How to Build a Go-To-Market Strategy That Scales in Private Equity

Guest: Brian Gustason, Operating Partner at Craig Group
Host: Alex Rawlings, Founder of Raw Selection

🔍 Episode Summary:

In this episode, Brian Gustason shares practical insights on building scalable go-to-market (GTM) strategies for lower-middle-market, PE-backed companies. With over 25 years of operating and advisory experience, Brian explains how to move beyond traditional, backward-looking due diligence and implement forward-focused GTM strategies across marketing, sales, and customer success.

He walks through a real-world case study of transforming a $30M founder-led business—covering ICP development, sales process creation, lead qualification, and customer retention. Brian also discusses how marginal gains across key sales metrics (win rates, ACVs, churn) can compound into significant growth and how CEOs, sales leaders, and boards can drive accountability and execution.

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00 – Brian’s background and role at Craig Group
 01:30 – Why traditional due diligence often fails to assess growth
 03:00 – Real-world GTM transformation of a founder-led distributor
 06:00 – Building ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and prioritising markets
 09:00 – Improving lead qualification and using pre-suasion techniques
 14:00 – Structuring an effective, trainable sales process
 17:30 – Playbooks, documentation, and AI tools to support sales
 20:00 – Importance of coaching and ongoing process evolution
 23:00 – Growth 2.0: Compounding small improvements across KPIs
 27:00 – Who owns GTM? Role of CEO, sales leaders, and the board
 29:00 – Brian’s content recommendation: The 80/20 Principle and his LinkedIn series

📚 Resources:

• Craig Group: www.craiggroup.io
• Connect with Brian on LinkedIn: Brian Gustason
• Book Recommendation: The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch

Raw Selection partners with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies to secure exceptional executive talent. We focus on de-risking executive recruitment through meticulous search and selection processes, ensuring top-tier performance and long-term success.

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/
🌐 Visit Raw Selection: www.raw-selection.com

Looking to grow your team? Check out our Hiring Guides

for proven strategies, templates, and best practices to make smarter hires. 

Transcript

00:00
Welcome back to the Royal Selection Private Equity Podcast. Joining us today is Brian Gustafson, an operating partner and PBAT operator.  Today we're going deep dive into the lerm of the market  and building your go-to-market strategy.  Let's dive in.  Brian, can you share with us a brief insight into you, please?  Yes. 25 years of operating experience, uh operating and advisory experience started off

00:30
in consulting like many people in the PE world, uh both Booz Allen and PWC  moved into an operator role, including actually  a sales oriented role,  which was  a great start for me in terms of  giving me really good solid foundation for go-to-market. I worked in that VP of sales and marketing type roles for a number of years and then moved into the PE space. I have worked in interim roles as well as

01:00
growth-related projects. currently working with Craig Group,  which is based out of Houston. It's an advisory firm working with PE-backed lower middle market businesses to help them accelerate organic revenue growth, which as you know is very important for valuations. And we do the full go-to-market  continuum, so marketing, sales, and customer success improvement to accelerate organic revenue growth.

01:30
What's one mistake that you see private equity firms or portfolio companies making and what would you suggest to correct them? You know, I feel like  in many cases,  PE firms when they're starting their due diligence process, they're heavily reliant on traditional commercial due diligence.  And  in some cases, I think that that's  not always effective in terms of measuring the growth potential.

02:00
of uh an acquisition target, I do feel like traditional commercial due diligence is superficial in nature  and really doesn't measure effectively the ability for these firms to grow. ah And so I think  more go-to-market focused due diligence would be helpful on the front end um to make sure that the business can actually grow and meet the investment thesis.

02:25
Okay. So let's dive into a little bit more detail. what are you mentioned like traditional commercial due diligence? What is one or two things that you would suggest that firms should do differently or assess or look into or look for that would improve that process? Right. So, uh you know, I typically work in the lower middle market ah area. And so in many cases, these firms  are really don't have mature go to market uh infrastructure, expertise or teams.

