9
min read
The Six GTM Motions of B2B SaaS
Every B2B SaaS GTM motion calls for a different marketing strategy. The one that worked for Notion won't necessarily work for you.
Sofya Leonova
Co-founder + Marketing Director
When Bobby Pinero launched Equals in 2022, every user had to get on a call with the team and pay up front. No trial, no self-serve. Five months later, Equals raised a $16M Series A from a16z on that motion.
Then everyone — users, advisors, investors — told him to lower the friction. Add a free plan. Be more like Notion, Figma, Airtable, Canva. So he did. He killed the gated onboarding, slashed prices, and launched freemium. Active companies 4x'd in the first weeks.
Then it broke. Engagement collapsed. Retention tanked. For every new company that signed up, another one dropped off. By the time Pinero killed freemium six months later, the business had been set back by the better part of a year. As he later shared: "It was easy to look at the darlings of SaaS — companies like Notion, Figma, Airtable, Canva — and think that what worked for them would work for us."
Equals had borrowed the wrong playbook. The marketing tactics of horizontal product-led growth (PLG) companies at a time when the product was built for a horizontal sales-led growth (SLG) motion. Pinero was a 7-year Intercom veteran, the first finance hire there, a board member. Exactly the kind of operator you'd think would know better. Yet he borrowed the playbook because Equals was a horizontal product, the most visible horizontal SaaS playbooks at the time all came from PLG companies, and advisors and customers both pushed in that direction.
This article is about matching your GTM motion to the right marketing strategy. But there's a deeper layer to the Equals story, and it's the prerequisite for everything else that follows.
The ICP foundation
The freemium failure was the visible event. The deeper problem was that Equals didn't yet know which customer it was for, or what specific value the product delivered to that customer. Without those two things in place, no marketing playbook would have worked. PLG, SLG, or anything in between.
The fix wasn't "switch playbooks." It was verticalize. Equals stopped selling to anyone with a spreadsheet and went deep on one use case: ARR reporting for finance leaders at SaaS companies. As Pinero put it on LinkedIn: "We found 3 types of people who would lay down their LIFE for our product. And targeted only those people." ARR tripled. Onboarding got dramatically better. And, tellingly, eighteen months later they re-launched self-serve, the same motion that had broken the business the first time.
A defined ICP and a clear understanding of the value your product delivers to that ICP are prerequisites for picking the right GTM motion, and therefore the right marketing strategy. Without them, any framework you apply will mislead you, because any playbook applied to an undefined audience will produce the same kind of result Equals got the first time around.
Every Series A company has to do this work. The pattern we see at Proof Dept isn't that some companies need to verticalize and others don't. It's that everyone does. The cost of postponing it is just highest for PLG companies, because the breakage is fastest and most visible. SLG companies pay the same cost more slowly, because the sales team papers over the ICP problem in 1:1 conversations.
Once you’ve done that foundational work, what follows is matching your motion to the marketing strategy that fits.
The framework
We tend to flatten a varied, multidimensional B2B SaaS market into two seemingly interchangeable GTM motions (product-led and sales-led) and wonder why the strategy that worked for Notion doesn't work for us. I think that’s where a lot of our blindspots come from.
There are six GTM motions worth understanding for the purposes of marketing strategy, defined by two primary axes (horizontal vs. vertical market; product-led vs. sales-led GTM) and three secondary axes that show up inside each motion (ACV, buyer type, technical depth): Horizontal PLG, Horizontal SLG, Horizontal Hybrid, Vertical SLG, Vertical PLG, and SMB.
Each motion is a different GTM operating system, and each calls for a different marketing strategy. The sections below describe both: what the motion looks like, and the marketing strategy that fits it.
Tomasz Tunguz has argued since 2015 that vertical SaaS requires a structurally different GTM than horizontal SaaS. The framework here extends that observation by crossing it with the PLG-vs-SLG axis.
All models are wrong; some are useful. Companies blur the lines, transition between motions, and sometimes occupy two at once. That said, if you're at the Series A stage, you are almost certainly closer to one of these motions than to the others, and that proximity should determine where your marketing investment goes first.
1. Horizontal PLG
Calendly, Linear, Loom, Notion, Canva, Webflow, Replit. All started in this motion before moving to Horizontal Hybrid. In this motion, the product spreads through use. Someone uses it, sends an artifact to a colleague, the colleague signs up. ACV stays low ($0–$10K), customer count is large, and the motion is capital-efficient. The buyer and the user are the same person.
For a genuine Horizontal PLG company at Series A, the highest-leverage marketing investment is the product itself. Activation rate, time-to-first-value, in-product virality, and the shareability of the artifact your users create. Around the product, growth marketing (lifecycle email, referral mechanics, expansion loops, PQL definitions) is where the marketing work happens. Content matters, but the form is practitioner-credible writing distributed where the community already lives, not gated whitepapers. Events are mostly skipped at this stage. Paid is mostly wasted on sub-$10K ACV without a viral loop riding on top of it. Kyle Poyar at OpenView has done some of the deepest public work on what specifically makes PLG marketing different from sales-led marketing.
