The metric every GTM team should track (Exit Five Newsletter)

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TOGETHER WITH DEMANDBASE

📰 2025 State of B2B Marketing Report: What’s Broken and What’s Working

Revenue targets are going up. Budgets don’t seem to be following. And most teams are stuck managing more tools, more data, and more noise, without seeing better results.

That’s why Demandbase teamed up with The Harris Poll to publish the 2025 State of B2B Marketing report. A deep dive into what top-performing teams are doing differently, and how you can apply it right now.

Here’s what’s inside:

• How to actually connect your data (so your team isn’t working off 12 dashboards)
• What automation and AI look like in real-world campaigns
• Why campaign ops is the new secret weapon
• How the best teams are tracking impact across leads and accounts

If you’re rethinking how your team works across tools, channels, and data, this is the roadmap.

📈 This Metric Predicts Your Survival (And Other Tips To Decode Your GTM Growth)

Editor's Note: Hey. Dave here. When I was planning Drive, I wanted speakers who could talk about things that won't get ripped away in three months because of some new AI update. Timeless stuff. The fundamentals that matter. That's why I asked Sangram Vajre to open the event. He runs GTM Partners and just finished research on 100 companies – studying what separates the ones that scale from the ones that…don’t. This newsletter breaks down what he found. And fair warning: it might make you rethink everything about how your company approaches GTM.

At Drive recently, Sangram opened the event with a challenge.

"How do you define go-to-market?"

Hands went up. People gave answers. Messaging. Positioning. How you convince the world they need your product.

All good answers. All different answers.

And that's the problem…

If we can't define it, we definitely can't fix it.

After helping build two companies past $100M and interviewing hundreds of executives, Sangram found that nobody agrees on what GTM means.

So here's what he's learned from studying 100 companies that figured it out.

📝 GTM Isn't a Plan. It's a Process.

First, let's kill the old definition.

GTM isn't something you figure out at an offsite and write in a deck.

It's what you do every single day.

Deciding whether to invest more in marketing or sales? That's a GTM decision.

Opening a new office or staying put? GTM decision.

Building a new product or acquiring a company? GTM decision.

GTM is a transformation process. It's how your entire company creates, delivers, and captures value.

3️⃣ The Three Stages Nobody Talks About

Most companies think they just need to "get to market." But the research shows three distinct stages:

• Problem Stage: You have a solution to a specific problem. You're scrappy. You're testing. You're figuring out who will pay for this thing.
• Product Stage: You've got product-market fit. Now you're scaling. You're adding features. You're building repeatability.
• Platform Stage: You've become infrastructure. Multiple products. Multiple use cases. You're embedded in how customers operate.

The companies that fail? They try to act like a platform when they're still solving a problem. Or they stay in problem mode when they should be scaling.

📊 The One Metric That Predicts Everything

Want to know if a company will be around in three years?

Look at their Net Revenue Retention (NRR).

Sangram's research showed something clear: if you're not at 100% NRR or higher, you're in trouble.

Think about it. If you're at 70% NRR, you're losing 30% of your revenue every year. You have to replace all that revenue just to stay flat, then grow on top of it.

That's not a growth problem. That's a survival problem.

The companies hitting 110-120% NRR? They're not just retaining customers. They're expanding them. And that compound growth is what separates companies that scale from companies that struggle.

Here's the hard truth: if your NRR is below 100%, stop obsessing about top-of-funnel campaigns. Fix retention first. Figure out which market wants to stay with you.

🤝🏻 The Boring Marketing Advantage

One person asked Sangram about their challenge: they have 120% NRR but are struggling to grow new business.

His response? "You have a great problem. You're not going out of business."

But here's where it gets interesting. Their struggle isn't unique. Most companies with great retention hit a ceiling on new growth because they got really good at serving one specific market.

The answer isn't doing more of what worked. It's almost like launching a new business.

You have to go back to the problem stage for that new market. Your NRR might not be as good there at first. And that's fine.

This is where "boring marketing" wins.

Boring marketing means: deeply understanding where you grow the most. Doubling down there. Ignoring the shiny tactics everyone else is chasing.

It means saying no to 47 different things so you can do 2-3 things really well.

🛠️ How to Build a GTM Operating System

Sangram shared 8 questions that define a real GTM operating system. Most companies can't answer these. And that's why they struggle.

If you don't have clear, aligned answers to these questions across your exec team, that's your problem. Not your marketing tactics. Not your sales process.

Your GTM operating system.

🫵 What This Means for You

Stop treating GTM like a strategy doc you write once a year.

Start treating it like the operating system that runs your business every day.

Focus on retention before growth. If customers aren't staying and expanding, you don't have a GTM problem. You have a product-market fit problem.

Be honest about what stage you're in. Don't act like a platform when you're still figuring out the problem.

And maybe most importantly: get alignment on those six questions. Because tactics don't fix misalignment.

– Dave

P.S. We’re already thinking about Drive next year. We're bringing it back but this time it’s in Stowe, Vermont. It’s gonna be amazing. And you can put your name on the waitlist list here.

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📚 LATEST CONTENT

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• 📰 Marketing Is Broken: Why You’re So Busy and Still Not Getting Anything Done
• 📰 How to Put On a Virtual Event People Actually Want to Attend
• 📰 How to Lead a High Functioning Marketing Org

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