Decoding B2B Growth Marketing and GTM Strategies with Abhishek G.P.

Inbound, outbound, or a combination of both? This question stares at B2B growth marketers yet again. 

Demand generation is in flux. AI is altering how users search, offline events are making a comeback, and buyers are discovering brands through multiple channels. 

However, despite these trends, having a fairly healthy organic presence is a must, affirms Abhishek G.P., formerly the senior director of inbound growth at Freshworks. 

But picking the right demand generation channels depends on a range of factors, most importantly the go-to-market (GTM) motion you use, says G.P., who was instrumental in leading Freshworks’s shift from a product-led growth to a product-led growth plus sales-assist motion. 

In a chat with G2, he shares how to pick the right motions and channels for your growing business and sustain an ecosystem of experimentation while scaling. 

This interview is part of G2’s Professional Spotlight series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment. 

Deep dives with Abhishek G.P.

Can you describe your professional journey and what ultimately brought you to Freshworks? 

I was a marketing student even before I did my undergraduate degree. So, I’d been reading about marketing since I was 15-16. Later, I had the opportunity to intern with Unilever. Those five months were an eye-opener for me. I got a grounding in marketing principles, positioning, and value proposition while working on a live project and interacting with consumers. That’s when I decided I wanted to build a career in marketing. 

But I realized that before I do marketing, I must know how goods and commodities are bought and sold. So, I decided to start with sales.

When I worked with Kantar, I worked with large brands like PepsiCo and LG, learning how buyers buy and the motivations behind their decisions. Later, I had a couple of stints in digital and brand marketing with large organizations in India. 

Finally, I landed at Freshworks, where I’ve led the growth team for all these years. 

You’ve hired and led teams for different stages of Freshworks’s growth. Could you discuss a few best practices that may have helped improve work satisfaction among employees and retain them? 

When I think of building teams, I think of the fact that you exist within the larger realm of the organization. 

Six years ago, Freshworks was a founder-led company. So, it was all about chasing a big, hairy, audacious goal, and each individual's purpose was built around it. 

So what matters then would not matter in the interim stage, where one of our stated values was building a happy work culture. The stated goal for the organization was: how can Freshworks help you create the best work of your career? 

Now, post-IPO, we are a different organization, which is mostly about predictability, repeatability, and building the best systems and processes to beat all marketing and sales metrics benchmarks.

What matters at different stages of the company evolves over time. Therefore, as a leader, you must consciously think about the kind of team you want to build and groom, and the kind of members relevant at different times.  

For me, it’s been about ensuring you have the right people in the right place. But this is easier said than done. 

“You must create personalized learning paths for specific individuals. This is especially important for the top 10% of your team, who expect you to craft those individual paths.”

Abhishek G.P
Former senior director of inbound growth, Freshworks

The 10% of your team are at the highest risk of being pushed away. So you need to take good care of them. 

We’ve also gotten better at making room for experimentation. When you grow fast in your early years, every input you deploy in the market most likely leads to a supernormal output. 

However, in a post-IPO growth stage, you must have a different mindset when experimenting. You need to be prudent regarding the hypothesis you create for experiments. You must consider how you measure the outcomes of those experiments and how you scale them. 

So, the current way I think about building a team is to make sure we have an experimentation mindset and that each member has specific experiments they run, own, and report on. This helps individuals perform well and learn on the job. It also helps the company because you need two of 10 such experiments to work well for the organization to succeed.

So it's a combination of figuring out the company’s growth stage, what motivates top performers, and what kind of coaching other team members need from you. 

Experimentation is easier in the initial phase of growth. But, as companies grow, the margin for error narrows, and sustaining the same culture of experimentation is challenging. 

How have you been able to retain experimentation within the company? 

It starts from the top. The leadership has to be supportive of a culture of experimentation. 

My role was to understand the strategy and map the team, as well as their capabilities, systems, and technologies. Within this, experimentation can flourish. 

For example, we run a ton of experiments on our website. It could range from changing the color of the CTA button to changing the messaging. Experiments are a major contributor, or a meaningful contributor, to our leads and revenue. 

