gtm_motion_design v1.0.0

name: "gtm_motion_design" description: "Choose a go-to-market motion (product-led, sales-led, community-led, partner-led, or a hybrid) with selection criteria, per-motion cost math, and hybrid playbooks. Use when someone asks which GTM motion fits, whether PLG or sales-led is right, how to add a second motion, why a motion is losing money, or needs CAC and payback math per motion before hiring or spending." metadata: { "includeInPrompt": true }

GTM Motion Design

Purpose

Pick the primary go-to-market motion on evidence and arithmetic, then layer a second motion only when a named trigger fires. A motion is the repeatable model that creates demand, closes customers, and expands accounts. It fixes the team shape, the cost structure, and how buyers first meet the company, so choosing by fashion is expensive.

This skill covers motion selection only. For a solo founder building a first launch plan (positioning, first ten users, launch sequence), use founder_gtm_playbook instead. This skill starts where that plan ends: which engine carries growth, segment by segment, and what each engine costs per customer.

The four core motions, plus marketing-led inbound as a feeder:

• Product-led (PLG): the product is the acquisition, conversion, and expansion engine. Free tier or trial, self-serve signup, in-product upgrade prompts. Sales, if present, works product-qualified leads (PQLs) only.
• Sales-led: human reps drive the funnel end to end: outbound or inbound qualification, demo, proof of concept, procurement, close.
• Community-led: a practitioner or user community creates awareness, trust, peer support, and advocacy that turn into pipeline. Members get value before anyone asks them for value back.
• Partner-led: integration partners, agencies, resellers, or marketplaces source or close deals you cannot reach as cheaply direct.
• Marketing-led (inbound): content and search capture existing demand and feed one of the four motions above. It is a feeder, rarely a primary motion on its own.

Workflow

1. Segment before you choose

Never pick one motion for the whole company. Split the market into segments that differ on ACV, buyer, or buying process (example: self-serve teams, mid-market, enterprise). Run steps 2 to 4 per segment. Most motion fights are two segments arguing past each other.

Collect per segment, and never invent any of it:

1. ACV (annual contract value) today, and the realistic ACV after expansion.
2. Time to first value: can one user get a real result alone in under a day, or does value need data migration, configuration, and training?
3. User versus buyer: same person with a card, or a user plus a manager, procurement, security, and legal?
4. Buying risk: reversible trial purchase, or a contract with compliance review (SOC 2, HIPAA, data residency) and a signed MSA?
5. Distribution assets that already exist: a user community, integration partners in the same ecosystem, search demand for the problem, a product users invite colleagues into.
6. Gross margin and expected account lifetime (or monthly churn), from finance or cohort data.
7. Cash constraint: the longest CAC payback the company can fund.

2. Score each segment

Score the segment on the seven criteria in references/scoring-worksheet.md (1 to 5 each). The pattern, not any single score, points to the motion:

• Fast time to value, user equals buyer, low buying risk: product-led scores high.
• Slow or assisted time to value, a buying committee, high buying risk: sales-led scores high.
• Buyers already gather in a practitioner community and help each other: community-led becomes viable as a primary or feeder.
• Buyers already buy through an ecosystem, marketplace, or implementer: partner-led becomes viable.

Use the ACV bands in the worksheet as a starting heuristic only. The math in step 3 overrules the bands every time.

3. Run the cost math per motion

Run bin/motion_cost.py per segment with that segment's own inputs. CAC inputs must be segment-specific: a $350 self-serve CAC and an enterprise sales CAC never belong in the same run as if they were interchangeable.

Formulas the calculator uses:

• Monthly gross profit per account = (ACV / 12) x gross margin
• LTV = monthly gross profit x lifetime in months (lifetime = 1 / monthly churn when churn is what you have)
• CAC payback in months = CAC / monthly gross profit
• Max CAC for a target payback = target payback months x monthly gross profit
• Sales CAC from touch time = (hours per opportunity x fully loaded hourly rate) / win rate
• Partner CAC = rev share x (ACV / 12) x paid term months, plus enablement cost per deal
• Community CAC = monthly community cost / paid accounts attributed that month

Worked example, verified with the calculator (ACV $6,000, margin 80 percent, lifetime 30 months, monthly gross profit $400, LTV $12,000, max CAC for a 12-month payback $4,800):

• Product-led at $350 CAC: payback 0.9 months, LTV:CAC 34.3x. Passes.
• Community-led at $7,000 monthly cost and 10 paid accounts a month ($700 CAC): payback 1.8 months. Passes.
• Partner-led at 20 percent rev share for 12 months plus $150 enablement ($1,350 CAC): payback 3.4 months. Passes.
• Sales-led from touch time, 12 hours per opportunity at $95 per loaded hour and a 20 percent win rate ($5,700 CAC): payback 14.2 months, LTV:CAC 2.1x. Fails both planning checks at this ACV.

The same sales touch passes easily at $60,000 ACV. That is the whole lesson: a motion is not good or bad, it is affordable or unaffordable at a given ACV.

Planning targets are the caller's choice. A 3:1 LTV:CAC floor and a payback under 12 months are commonly used starting targets in B2B SaaS planning; state yours explicitly and do not present them as laws. Payback also has a cash meaning: every month of payback is a month you fund the customer before they fund you.

4. Decide, and write the kill criteria

Output one primary motion per segment, one optional feeder, and the evidence. Then write, before launch:

• The PQL or handoff definition if any hybrid is planned (step 5).
• The review date (one or two quarters out) and the two metrics that decide keep, fix, or kill: usually CAC payback and conversion at the motion's bottleneck step.
• The kill criteria in plain numbers. Example: "If sales-assist payback on mid-market stays over 15 months for two quarters at a win rate under 20 percent, we cut the touch to PQL accounts only."

A motion with no kill criteria becomes a headcount argument later.

5. Add a second motion only on a trigger

Hybrids work when the second motion feeds on the first motion's output. They fail when two motions compete for the same account with unclear ownership. Full playbooks are in references/hybrid-playbooks.md. The four standard hybrids:

1. PLG land, sales expand (product-led sales): self-serve lands teams, sales converts accounts that cross a PQL threshold into contracts with SSO, security review, and consolidated billing. Trigger: self-serve accounts regularly hit seat, usage, or spend ceilings they cannot self-serve past.
2. Community layered on PLG: community answers, templates, and events raise activation and retention for the self-serve base. Trigger: new users ask each other the same questions and power users already help unpaid.
3. Partner-led for one unreachable segment: an implementer or marketplace carries a segment your direct motion cannot reach at sane CAC. Trigger: direct CAC for that segment fails step 3 while a partner already owns the relationship.
4. Sales-led core, self-serve long tail: keep reps on high-ACV accounts, open a self-serve tier for accounts below the rep floor. Trigger: reps keep disqualifying small deals that still clear the PLG math.

Every hybrid needs three rules written down before it starts: account ownership (who gets credit and who can touch an account), the handoff trigger (the exact PQL signal), and the pricing guard (sales discounts never undercut the self-serve price in a way that trains buyers to wait for a rep).

Output Contract

Deliver a motion decision memo with:

1. Segment table: segment, ACV, buyer shape, time to first value, buying risk.
2. Score summary per segment from the worksheet, with the two criteria that decided it named in words.
3. Cost table per segment from bin/motion_cost.py: CAC, LTV, LTV:CAC, payback per motion, and the max CAC for the stated target payback.
4. Decision: primary motion and feeder per segment, plus what was rejected and the arithmetic or evidence that rejected it.
5. Hybrid plan if any: playbook name, handoff trigger, ownership rule, pricing guard.
6. Kill criteria and review date per motion.
7. Open inputs: every number the user still owes (real churn, real win rate, loaded rep cost) flagged as an assumption until supplied.

Operating Rules

1. Every factual claim about a market, benchmark, or company must come from a source the agent checked, or be labeled a planning assumption. Never invent win rates, CAC figures, or benchmark bands and present them as market data.
2. The math overrules the heuristic bands, and both overrule fashion. If PLG is trendy and the product needs a six-week implementation, the answer is sales-assisted, and the memo says why.
3. Fully loaded costs only. A sales CAC that excludes rep salary, tooling, and management time is a fiction that will pass any check. Same for community: staff time is the cost, even when members post for free.
4. Partner rev share is a CAC paid out of revenue over time, not free distribution. Model its full term cost per deal, and count the margin you no longer have when you price expansion.
5. Community-led is slow to start and compounds late. Do not judge it on month-one CAC, and do not promise it as a fix for a pipeline gap this quarter. Judge it on member growth, peer answer rate, and attributed accounts over quarters.
6. Do not run two primary motions at one segment. One primary, one feeder, clear ownership. Split by segment if two primaries are truly needed.
7. Re-run the math when ACV, win rate, or churn moves materially. A motion decision is a snapshot of inputs, not a permanent identity.