The thing this motion gets wrong is staying horizontal too long, even after the niche they actually win in has surfaced. Horizontal products are never actually horizontal at Series A. At Series A, Linear sold to design-conscious engineering leaders at SaaS startups who hated Jira. Figma sold to product designers tired of file-versioning hell with Sketch. Notion sold to indie hackers and YC operators. All three look horizontal today but they verticalized by buyer discipline at Series A.
Horizontal SaaS follows a curve. You start horizontal while you're figuring out your ideal ICPs. You niche down hard around Series A to cross the chasm by winning a beachhead (Geoffrey Moore named this dynamic in Crossing the Chasm in 1991, and it still holds). Then you slowly expand horizontally over time.
When a horizontal PLG company at Series A fails to verticalize, the breakage is fast and visible. The PLG motion runs on product marketing, and product marketing runs on a clear ICP. If you don't have a clear ICP, your onboarding is built for a generic user. So when real people sign up, the product walks them through something that doesn't match who they are or what they came to do. They don't hit the "oh, this is for me" moment. Most of them leave before they ever get value from the product, which means very few signups turn into active users.
AI has changed the bar for this motion more than for any other. An aha moment that used to take ten minutes now has to land in under sixty seconds. Products that ask users to configure anything before showing value are losing trial users to AI-native competitors that don't. Onboarding is now the most important marketing surface area in this motion, and activated signups (not website traffic or monthly signups) is the main PLG marketing metric that matters.
2. Horizontal SLG
Gong, HubSpot, Salesforce in earlier years, and the AI-native cohort: Glean, Sierra, Decagon. Top-down GTM from day one. The buyer is a VP or department head. ACV is meaningful ($25K–$500K+). Sales cycles run months to quarters.
In this motion, marketing's job is to build brand and category authority. The work the product does in PLG, but for buyers who can't try-before-they-buy. You're either creating a new category (Gong with revenue intelligence, Sierra with AI agents for customer experience) or reframing an existing one. The work is to be the company that defines how the buyer thinks about the problem, and to do that publicly enough that you become the first vendor on every shortlist.
At launch, this is what matters: 3–5 named design partners with quantified outcomes, an A-tier press exclusive on launch day, an operator-angel cap table as social proof, and founder-led enterprise sales for the first 12–18 months. The content moat (original research, founder thought leadership, peer-credibility podcasts, eventually a flagship conference) comes next, once the launch flywheel has earned the runway. Gong's anonymized sales-conversation data turned into research reports the rest of the industry quoted set the template.
The narrow-positioning rule from Horizontal PLG applies here too, with a twist. Horizontal SLG companies can stay horizontal longer than they should because salespeople sell into whichever buyer is in front of them. A demo can be reshaped on the fly to fit a fintech CFO or a healthcare COO. That flexibility masks the ICP problem for a year or two, until the company tries to scale paid acquisition or marketing-sourced pipeline and discovers that "we sell to everyone" doesn't compile into a campaign. Verticalize early, expand horizontally as you grow.
The pattern we see most consistently at Proof Dept in this motion is sales enablement underinvestment in case studies, one-pagers, consistent pitch decks. One or two sharp, quantified case studies per month is the investment that disproportionately moves enterprise pipeline at this stage.
The related pattern is channel sprawl. Series A teams in this motion try to run paid, SEO/AEO, ABM, events, podcasts, OOH, community, and partner co-marketing simultaneously. Each channel gets a token investment and none reach the depth required to produce pipeline. The companies that move fastest pick two or three channels and go deep before adding more.
3. Horizontal Hybrid
Figma, Stripe, Datadog, Vercel, Cursor, ElevenLabs. Many of these started as Horizontal PLG and shifted to Horizontal Hybrid by expanding into enterprise contracts. Some ran this motion intentionally from the beginning. Individual practitioners adopt the product bottom-up; procurement signs the check top-down. Two distinct audiences must be credentialized simultaneously.
Marketing's job is credentializing for two audiences without compromising either.
On the practitioner side, the product itself does the heaviest acquisition work: free tier, viral artifacts, bottom-up team adoption. Sitting on top: world-class documentation, developer relations, community infrastructure, and where applicable, open source as marketing surface. Practitioner-credible technical writing lives inside the product or community, not in gated whitepapers.
On the procurement side, the channels mirror Horizontal SLG: category brand, ROI case studies, security and compliance content, ABM, executive briefings. Figma is one of the most recognized examples of doing both well. A design-credible community presence sitting alongside increasingly serious enterprise content as it grew. Stripe is the same pattern in developer form: engineering-first docs that convert indie developers, sitting underneath gravitas-laden brand work that convinces the CFO at a Fortune 500.
AI tools that go from PLG to enterprise expansion are passing through this motion faster than non-AI products did. Cursor compressed what took Figma half a decade into eighteen months. If your product is AI-native, the transition will happen faster than you plan for, and the procurement-grade content layer needs to exist before you think you need it.
4. Vertical SLG
Harvey, Toast, Procore, Veeva, Clio, Mews. Industry-specific software, sold top-down to professional buyers in a defined vertical. The deal includes workflow consulting, implementation, and often embedded financial services. ACV is often high ($25K–$500K+) and lock-in becomes structural once a customer is in.