While experimentation depends on the culture and leadership, the team's onus is to ensure that the experiments are statistically valid, repeatable, and scalable.

“Report on wins not for the sake of it but because they’re meaningful markers for driving change. That’s how you build confidence within the organization and with the leadership.”

Abhishek G.P.
Former senior director of inbound growth, Freshworks

For successful experiments, you build a structure so that people can experiment confidently and with leaders' backing. They must be able to take informed risks. This is important, not just for tiding over economic downturns and driving technological innovations, but for organizations to evolve. 

Speaking of technology, marketers are extensively using AI. When I ask leaders what new skills marketers must be good at in the AI age, they share the obvious — storytelling and data analytics. 

Do you suggest anything beyond these two skills?

I've thought about this question a lot.

One important meta-skill (I call it meta for its compounding benefits) is to unlearn, learn, deploy, and iterate fast. You could call it the growth mindset or an experimentative mindset. 

You must be very agile in terms of how you think, how fast you learn, and how rapidly you deploy. Today, every marketer, irrespective of their job title, is a doer. 

Going forward, you must also look at a slightly different team makeup. You want people with an engineering mindset. And by engineering mindset, I mean someone curious about things, hacky with tools and technology, and can unlearn, learn, and iterate. You do not need to have an engineering background for this. 

They must be able to create high-quality prompts that reflect reality. This is where your judgment as a marketer comes in. It will be about leveraging prompts while figuring out the right solution using your marketer’s wisdom. 

During the growth phase, many companies struggle with finding the right balance between inbound and outbound strategies. How should they allocate resources between the two? What key factors should be considered?

A large part of this decision rests on timing, such as when you deploy or layer outbound on inbound. 

A  parameter you can consider includes asking yourself what your product portfolio looks like. 

Consider a product for sales teams. You must know the persona, their buying behavior, and the user. For instance, the end user within a sales team might be open to using and deploying the product alone. 

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Second, know your product's annual contract value (ACV). This determines how much you are willing to spend to acquire a particular prospect. It informs decisions about where and how much you spend, including SEO and events. 

Third, you need to know your focus market and understand how it buys. For instance, you could cater to North American and UK markets and non-English regions within the EU. North America could be a high investment-high returns market because of its high ACV compared to other markets. So, you might consider both inbound and outbound for the North American market and primarily inbound for other markets. 

Thank you — those were some great insights. At Freshworks, you were part of the team that led the shift from the product-led growth-only model to a PLG-plus sales-led motion. 

What do you mean by the new combination, and how did you lead this transition successfully? 

The GTM motions in SaaS comprise product-led growth (PLG), where the product does the magic, and the PLG sales-assist, which involves PLG and sales teams enabling purchases. 

Then, you also have the PLG-plus sales-led motion, which involves a high-ACV product. For this, you need a sales team in the region to sell. 

You can think of these motions along a spectrum. To know where you are in the spectrum, you must consider the factors outlined in the previous answer. 

But how do you progress along this spectrum?

In the case of Freshworks, we started by understanding our product portfolio. Some products were a natural fit for PLG sales-assist motion. 

Take customer support, for example. It’s a red ocean market. There are about 700 to 800 competitors. There, your product needs to do the magic in terms of creating a compelling experience, great onboarding, and ensuring your prospects attain value while using the product. 

At the same time, you want a sales team that can better understand the buyer's needs and enable them to buy the product. So, having a PLG sales-assist motion suited this market. 

When we decided to move to a PLG-plus sales-led motion, we asked ourselves: for which market and why the motion?

For instance, for Freshservice, which is slightly more mid-market and enterprise, it made sense for us to target specific markets like North America and the UK and layer on a direct sales and partner motion. This ensured higher and deeper touches with prospects and multi-threading into different accounts. We enabled salespeople to fly down to engage prospects and understand what they need. 

In this case, our choice was clear. It had to be PLG-plus sales-led motion with the secondary motion of PLG-plus sales-assist. 

But then question was: how do we measure the success of these approaches? 

First, you must devise a reliable lead-scoring model to help you determine lead quality and intent. Second, check the product's retention. Next, check for two-way connections between the sales teams and prospects. 

But when you move to a PLG-plus sales-led motion world, the set of metrics changes. You want to check the number of accounts you engage and the stage-wise pipeline view. 

To progress along the spectrum, an organization’s culture must be open to transitioning from one set of metrics to another. 

As companies progress along this spectrum, how do their costs vary?

When you layer a sales-led motion on top of a PLG motion, your costs go up as you must hire regional sellers and solution engineers to support sales teams. You don’t just do SEO anymore but also invest in events, and in account-based and partner channel marketing. 

Initially, the costs balloon as you move from the PLG to the PLG plus sales-assist motion. But over a period of time, this gets you higher ACV deals, and you get a good return on spending on both motions. 

You’ve also advocated for a product-channel-model fit for companies. Why is such an alignment important, and where can companies start?

I would credit this to Brian Balfour, who’s spoken about the product-channel-model fit. 

When you transition from a PLG to a PLG plus sales-assist motion, you want to think of what will break the system and avoid such situations. A tough pivot to the latter can make you ignore inbound channels and move entirely to doing more events and webinars. 

When you think of product-channel fit, you’re looking for channels that would work for your product. To avoid disruptions to the fit, you must slowly layer on each tactic, run experiments, measure results, and scale. 

I would also think of a model fit because, like I said, PLG or sales-led models have a different set of channels that seem to work for it. That’s why it’s essential to look at it as a triumvirate: product-channel-model fit. This helps you secure growth while moving from one motion to another without breaking systems. 

Is inbound foundational to the growth spectrum? What’s your view on companies focusing on outbound strategies without first setting a base of inbound?

I would think of it in two ways. Inbound is a great way to test your market. 

It's not uncommon for enterprises or startups to invest in paid ads or partnerships with platforms like G2 to understand inbound traffic. You want to check if the leads are converting, if there is a product-channel fit, and if the messaging is resonating. Inbound is a great way to validate your hypotheses. 

“In my opinion, the whole inbound-outbound construct is artificial. Different personas may use different channels, but having a fairly healthy organic presence is a must.”

Abhishek G.P.
Former senior director of inbound growth, Freshworks

Inbound is a way to make discovery easy for your prospects. So, different profiles of your prospects would use different sets of channels, and they could be inborn and outbound. What matters is that you cover a good distribution base. 

A fairly healthy organic presence is a great way to build engagement and your brand. Make sure your content is distributed well, and that you have good SEO and a presence across review sites. 

With inbound, you ensure you’re mapped out across the channels where your prospects are present and continue delivering refreshed content on those platforms. 

I think it's a great way to start for companies because prospects are more likely to traverse some of those channels before they even think of attending a webinar or event. So, a healthy inbound presence is super important because that’s how most prospects consume content these days. 

What’s your view on the growing emphasis on community-building and owned media for B2B companies? 

There are some foundational truths on which marketing rests. These include consumers trusting their peers because they value their opinions, participating in something that’s higher-order and gives them purpose in life, and wanting to hear out influencers. 

When you think of community and owned media, the principles remain, but the vehicle has changed. 

Community is all about exchanging opinions on a platform because I value you as my peer. It’s about coming to a group of people whom I hold in high regard when I have to make important decisions about my professional life. It could be a system or technological platform, too. Communities are here to stay. 

As for owned media, brands are going to be more important. 

“As distribution channels diversify and multiply, it matters that people know and trust your brand.”

Abhishek G.P.
Former senior director of inbound growth, Freshworks

And owned media helps you curate a set of voices to create a true narrative with a point of view that could help you move from one state to the next as a professional. 

Owned media is popular in B2C, where it thrives. It’s a slightly newer concept in B2B, and along with community building, constitutes durable endeavors to help scale marketing efforts. 

To learn more about growth marketing, connect with Abhishek G.P. on LinkedIn.

Edited by Supanna Das