MOVE: A Go-To-Market Strategy with Sangram Vajre, Founder Terminus and Flip My Funnel Podcast

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Sangram Vajre, who's the co-founder and chief evangelist at Terminus and host of the Flip My Funnel podcast. Today, we're going to be covering three main topic areas with Sangram. First, the story behind founding Terminus. Second, his move framework, a four-question go-to-market motion. And the metrics to measure the return on the move framework. Sangram, please take a moment to give us a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Sangram Vajre** (1:12)
Hey, man. Thank you so much for having me. Quick background. Really, I ran marketing at Pardot and was lucky enough for the Pardot as a business to be acquired by Exact Target and then Salesforce, spent a couple of years at Salesforce. Then I started a company called Terminus, as you said, and it's been seven years into it, building a whole account based marketing movement and momentum around that stuff. That has been one of the most fascinating things of my tech career, so excited to be here.

**Ray Rike** (1:40)
Okay. You have a great career in marketing automation, right? With your beginning there and then at Salesforce. I'm sure you were after the acquisition, you were in the marketing cloud at Salesforce, correct?

**Sangram Vajre** (1:51)
Well, it's funny. There was a big debate between where Pardot said, because it is marketing automation, but it is for salespeople. And at that time, Salesforce had Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud was really B2C, Sales Cloud was B2B. So we were actually part of Sales Cloud supporting the Sales Cloud motions and Marketing Cloud was completely different for B2C. It was very interesting.

**Ray Rike** (2:15)
I don't think and I thought I knew the marketing automation space very well. I was part of the first generation of marketing automation dating back to 1998 With a company called Market First and we kind of launched the first marketing automation for considered B2B purchases as an enterprise app versus as a SaaS app.

**Sangram Vajre** (2:32)
Do you remember Ray then Vtrends?

**Ray Rike** (2:35)
Oh, of course.

**Sangram Vajre** (2:36)
The Vtrends, my co-author on the move book when we get to it is Brian Brown. He was the co-founder of Vtrends and that's like 2001 or something like that. Right around that time, they were one of the early marketing automation companies before marketing automation was a thing.

**Ray Rike** (2:51)
Yeah, we won't get into this, but it's funny. We were acquired in 2002 by Pivotal, which was a mid-market CRM vendor, and then we saw the Marketo app and we're like, wow, that flow charting looks exactly like we did in 1998 Sometimes having great ideas, it's not only the great idea, it's the timing and the execution of that great idea. But let's go a little bit more into the founding of Terminus because marketing automation, more for sales and for marketers. But then in 2014, account-based marketing, how has your vision for Terminus kind of evolved over the seven-year journey today?

**Sangram Vajre** (3:29)
Well, I'll tell you a quick story. When I was at Salesforce, I remember during that time, we used to generate so many leads, Ray, that we were like a lead machine pretty much. And we were always hitting over numbers and all that stuff. And that was at Salesforce, just being part of that whole ecosystem. And I remember my sales counterpart one day coming and saying, Sangram, fantastic job. You and your team did a great job. Love it. 3,000 leads last quarter was fantastic. Next quarter, can you generate 4,000 leads? And Ray, I just sank in my seat because I was like, really, like, are we a coin operated lead machine? because that's not what I thought we did. Why are we not talking about accelerating our pipeline? Why are we not talking about expansion? Why are we not doing all these things?
And that really led us to, led me and a couple of other folks that I met along the way, my co-founders, at Expat in a Grass, to start Terminus. That was the problem we were trying to solve.

**Ray Rike** (4:26)
I love it. A marketing practitioner and entrepreneur saying, it's not about the leads, it's about the outcomes. So you actually think measuring marketing performance and account-based marketing performance is more about the revenue generated, the pipeline generated, the conversion rates, than it is about the number of qualified accounts and qualified leads you generate?