The marketing playbook here barely overlaps with the horizontal motions. Your buyer is at industry conferences, reading trade press, talking to peers on industry-specific Slack and LinkedIn. Your marketing has to demonstrate domain depth in every artifact: language, references, integrations, customer logos. Prove you understand restaurants, or construction, or pharma by showing it. Be at the right industry event, get quoted in the trade publication, win a customer logo that the buyer's peer admires.
Events are the top investment in this motion. Content is industry-credible, ideally co-authored with practitioners. Case studies are your number one sales tool.
AI is being absorbed into this motion as proprietary-data-driven product features. Toast's Benchmarking, Veeva's patient data, ServiceTitan's dispatch. These are defensive moats built on industry-specific data nobody else has. The positioning move isn't "we have AI"; it's "we have AI trained on data no foundation model provider can replicate."
5. Vertical PLG
The newest and smallest motion, but possibly the fastest-growing. Heidi Health, Freed, Suki, Spellbook. Industry-specific software adopted bottom-up by individual practitioners: clinicians, lawyers, and other licensed professionals. Three years ago, this motion essentially didn't exist at scale.
The reason it exists now is that AI removed the implementation overhead that previously made vertical software enterprise-only. A clinician can now adopt an AI scribe like Freed or Heidi during their first patient consultation and feel the value immediately, without IT involvement or org-wide rollout. The single-practitioner motion that wasn't viable for Procore in 2014 is suddenly viable for Heidi in 2026.
The marketing playbook is closest to Horizontal PLG with two important differences. First, the language has to be practitioner-credible in a way that B2B SaaS language is not. Heidi doesn't market to clinicians the way Calendly markets to ops teams. The proof points are clinical-workflow-specific, not generic "save time" claims. Second, the community is professional peers, not B2B SaaS buyers. Marketing happens in practitioner-specific podcasts, peer LinkedIn networks, professional society sponsorships, and continuing-education content.
The window in which AI makes this motion possible is also the window in which it's open to competitors. If you're an early-stage vertical PLG founder, the strategic urgency is real: move fast, build the practitioner community moat early, and start thinking about the practice-level upmarket motion before your closest competitor does.
6. SMB
Early Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Shopify on the horizontal side. Jobber, Housecall Pro, Honeybook, early Mindbody on the vertical side. Software sold to owner-operators running small businesses — the generalist running her own shop, not a procurement committee and not a specialist team. ACV is low ($300–$3K) and volume is the game. The buyer is the owner-operator, and they buy software the same way they buy everything else for their business: by asking their AI agent of choice, reading reviews from peers, and picking the option that looks like the surest bet.
What matters for marketing in this motion is being the recognizable, safe default for a category. Your SMB customer doesn't want to be early. They want to use what their peers use. They search "best accounting software for contractors" or "best CRM for plumbers" or "booking software for salons" and pick something on the first page that has thousands of reviews. The marketing job is to be that result. That means winning on organic and paid SEO, and increasingly AEO, building a content library deep enough that long-tail keywords pull traffic for years, and making the product so frictionless to set up that a non-technical owner can be in and using it on a Tuesday night.
Brand here is closer to consumer brand than B2B brand. It needs to feel approachable, trustworthy, and recognizable. Not innovative. Innovation is risk, and your customers are paying you to avoid risk. Layer trade or function-specific proof on top: feature real practitioners by name and trade, speak the practitioner’s language, get recommended inside their own communities.
The AI shift to watch in this motion is that incumbents are exposed in a way they weren't before. SMB owners are willing to switch if a new tool can credibly promise to set itself up in minutes instead of weeks. If you're entering this motion now, the wedge is time-to-value.
The takeaways
Message for the motion you're actually running. The messaging that works for a PLG company won't work for a SLG company even if the product is identical, because the buyer, the context, and the moment of evaluation are different. A PLG user is at their desk mid-task, deciding in five minutes whether to try your product. The messaging has to be concrete and immediate. A sales-led buyer is sitting through a demo as part of a multi-month procurement evaluation, deciding whether to bet a $200K contract on you. The messaging has to deliver category authority and ROI evidence. Same product, different positioning, different messaging, because the person reading it and their context aren't the same.
Focus on the channels that fit your motion, and learn the channel-specific best practices for that motion. A Horizontal PLG playbook and a Vertical SLG playbook share almost no channels in common, and the ones they do share are run differently. Channel depth beats channel breadth at the early growth stage. The Series A teams that get this right pick two or three channels and go deep before expanding.
Hire marketing leadership to execute on those channels with that defined strategy. Your first marketing hire has to understand marketing for your specific GTM motion. Most mid-level marketers have only worked across one or two motions in their career, and few are comfortable flexing between motions. Hiring a great Horizontal PLG growth marketer into a Vertical SLG company is one of the most expensive miscasts.
Getting your motion and your marketing strategy right faster and earlier matters more now than it used to, because AI is compressing company lifecycles. The window between Series A and the point where you need a working marketing engine is now shorter than ever.
