Has SaaS lost Go-to-Market Fit - with Jacco van der Kooji, founder and CEO Winning by Design

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Jacco van der Kooji, the founder and CEO of Winning By Design. Today, we'll be covering four topics with Jacco from his recently published article. One, data that highlights the need to change go-to-market tackets. Cut to grow, maybe the importance of unit economics. Second, we'll discuss go-to-market fit, what it is.
Third, we'll discuss scale up fit. When is the right time to go from go-to-market fit to scale up? And fourth, the go-to-market efficiency metrics that matter heading into 2024 So Jacco, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here in the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Jacco van der Kooij** (1:21)
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for having me, Ray. My name is Jacco van der Kooji. I'm the founder of Winning By Design. And in about 2012, I started this company because I believed that SaaS had a specific go-to-market model, but it was still using an outdated go-to-market model, that of the perpetual software.
And so ever since then, I've set up and moved forward with identifying what is the right way to go to market that is dedicated to a recurring revenue stream and built upon the best practices of a perpetual software solution.

**Ray Rike** (1:53)
OK, so we know you're going to bring energy, but one of the reasons I'm so happy to talk to you is you just published this article and it's entitled, Has SaaS Lost Go-to-Market Fit and What to Do About It? So first, let's start at the beginning.
What is go-to-market fit?

**Jacco van der Kooij** (2:11)
Well, thank you for asking. So I'm going to pull up behind me. There you see, I'm going to move a little bit to the side so that we can see that, but I'm going to pull up a diagram. We're going to be talking about a lot of that diagram, and it shows that what you see down here is three phrases, product market fit, go-to-market fit and scale up fit.
I want you to think about these three specific phases, product market fit, go-to-market fit and scale up fit.
Product market fit is really all about, can you get to the first $1 million and can you get there by winning customers that are not your best friends, uncles and so on and so forth.
Often, one of the key principles of product market fit is that you have established a good pricing and packaging.
For example, to a million dollars, if you would sell a $20,000 solution, you would need approximately 50 customers. 50 customers is a lot. You don't have that many friends who would be spending like $20,000 on you to get there. That gives you an idea. A $100,000 solution, you would need about 10 solutions to get to product market fit. That gives you an idea. Now, generally, as it says down here, you may not be able to read it, but just for your understanding, that it generally did you establish the value proposition, and that is the pricing and packaging and what value you offer in return for that. The outcome of that is that you know what you are selling. You now say like, hey, I got a price list, I got a product customers are willing to buy that.
Often in the product market fit mode, you are still in a form of founder led sales. The founder is still heavily involved. When you maneuver from product market fit to go to market fit, you can no longer be dependent on just the founder led sales. You need to be able to start multiplying that. You do that to what is called a GTM motion. A GTM motion, many of you are very familiar with them. It could be an inbound motion, an outbound motion, an enterprise grade outbound motion. It could be a PLG style motion and so on. These motions, they act and operate like a production line inside a factory. Now, most companies up to $10 million should only deploy one GTM motion.
Some of them, when they are getting a little bit muckery, then they have two or three and then it gets really messy. But go-to-market fit means that you have one GTM motion and that GTM motion, the way you sell to your customer is mapped to the way your customer is buying. And Ray, this is super important to realize. Customers are buying is the determining factor, not the way you sell. In other words, we have to map GTM motions towards the way how customers are buying. We may uncover a new way how they love to buy, for example, PLG, but we cannot create something new that they have never seen before. It already exists and they want it. That means that a GTM motion is an effective way to bring your products to market.