You said it before.
I don't think it's like an option
when you're playing up market.
The issue you have when you're an ISV
and you're working with large enterprises,
if you're not compliant, they're not compliant.
And so they behold themselves to a lot of dip,
like it's called, we call it third party risk management
and then these large enterprises,
all of their constituents and all of these ex-statuents
need access and need to show that they're giving proper security
to access and to the information they have.
So things like ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and GDPR,
you know, FedRAMP, like depending on where you're going,
you can't sell into these companies as an ISV without it.
And so especially as you look at the opportunity to scale
and to work with many companies,
even if you're not looking at the enterprise,
if you want to go selling to mid-market companies
or other startups, you still want to showcase
that you have a minimum level of security that you're keeping.
It's compliance is the end result of good security management.
It's really the end result of good risk management.
So if you manage risk well, you help your company.
Everybody has risks in their business.
It's how they manage them.
So compliance is there because people have done
a really bad job at managing risks and shareholders
and other folks that come to get burned by that.
So they force you to do a minimum level of management
of those risks and comply with that.
So for ISVs that are looking to sell,
and this used to be a much more difficult thing.
When I was at a previous employer 10 years ago,
we had to go get our SOC 2.
It was like a half a million dollars
and a year's worth of effort.
You can get a SOC 2 as an ISV now
in less than six months and for like a tenth of the cost
of what you used to pay for it.
And so because it's automated and the amount of time
and people that it used to take has been taken away.
And so as a company that's looking to go penetrate,
I don't, it doesn't need to be the enterprise
just to go and scale their organization and gain trust.
You need to showcase that.
And the solutions are here that can help you do that
in a much better, faster and cheaper way.
- Thanks for sharing Jake.
Anything you want to add on to that one?
- I'll just try them in.
I totally agree with Adam Sand.
Obviously this is more his core than mine,
but there's pillars that we're seeing
in the ISV market in general.
I'd imagine our ICPs are probably
a really similar market down market.
And pretty much everybody these days
needs to have a foundational cloud strategy,
needs to have a complying strategy to play in that game.
We highly recommend that they consider cloud-code market
as one of their routes to market
to take advantage of all the entitlement.
It's demonstrated time and time again
across the ISVs that are leaning in on it.
So.
- For sure. Thanks, Jake.
Adam, this one's for you.
Do you have some success stories from,
or even just one from some ISVs that you all have worked with
to help get them up and ready?
- Yeah, look, the majority of my customer are ISV.
So you can pick, you know, there's probably 4,000 of them
that we've helped get.
And it's not just for the compliant,
like I'll be selling to Jake.
And hey, if you want to go enter a new market,
if you want to go do sell to the Fed, you need FedRam.
Let me help you with it.
If you want to go be able to sell into the commercial market,
you need to stock too.
Let me help you with that.
So you can look up the customer list on,
on DRADA and you'll see that it's like a,
a license to hunt or not without it.
You're not allowed to go hunting.
But there's pull up market.
So for us, that's really interesting
in how you started this conversation is like enterprises
needed as badly as these ISVs
or as the commercial markets do.
It's just a harder problem to go solve.
There's, the blinds has been around since the dawn of compute.
There's a lot of legacy and a lot of information there
and make no bones about it.
Somebody will help those companies
and we'll help them tackle this problem.
And we plan to be the company to help them go do that.
- Right on, thanks for sharing.
And I love what you said earlier.
If you're not compliant, your customers aren't compliant either.
I think that's the huge kind of quote that I got from that.
So thanks Adam.
Moving on to the next topic,
diving into cloud go to market.
So buyer expectations are rapidly evolving year over year.
And one of the ways it's shifting is in how ISVs
and enterprise folks wanna buy.
So building a cloud GTM strategy really represents
a huge opportunity for orgs to meet enterprise companies
where they're already transacting.
So Jake, we'll start off with you on this one.
We'd love to hear more about just,
what stages tackling their cloud GTM journey,
which may seem like a solid question since,
you know, we were kind of the category creator there,
but how's cloud GTM impacted tackles growth?
- Well, good question.
So of course we are, you know,
really focused on our cloud go market strategy
being the cloud go to market company.
About 80% of our revenues flow through the cloud market places.
That's a number that we wanna even drive higher.
And, you know, I'm trying to bring my experience
in the enterprise space.
And so as we start to think about more account plans,
value props, personas and such,
we're trying to bring those things in an integrated way.
So we're trying to sell cloud go to market to the ISV,
which has different value drivers
based on who you're talking to as well.
So, but I'd say we're pretty good at it.
But we still have a ways to go.
I think there's a lot we can do with propensity data.
I think there's a lot we can do to get better at co-selling.
You know, we're here today with our good partner, Drada,
in regards to, you know, sharing a very common ICP
and value driver at those that are trying to go fast
on the cloud.
And so I still think we can do better,
but I think we're pretty good.
>> Right on, thanks for sharing Jake.
So Adam, I'd love to hear more about Drada's Cloud GTM journey.
>> Yeah, I mean, we're born in the cloud.
We're, I mean, our whole, like,
what I'll say is I think the market places are an amazing place
that are fairly new in terms of like BD ecosystem.
And so like AWS, GCP and Azure,
we were the largest transacting ISV in our segment
in AWS globally last year.
And it's because we drive our deals that way
as much as we can and we use tackle as a avenue to do it.
And I'll tell you, like, you talk about meeting people
where they are, the marketplace are amazing places
for these companies to be able to buy software
and they're there.
And so you're meeting them where they are.
And I think it's, at this point,
still there's a lot of green field there
and I'll take Jake's point.
I think we do a good job there,
but there's a lot more that we can still go do.
It's early days with those partners.
And they're like, I put a ton of time and effort
into making sure that that's an area where we stay diligent
and we continue to grow.
I just think it's a huge opportunity
that's fairly new in our world.
- Love it. Thanks, Adam.
So similar question for you, Jake.
Success stories from ISVs that you work with
and this may have been being a pass back to Adam
to hear a little bit more about his journey with Amazon.
(laughs)
- I just think that, just Adam's point, it's proven, right?
And it's coming on fast.
And so I would just recommend that
the executive teams of these ISVs evaluate it
and right size it relative to your company strategy
and your go-to-market strategy.
And that's where I see it's going well.
Like I just don't think you can put this on your back
as an alliance, cloud alliance leader or a RevOps leader.
I really think you need to get the executive team aligned here
to do it to do it well.
With the long-term strategy to start to build it
to any type of scale.
And so that's what I'm seeing across our stronger customers
that are doing upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars
to billions of dollars.
And I know that Drade does it really well
because yeah, we know how much the volume
you guys are pushing through AWS.
And we know that that comes from the top.
That's why you're here today.
So.
- Love that. Awesome. Thanks, Joel.
So this truly an amazing better together story.
So honestly by leveraging Drade and Tackle,
it gives ISVs the opportunity to really increase their TAM,
total adjustable market by getting the strong compliance
posture, but also getting up and running
on a cloud marketplace.
So those are two major achievements that like you said,
Adam could take way, way, way longer in the past to get done.
But now it can be done in a matter of weeks
instead of months and months or years to accomplish.
So yeah, so we have one more question on our agenda.
I saw we have a question if you come in the chat
or in the Q&A section.
So last question before we wrap up,
we'll start with you Jake.
What's the best advice you can give to ISVs
who are just starting to begin their upmarket shift?
- Well, I think you've got to get some wins.
You know, you've got to get some wins
because sellers, you know, like proof points
and ultimately you're trying to change culture.
And to do that, I think you need some anecdotes.
I think you need sellers to tell their sellers
that it was a pretty positive experience.
And so, you know, we've got an entire maturity model
that we work off of.
And, you know, where we start is let's get some wins
under our belt.
Let's start to talk about how we can scale those,
you know, those ones or two Z wins
into a more, you know, core strategy across the sellers
and the revenue system.
- Awesome, thanks for sharing Jake.
Adam, what's your top tips, best advice you can share?
- Yeah, I liked where Jake started.
I think ICP figured out,
make sure that you know where you can get the,
where's the lowing fruit?
Where can you go establish a beach head
and start winning to this point?
Like you got to win.
You've got to prove that you can win up there.
And, you know, have a plan, like,
and like what I see and I call it,
like this schizophrenia of leadership
or like bipolar when things get bad.
Let's make a change.
It's like, wait a minute.
Like what was our plan?
How's that going to affect the,
but I'm not afraid to make change
or to iterate and figure it out.
But I want to stick to it.
If we're going to make a fundamental change to the plan,
there better be a damn good reason why.
Because it's hard, like,
especially going up and selling it in bigger,
they're going to ask more of you.
They're going to try to get it for lower,
like you all have customers tell you,
like, hey, you're going to get my logo, we want it for free.
It's like, why would,
why would you ask us to do that as a customer?
Like you want us to continually be able to serve you better.
Part of that is you being a real customer
through our business. And so understanding and like,
I think having experienced like a leader like,
like Jake or someone that's done this before,
that can help lead you because like,
have a plan and know that the person who made it,
knows what the heck they're doing so that
it doesn't get challenged constantly.
Because the other thing is like,
time is the enemy of our ability to go win the space.
And so you got to move fast.
You've got to have a plan and act on it
and have trust within your organization
that through our times and good,
as long as you're seeing continual improvement
and continual movement up, keep going.
Like it takes guts and go do it.
Totally.
Well, then also just recapping something you mentioned earlier,
just have a good feel for the poll, right?
And even just going out and having conversations
with the market to see if it is viable to move a market to.
So all right, looks at me.
Nice teamwork, like Jake, what's time it's going to cut you off.
But I think that understanding the market,
who you're going to like, if you can define that
in your ideal customer profile, you need to do that first.
Like I don't think there's something more important
that you could do first.
Great.
Thanks Adam.
Looks like we had one question from our good friend,
Gary Gaddis in the Q&A section.
So I'll ask it, we'll pass it to you, Jake.
And then Adam, you can give your thoughts on it.
But the question is, what kinds of things
are you doing to get your sales team engaged
and up to speed on Cloud GTM?
I don't think that question was for me.
If my sales team doesn't understand Cloud marketplace GTM,
you know, Ashby and I have some bigger challenges on our flights.
[LAUGHS]
All right, you can jump in.
Yeah, look, I'll second it.
But what I'll say is like, help them understand
the forced multiplier that the value is going to bring to them
by going that way.
Like it's kind of a no-brainer when you look at it
and you look at the numbers and how much business it drives.
But I think as a company, get at your head around that and say,
you know, that's a conscious decision that we want to go make.
And so we're going to go enable sellers.
And we're going to go take a team.
We're going to focus them on it.
We're going to put a leader on it.
We're going to go enable the heck out of them
and go-- there's going to be some learning along the way,
but just go drive to figure out how to get the wins
and to continue to scale as fast and responsibly as we can.
Thanks for answering.
All right, y'all.
Looks like there aren't any more questions that came in.
So one more time.
Huge thank you, Adam, Jake, for sharing your insights today.
Thanks to all of you for attending and sharing
your questions and just attending today's session.
So in April, we're having another webinar with Yext,
really diving into how they built out their Cloud GTM
adoption internally, which is a huge part of our maturity
model and topic there.
So thank you, Adam.
Thank you, Jake.
And we'll see you all next time.
I hope you'll have a wonderful month of March.
Bye, y'all.
Yeah, thank you, Greg.
Thanks, everybody.
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