Leading a GTM team

Inbound has dried up. Leads are down two quarters running and nobody knows why. What do I do?

First separate the three things that look identical on a dashboard: demand fell, demand moved somewhere you cannot see, or your one channel changed its rules. If organic traffic dropped while brand searches held, you probably lost clicks to AI answers rather than losing buyers. If sales still hear "I have been following you for months", the demand is there and your tracking is not. Fix measurement before you panic and start discounting. Then face the structural issue, which is usually that a single channel carried you and it stopped compounding. Add a second motion deliberately, run it for two quarters before you judge it, and stop treating a channel dip as a marketing personnel problem.

Go deeper

4 resources, 3 India-specific, 4 link-checked.

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✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

Names the six channels B2B companies actually grow on and shows how top companies weight them, which is the frame you need when one channel stalls. Also the useful reminder that organic inbound dominating usually means product-market fit, not clever marketing.

Scaling your B2B growth engine

From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky 20 min read

  • Top B2B startups take about 2 years from founding to $1M ARR, and roughly 1.5 years from their first customer.
  • Six channels ranked by prevalence: organic self-serve, organic sales-assist, outbound, content and SEO, paid, then partnerships.
  • Databricks' Ali Ghodsi on trying zero-touch PLG in 2015: revenue flatlined, and for practical purposes PLG did not work in enterprise.
  • Loom took 4 years to reach $1M ARR by design, choosing ubiquity inside organizations over early monetization.
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The same ground, at another level

How inbound, content and demand gen reads from a different seat.

Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? Inbound means someone with the problem finds you while they are looking for an answer, and leaves you a way to follow up. For a startup with no aud... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I decide what to write about so it brings in buyers and not just traffic? Sort every topic idea by how close it sits to a purchase. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, integration pages and "how do I do X with Y" pages ... Doing the work 4 resources → What do the companies with genuinely great inbound do differently? They pick one content strategy and commit to it for years instead of sampling five. Lenny's breakdown of content-driven growth is a useful map: edi... How the best do it 4 resources →

People also ask

Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? 4 → I write blog posts and nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? 4 → How do I decide what to write about so it brings in buyers and not just traffic? 4 → Our product is self-serve. How do we get users without a sales team? 4 → How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel? 4 → I run demand gen for an Indian SaaS selling globally. Does the US content playbook work here? 5 →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Get your first customers, our Starting Up track.

How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me? 19 → When is my product 'ready' to launch? 19 →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Grow organically & retain, our D2C track.

How do I build a referral program that people actually use, not one that just sits unused in my Shopify admin? 4 → Should I be on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest, or just pick one? Where do I actually put my limited time? 4 →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →