Lessons from building a deep tech GTM function
By Clara Ricard, Andrew Stevenson and Alex Duell
There isn’t a cookie cutter playbook to scaling deep-tech companies. But there are valuable lessons to take away from those that have navigated the scaling journey successfully.
The first article of this series captured Gaurab’s practical tips on building a top performing team at Solugen. This time, we wanted to focus on what it takes to build a go-to-market (GTM) function from 0 to 1. We spoke with our Venture Partner Andy Stevenson to get first-hand insights from his experience at world class deep tech companies like Redwood Materials and Twelve, where he is currently VP Commercial.
When to start building a GTM team?
Deep tech companies can go multiple years before seeing their first revenues. However, deep tech founders should be close to the customers from the beginning as product development is long and pivoting is particularly expensive.
Founder-led sales first
Many are tempted to hand off some of that responsibility to a more experienced person. However if you hire too early, you will probably proceed to churn through some great commercial people, through no fault of their own. As a founding team, you are accountable for taking the first steps in designing a robust commercial strategy and no amount of hiring will absolve you of the need to do this deeply strategic work. On top of that, founders are probably more effective than external hires in closing the first major deals and partnerships.
Business operations before business development/sales
As a first non-technical hire, deep tech founders should consider hiring a strong generalist Chief of Staff or business operations lead, with a solid commercial strategy track record and roughly 4-8 years of experience. They can be a sparring partner for the founder, help structure the go-to-market motion and triage incoming opportunities.
Ideal candidate profiles
Once you've secured a few high-level customers or partners and developed a somewhat repeatable model for acquiring them, it's time to make your first hire. Much has been written about hiring people with great “start-up DNA” - adaptable, tenacious, collaborative, and able to handle ambiguity with a cool head. In addition to that, Andy shared with us a couple additional characteristics to look for in an early deep tech commercial hire.
Ruthless prioritization of customers and partners
Interviews should test the candidate’s ability to prioritise customers and collaboratively agree on “what moves the needle and what doesn’t”. For example, Andy always asks candidates to lay out who their top priority targets are and why, whether it be customers or key strategic partners.
Knowing when to say “no” is also an underappreciated skill to look for. Countless inexperienced salespeople waste time, energy, and resources chasing lost causes or pushing poorly qualified leads too far down the sales funnel. In a SaaS environment these can be frustrating, but in deep tech - where even the best companies sometimes have only a couple of months of runway - these errors of judgement can kill the company.
Ability to sell the long-term vision
Can you sell something that doesn’t exist yet? As simplistic as this sounds, it’s pretty close to the truth for many deep tech start-ups.
A skill that separates the best early stage sellers from the middle of the pack is their ability to make the long-term vision compelling enough for a prospective buyer to allocate budget today. It makes sense to prioritise candidates who have sold category-defining products or new product lines before, particularly if they unlocked net new budget from prospective customers.
Navigating complex stakeholder management
The best commercial people in deep tech are comfortable driving agendas and bringing cross-functional stakeholders to consensus. This is an important skill in order to close customers, which often require long enterprise sales processes and can include third parties. When selling commodity products with a premium, the transactions almost always involve a commodity user and a more consumer-facing company that is actually paying the premium, such as Twelve's partnership with Alaska Airlines and Microsoft.
This skill is also helpful internally to navigate potential disagreement. How many times has a new salesperson stayed quiet about the unit economics of the product they’re being hired to sell, not stacking up, only for that fact to emerge and bite everyone six months down the line? Pick a candidate with the courage, self-motivation, and skills to engage in often-difficult conversations with leadership early on.
Key drivers of GTM team success
Once you have hired a rockstar GTM person, it’s time to figure out how to empower them to become effective inside your organisation.
Measure performance but from first principles
Regardless of how much or little structure you have across the business, it is instrumental to ensure your GTM function feels tied to measurable deliverables from day one. This is not about designing a super complex KPI dashboard but about nurturing a revenue-first mindset.
Performance of early stage commercial hires should be measured blending behavioural and metric-related outcomes. Behaviour can be assessed by how the individual exhibits some of the traits outlined in the ideal candidate profile section. Metrics are sometimes difficult to attach to individual performance and are limited, so you can consider leaning more heavily on project-based milestones.
Most companies require several iterations before getting it right. The biggest mistake you can make is being slow to exit hires who clearly are not the right fit. The more mature your GTM team becomes, the more objective, consistent, and repeatable performance management becomes. While Andy considers a variety of factors and progress on underlying metrics in compensation decisions, promotion is heavily linked to achievement of specific outcomes such as closing deals.
Avoid compensating early commercial hires differently
Designing commission plans for early stage GTM teams is a difficult task, especially for pre-revenue businesses. Every time Andy gave in to a new hire pushing for a commission, the metrics used for the incentive plan ended up being essentially meaningless and in danger of driving the wrong behavior.
An important mentality to instil in your early stage team is that “when the company wins, we all win”, rather than trying to bring in flimsily-calculated commission plans. You should pay your early stage GTM team market-appropriate base salaries and compensate them with equity in the same way you would for your technical teams. This avoids complexity, while increasing the likelihood of hiring people who are genuinely bought into your company vision. Once your GTM team matures and the company is scaling, it makes sense to introduce a cash-commission scheme to attract a different type of candidate profile.
Cross-functional integration and collaboration
Ensuring GTM hires are exposed to company leadership early and presenting regularly at cross-functional standups can pay dividends. With any new hire, even with junior team members, Andy finds an opportunity for them to present something to senior leaders to start raising awareness of their role and building trust that they can be relied on.
Overall, it’s highly beneficial to get everyone excited about the work being done by the GTM team. And vice versa, the best GTM hires are intellectually curious, proactively seeking to learn and collaborate with the technical teams in order to gain product fluency and therefore credibility in internal and external conversations.
Think strategically about what falls under GTM
Thinking critically about “what does GTM really mean to us?” can uncover some interesting synergies and really supercharge the GTM function.
Take, for example, building out a Policy function. Rather than opting for a traditionally reactive function, deep tech policy teams can have a deeply commercial focus: driving revenue through incentives, grants, and credits. In addition to building out a Policy team within Twelve’s Commercial function, Andy also oversees the Project Development Team. This is unusual as it is often seen as an engineering-adjacent function. Since Project Development at Twelve is mostly about feedstock sourcing and therefore is deeply commercial, the leadership team evolved their org-design to reflect this.
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While every company is unique, it’s valuable to learn from successful climate tech operators on how to think about scaling the go-to-market function from zero to one.
We love to learn about what it takes to scale deep tech companies and there is so much more to this topic than we covered in this blog post. If you are a founder building to make the climate transition a reality, we would love to meet you.