02:55
And so in many cases, the traditional commercial due diligence will be backwards looking in terms of previous growth or previous  capabilities and not really look forward in terms of whether the revenue engine can actually scale. And I think that there are ways to do that even in very tight timeframes, right? Due diligence, oh you you may only have, I don't know, five to six week window to really uh evaluate the

03:25
growth potential of the  acquisition target.  think that teams can do a lot better by looking and really evaluating the scalability of the revenue engine going forward. And I don't see a lot of them doing that.  I think that's really why my team gets a lot of work as a result of that,  because they're not evaluating the growth potential of the business. The ability of the business to achieve the desired growth rates in year one and two.

03:53
In many cases, they're not evaluating that properly upfront. Makes sense. So let's dive into a go-to-market strategy. you can give us an example of a, know, keep it confidential, obviously, but something where you've been involved in, you deployed what you did, and then dive into kind of what you learned, what the result was as well. Right. So a great example would be a recent project that I worked on, which was...

04:20
This business was, it's an industrial distributor, value added distributor and relatively small, $30 million  in revenue. When  it was a founder led business. So the founder had developed relationships  and really hadn't developed, know, effective processes or systems. And so the PE firm acquired the business  and determined that...

04:47
the business really didn't have a go-to-market strategy in place. It was sort of, you know, uh ad hoc in nature and sort of opportunistic. So it's much better, as you would think, to have a structured, well-thought-out go-to-market strategy and implementation plan. So I was involved in developing that. So what we learned was that, um you know, A, they, again, primarily a relationship-based sales didn't really have

05:17
much marketing,  did not have a structured sales process, and then unfortunately was in a way sort of neglecting its existing customer base. So really didn't have much in terms of customer success, driving revenue with existing customers. And so what we did was we looked at it from all three of those angles. How could we develop a growth plan that incorporated better marketing, better sales, and then better after sales or customer success?

05:46
And so we worked with this business initially on the marketing side to identify what are called ideal customer profiles. You you need to ensure that you're aiming at the right markets, the right personas, et cetera, that will enable faster growth. So we actually prioritize instead of just accepting any type of business that walked in the door, we help them prioritize  to five  ICPs or five ideal customer profiles.

06:16
So we're able to do that. for better aiming, then we evaluated their lead generation, their demand generation and lead generation. Were they just accepting any leads that walk through the door or could they better qualify leads upfront develop, you know, a much higher quality  lead flow for their sales team. So the marketing side really was developing the better aiming, the better lead generation, highly qualified leads.

06:45
And then from a sales perspective, it was actually developing a sales process, an actual sales process uh that could be trained, uh that could be developed for training for their sales team so that they would  not be reliant on the founder like they were previously. uh And then developed sales enablement tools like  pitch  decks that were focused on the specific  markets, verticals that we identified, the ICPs.

07:13
and also a better coaching so that we could develop these team members, these sales team members into better  closers. And so after we did that, then again, we focused on what do you do with your existing customer base, right? So we learned that they didn't have an onboarding process for their new customers. They didn't have a training process. They didn't have a way to measure customer health, scorecards and so forth. And they really didn't have effective upsell or cross-sell

07:43
motions. You know, they were just relying on the customer to come to them if they needed something as opposed to being more proactive about upselling and cross selling. So again, we worked on marketing, sales and customer success as well as data, right? We  helped them stand up an effective CRM so that they could segment their opportunities. The net result of this was  much better, you know, highly qualified leads coming in the door inbound and outbound type leads. The close rates went up.

08:13
their average contract values went up, meaning that they were selling more, you know, more items, average order values were increasing,  and their customer churn was reduced.  Customers would stay longer, which benefited the lifetime customer value.  And at the end of the day, the firm has been growing much faster as a result of this structured go-to-market strategy and implementation.  Well, let's dive into that in a little bit more detail. As you mentioned, marketing first.

08:42
You mentioned the identification of the ideal customer profile, customer avatar. How did you go about identifying that? How did you find out who the  right people to sell to were? Well, a lot of it is looking at their own data and to understand, you know, who are their best customers? Do they share specific characteristics?  You know, if you accept any customer that walks in the door, it can be very difficult, uh not only from, you know, just your own resources, allocating your own resources, but just being efficient. So...

09:11
It was identifying where did they have legitimate strengths and legitimate expertise.  That was one aspect of identifying. so, and then what we did was we developed a process to evaluate and prioritize these markets.  The process that we used is, uh it's a very basic statistical process called the analytic hierarchy process, AHP. And what you do is you can develop criteria to evaluate markets. You wait.

09:41
those criteria, maybe some markets are more important than others. And then you have the executive team members run through and weight these,  actually run through this process of prioritizing  these markets based on  the criteria, the weighted criteria that have been set. And so you end up instead of, let's say you start with 10 potential markets, you can work with the teams to prioritize the top four based on these established

10:11
criteria. So that's one way to do it. But you do that in conjunction with looking at the data, which verticals have the most growth opportunities? Where are the most competitors where you may have, you may not have the ability to offer premium pricing. If it's really highly contested markets, maybe we don't focus on that market. And so there are  many different  ways to evaluate, you know, the different opportunities, but ideally you want to come up with say four to five.

10:40
markets that where your strengths will be valued by that customer base and where you have credibility. So if you're really strong in the construction market in the past, it's going to be easier to sell more in the future. And you can use what's called peer selling. It's easier to sell to more law firms if you already have  significant law firms selling experience, right? So all of this goes into prioritizing the markets where you want to double down.

11:09
and  identifying those markets that are weak that you want to suspend  or  get out of entirely. And then what parameters you mentioned about the qualification of leads. So what parameters did you put in place to qualify leads? Again, a lot of this is tied to the ideal customer profile, right? um The leads  who will actually value what you offer. You want to work with those. And think about it. If we have more...

11:39
highly qualified leads, it'll be easier to sell down the line, right?  Because they'll value what you say. So we look at a wide variety of things. look at,  again, the data. We look at uh win-loss analysis, for example. Where are you winning? Where are you losing? uh And, you know, clearly if you're winning, why are you winning? What is it about that specific lead? Is it a specific vertical? Is it a specific message that you are offering?

12:06
Or is it, are there specific team members, for example, who have expertise? Maybe you should be routing more of a specific type of lead to a sales team member because they have expertise and they can close them very effectively. So you're looking, you're constantly evaluating lead sources  and deciding where to double down. Where should you put more money in terms of uh paid search  or, you know, certain events, for example, you know,  to,

12:34
get more of those leads. also feel like,  you know, we talk about  a really interesting technique called pre-suasion. It's not persuasion, it's pre-suasion. And what that is is that where you're shaping the context of the meeting or the materials that you're sending out ahead of ever talking to um this lead in a sales conversation, you're shaping the conversation ahead of time. And so a lot of that is determining what's resonating

13:04
And should I send out more  of this content ahead of time because it's priming these leads ahead of the sales calls. So  again, a lot of this is determining is testing which lead sources are effective, which markets are effective  and your team members who's really effective at closing specific types of leads because I want to funnel more of those leads to those people.

13:32
You mentioned about materials and getting content to somebody first. What have you typically seen shared that typically works? You know, um it's interesting.  I feel like if you are,  if you have  a uh sales meeting set up, it's very effective to send information ahead of that meeting to shape the, your strengths, but also the topics that you'll discuss in that meeting. And that again goes down to that technique that I called

14:01
that I refer to called pre-suasion. How can I shape the meeting ahead of the meeting, right? And you can do so by having  information, links on your website that relate to specific, very relevant topics, or you can send out content, specific content that you wish to discuss during the meeting ahead of time. And so essentially you are priming this... um

14:26
sales opportunity or this lead ahead of your discussion to focus on the topics that you want to talk about. So uh that's an example of materials. That's a way to improve the odds of conversion ahead of time. And we work with a lot of companies on  using persuasion in marketing, sales and customer success. So it's about improving the odds that your conversation will be more effective and will focus on your strengths ahead of time.

14:53
Moving on to your sales process, what did the sales process look like once deployed in this, you know, we'll stick with the kind of first time P-backed business? So typically they lack a sales process at all, right? In many cases, I think I read an interesting quote, Forbes article quote that in 2024, that was, 60 % of all B2B salespeople lack any formal sales trainer.

15:22
I'm 60 % and just think about that. I mean, that's an astounding number. And so in lower middle market businesses, mean, many cases they don't have the resources to provide any training. And so a challenge is that you'll sort of like the wild west, right? Where you will have,  if it's not a sales led or a founder led approach where the founder is leading most sales calls, you'll have sales people who are very salesy, but lack any sales process at all. So.

15:51
In that case, what you have to do is identify a sales process, set up a sales process that can be measured, that has steps that will align to a CRM that you will hopefully, in many cases, these businesses actually don't have an effective CRM or they have spreadsheets. So you have to set up a sales process that align well to a CRM so that you can measure the progression of the  leads through the sales funnel. And so

16:21
in doing so, but it's very much helping to provide some structure to the sales team in terms of can they um have an effective sales discovery, for example, if it's a consultative or a technical sale, can they lead with an effective sales discovery where they are asking the right questions? Can  they  handle objections effectively? Can they close?

16:46
uh a sales opportunity effectively? Can they follow up effectively? A lot of salespeople drop the ball. They don't follow up after the initial sales discussion with the right information or the right case studies or whatever. So developing uh an effective sales process is  very important. And in many cases, a lot of these lower middle market businesses don't have a sales process to start with. they do see an immediate bump.

17:13
um once a process is installed and the team, the sales team is trained effectively on that sales process. It's much better than a random, you know,  again, wild, wild west type of situation.

17:28
So  when we look at that kind of sales process and everything documented,  how does that look from a documentation perspective? We've done internally with, we've put an LMS system in and everything's procedural based and lots of metrics. What does  very good look like? What does exceptional look like in a low middle market P back business from a sales process documentation?

17:51
Right. people talk about playbooks and I'm very much in favor  of a playbook. You want something that's referenceable and you want it to be online uh and, you know, digestible by the sales team members on demand. So maybe ahead of a sales call, they can refresh  and think about, you know, following the process. So yes, the sales organizations that warrant the highest multiples

18:19
tend to be those that have a structured process that includes a sales playbook. And by the way, the sales playbook is not static in nature, right? Where it's the playbook for years and years and years. can change  because, and in fact, it should be revisited probably least every six months in terms of relevance. Sales messaging changes, right? um The sales questions, effective questions change. ah So you want to have a sales playbook that is

18:47
that takes the  sales team from start to finish, but that is  adaptable,  that provides good scenario examples, examples of common objections and suggested answers,  and then  best practice techniques.  for the top salespeople on the team, I always like to better understand what is their process? What are they saying? What are they doing to close more? Is it just a favorable territory or do they have a technique?

19:17
Do they have a buzzwords that they use, right? And so really codifying that effectively, making sure that it's available to all team members and also available in training. When you bring on a new team member, you want to  ramp them as quickly as possible. So they should have really effective sales playbook, um you know, available to them  that they can use at the beginning as well as before every sales call. And again, a sales manager should use it effectively  after sales calls.

19:46
to evaluate whether did the salesperson actually follow the process? Did they use the  words? Fortunately, there are many AI tools out there also that can be used um to evaluate whether sales team members  are  using the right questioning, the right discovery, or handling objections effectively. That should be in line with the current sales playbook as well. And I will say to Alex that...

20:13
The same goes for account managers on the customer success side. They too should have a playbook,  running the gamut from  onboarding, how to do an effective onboarding, to ensuring adoption of your solution, to effective QBRs, quarterly business reviews, asking the right questions. then lastly, effective upsell and cross-sell techniques. I see so many account management teams devoid of any... uh

20:42
playbooks that they could use and it's a real missed opportunity. you mentioned earlier about coaching sales teams. So in these types of businesses, you mentioned the sales manager. Is that predominantly coming from the sales manager? Is that more the CEO, depending on the size of the business? Who does it and kind of how's that done effectively in regards to cadence and et cetera? Right. Great question. Unfortunately, in the lower middle market, I see very little coaching. Very low.

21:12
And it's an absolute necessity if the business wants to get to the next level. And you're right. In many cases, it should be the sales manager. However, uh sales manager in many cases is handling many different things, juggling many different balls, depending upon the size of  the sales team.  But coaching is really critical. And when you think about it, the best sports  stars in the world, they all have coaches, right? They are not left to their own devices and just...

21:42
in many cases they're being coached uh consistently, especially before big games. When you think about it, Q4 for most businesses  is  like the Super Bowl, right?  Or  for a business,  Q4. And yet many businesses are not coaching or ensuring that their team members are practicing effectively,  using the right, again, right techniques,  the right buzzwords, whatever is necessary, whether it's sales, whether it's the marketing team.

22:12
or whether it's the customer success team, right, for all of the renewals, how do we know that they are ready to go and will perform optimally? They need effective coaching. So I feel like definitely the  firms that are the most progressive, the ones that will grow the fastest, will use coaching.  And in many cases, it could be once a month. It should definitely be, uh you know,  and you could bring in an outside coach in many cases. uh

22:41
to supplement what the sales manager does or the VP of sale does.  You can,  and I think it's highly advisable. Again, if they are primed and ready to go  and  energized effectively, you're going to get better performance. Makes sense. Makes sense. So once  looking at, once this has been deployed, it's first time PBAB business deployed the kind of first iteration of  the sales process, the sales team.

23:10
What does the next level look like? Because that begins to go for the rounds, it begins to get through to an exit liquidity event or even the next investment. What does round two look like in making these businesses and sales process as strong as it can be? Right. again, I feel like there's always an evolution involved here. And so the belief that um any of these functions are static in nature, I think it's false. I think that there's  always ways to look for improvement.

23:40
For example, we look at, it's very easy to just focus on revenue,  high level types of KPIs.  There's always room for improvement in sales and in revenue growth by looking at sort of taking a step back and looking at other KPIs. So for example, we can improve not just with revenue, but we can improve with the number of qualified opportunities.  Just by improving that, the number of qualified opportunities for sales by 10

24:10
percent can drastically improve growth by increasing ACVs or average contract values, by improving sales win rates or sales cycle lengths. There are always ways that you can optimize. And I think when you think about it, uh you can have a compounding effect. It's really interesting actually. Imagine if you could increase the average contract value per sale by 10 to 20 percent. And then at the same time,

24:39
increase the sales win rate by 10 to 20 percent, you actually have a multiplicative effect and it actually compounds growth. So you look at the growth levers like number of qualified opportunities, average contract value, sales win rate, average sales cycles. And if you  marginally improve each of them by 10 to 20 percent, you can see 30 percent plus growth in the business.

25:07
So again, instead of thinking of a total transformation, growth transformation, think about  marginal improvements of key growth levers like those. And so that is really, that's taking it to growth 2.0, is looking at it at that level. What are the growth enabling initiatives and analysis that I can do to influence  those specific growth levers? When you get to that level,

25:34
You're going to see much faster growth. How can I reduce customer churn by 10 to 20 %? What impact will that have on my overall growth? Considerable. How can I use pricing? So dynamic pricing. So, you know, a lot of lower middle market businesses look at pricing as a once a year event, right? I'm going to increase prices, you know, by inflation or whatever it is. In reality, they should be looking at it from in terms of dynamic pricing.

26:03
How can I actually look at increasing certain  items that are particularly popular? um Which can I be selective on certain customer types on increasing their pricing because they're  not as price sensitive? So how can I use pricing, um the pricing lever to grow faster as well? So I'd be looking at all of these individual growth levers, and I do on a daily basis by the way, and how can I marginally improve them to compound growth  much faster? And so there's a lot of...

26:32
really interesting stuff that you can do.  And in reality, it's  not as complicated as we think because think about it, 10 % improvement, that's not a full scale transformation.  Most teams can handle 10 to 15 % improvement in any one of these levers. And they can do it in say,  in six to nine months. So we know what we need to do.  I suppose who does this?

27:01
sit with, depending on the size of organizations, scale up, don't know, that's a bit of a,  lots of different answers to that. But if I'm a chief executive of a private equity business and listening to this podcast or private equity firm, investor, partners thinking, yeah, we could do with some of this into our portfolio company.  Who do we now look at to go, well, okay, we've got this podcast, I'm just going to send it to X within the firm.  Who kind of sits within the responsibility of making sure this deployed, holding people accountable.

27:29
and coming up with the kind of first iteration around all this. Well, you know, I believe certainly in the lower middle markets,  in many cases you don't have a CRO.  The business isn't big enough. It just depends on the size, right, and how you define lower middle market. So  clearly the CEO is on the hook for this growth ultimately and  owns the growth number. So  I think that, you know, the CEO,  whoever leads

27:58
the various go-to-market functions. in some, in most cases, they'll have a VP of sales, uh a VP of marketing, um or head of marketing, um know, uh a head of account management. Again, I think it's, in many cases you see growth um that is siloed in nature. So they'll look at things in terms of just sales or just marketing or just account management, customer success. I think that this applies to

28:26
all of growth. think growth needs to be viewed as a system. So, and who's responsible? The CEO is responsible,  but also anyone who  is attached to growth. So again, that would be sales, marketing, customer success. I also feel like the board of directors would need to be um very aware  of  this,  of  what's a modern go-to-market, right? And what's available to them. So as the CEO is  presenting,

28:55
the board of directors, people need to be familiar with all of the various options that are available to them to grow more effectively. What are the modern ways of doing things? And so, as we talk about a lot of this, again, there are a lot of people who have to be made familiar, but it's, at the end of the day, the CEO owns it and is responsible. Makes sense. Makes sense. I think that gives it a good insight, certainly to the go-to-market strategy and what needs to be done there.

29:24
What do you read, watch, listen to that you recommend that others should check out? Brian. You know,  I spend a lot of time  writing uh on LinkedIn. I don't know if people know. mean, have my own series  of uh posts. It's P.E. growth, headwinds, and tailwinds. So that's a reference to headwinds, what inhibits growth, and tailwinds,  what facilitates growth, right? So P.E. growth, headwinds, and tailwinds.

29:51
I spent a lot of time in there and there are a lot of great experts like yourself, Alex. I mean, you put out a lot of great content,  you and your team.  I do a lot of reading as well. I recommend uh a book that I've read recently that has really influenced sort of my thinking.  Actually, I've reread it. I read it many years ago, but it's called The 80-20 Principle. ah Not sure if you're familiar with it, but I think it's particularly important in private equity because there's only so much time in an investment hold period.

30:20
You know, what is it, five to seven years on average these days? And so you really have to think about how you prioritize and sequence value creation initiatives, including growth. And so I really leverage the 80-20 principle in almost everything that I do. What is, you who are my top 20 % customers generating 80 % of value? This would be for a client or for a particular business. Where do I get, you know, 20, what are the top 20 % leads?

30:49
what are the top 20 % markets?  Who among my team are the top 20 % salespeople? ah And once you have that 80-20 thinking, then you can apply to 80-20 analysis. And so I'd recommend that a lot of people  reread that book by Robert, I think it's Richard Koch, who wrote it, 80-20 Principle. It's fantastic way of  thinking for private equity because again, you have to...

31:15
prioritize and double down on what's working. And I think it's a tremendous book that you can use um to frame your thinking  about growth as well. Perfect. And if anybody wishes to get in touch with you, post this podcast. Brian, how best to get in touch, Yes. uh Again, you can find me on LinkedIn, Brian Gustafson, or you can reach out to me. I'm a partner at Craig Group, and our website is www.craiggroup.io.

31:42
Craiggroup.io, or you can reach out to me  again via LinkedIn, happy to connect and discuss growth and how I can help your PE portfolio. Ryan, thank you very much for coming on to the Pride Equity podcast. My pleasure. Thank you, Alex. Thank you very much for everybody tuning in yet again. Until the next time, keep smashing it, and thank you very much for listening.