Go-to-Market Strategy Examples: What B2B Companies Can Copy

In the year before it listed, Atlassian spent about 21% of its revenue on marketing and sales. Snowflake, in the year before its own listing, spent about 111%.

Both sell software to businesses. Both did very well. The difference isn't that one was smarter. It's that they sold very different things, at very different prices, to very different buyers, and each built the motion its price could pay for.

That's the thing I'd want you to take from any go-to-market strategy example. The tactics are the least portable part. The conditions underneath them are what you can actually use.

Below are four companies, each with a different motion, broken down from their own SEC filings rather than from press coverage or folklore. Then an anonymised UK example from our own work, the mistakes these companies avoided, and how to turn any of it into a plan for your business.

The Four Examples at a Glance

Here's the short version. Every company fact further down comes from that company's own filing, quoted and linked. Figures are as of each filing's date and will have changed since.

The clearest single number for comparing motions is how much of each pound (or dollar) of revenue goes on marketing and sales. We worked it out from each company's published income statement:

A ratio above 100% means Snowflake spent more on selling than it brought in. That's only sensible when each customer is expected to grow a lot after signing, which, as you'll see, is exactly what Snowflake's model relied on.

How to Read a GTM Example: Five Things to Look At

Every go-to-market example can be read through the same five questions. Ask them of any case study you come across, including the ones on this page.

1. Segment. Who exactly did they sell to first?
2. Entry point. How does a buyer start: a free trial, a demo, a partner, a community?
3. Motion. Who does the selling: the product, a sales team, partners or users?
4. Price model. What does the price allow? A low price can't fund a field sales team.
5. Conditions. What had to be true for it to work? Copy the conditions, not the tactics.

Atlassian: Product-Led

Atlassian is the classic product-led example. It sold team software such as Jira and Confluence online, with free trials and automated checkout, and grew through word of mouth inside organisations. Its 2015 F-1 is direct about it: "We rely on word-of-mouth and low-touch demand generation to drive trial, adoption and expansion of our products within customers." And: "we do not employ a traditional, commissioned direct sales team."

At the time of filing it reported "more than 51,000 customers" in "more than 160 countries", and revenue of $319.5 million for the year to June 2015, up from $148.5 million two years earlier (Atlassian Form F-1, 9 November 2015).

One detail people tend to forget: even Atlassian didn't sell everything itself. The same filing says "Sales through indirect channels comprised approximately 25% of total revenues for fiscal 2015", including in regions that need local-language support. Product-led didn't mean product-only.

Shaun Clowes, a former Head of Growth at Atlassian who spent six years at the company through its listing, explained how the low-touch model scaled in this 2018 talk:

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What you can copy: if your price is low and the product shows its value quickly, let buyers try and buy without talking to anyone. If either condition is missing, this motion will stall.

Snowflake: Sales-Led

Snowflake went the other way. Its 2020 S-1 says: "We primarily focus our selling efforts on large organizations and sell our platform through a direct sales force". It paired that with consumption pricing, "only charging customers for the resources they use."

The two choices work together. A direct sales force is expensive, so it only makes sense if each account becomes large. Consumption pricing lets accounts grow without a new negotiation. Snowflake reported a net revenue retention rate of "158% as of July 31, 2020", which roughly means existing customers were spending 58% more than a year before. By then it had 3,117 customers, including 146 of the Fortune 500 (Snowflake Form S-1, 24 August 2020).

That's how a company can spend more than its revenue on selling and still make sense to investors. The spending is a bet on accounts growing for years.

What you can copy: if each account is worth enough to pay for a salesperson's time, sell directly to a defined list of accounts and plan for expansion from day one. If your accounts stay small, the maths won't work.

HubSpot: Partner-Led

HubSpot is the clearest partner-led example in B2B software. Its latest annual report says it focuses on "mid-market business-to-business (“B2B”) companies", which it defines as those with between 2 and 2,000 employees. Free tools are the entry point, and paid subscriptions follow.

The distinctive part is who does much of the selling. "Our Solutions Partners promote our brand and offer our customer platform to their customers." These partners are agencies and other service providers that help businesses with strategy and implementation. And they matter a lot: Solutions Partners and the customers they referred made up "approximately 25% of our Customers as of December 31, 2025, and approximately 49% of our revenue" for the year (HubSpot Form 10-K for 2025, 11 February 2026).

A quarter of the customers bringing in about half the revenue tells you partner-sourced customers tend to be bigger. That makes sense. An agency doing a full implementation usually brings a client who needs more.

What you can copy: if your buyers already rely on advisers (agencies, accountants, integrators), make those advisers successful with your product and they become your channel. It's slower to start, because partners need training and a reason to care.

Figma: Community- and Product-Led, With Sales Added

Figma grew bottom-up. Designers adopted the browser-based tool, sharing work by link pulled collaborators in, and free users converted to paid plans once Figma started charging in 2017. Its 2025 S-1 puts it plainly: "Figma’s product and bottoms-up adoption has historically driven much of our growth".

The community was a deliberate part of it. The filing describes "more than 200 Friends of Figma chapters" around the world, which organised over 650 events in 2024.

But the same filing is just as clear that bottom-up wasn't enough on its own: "we quickly recognized that we needed a direct sales model to serve larger customers. We hired our first sales rep in 2018". By March 2025 it had more than 40 paid customers each worth over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (Figma Form S-1, 1 July 2025).

Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder and CEO, talked through the early choices that shaped that growth at Y Combinator's AI Startup School in June 2025:

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What you can copy: if your users talk to each other and share their work, invest in that community, and add sales when large customers need more than self-serve can give them.

Most Companies End Up Mixing Motions

Very few companies run one pure motion for long. Atlassian sold a quarter of its revenue through partners. Figma added sales reps. HubSpot has its own sales team alongside its partners.

Buyers want the mix too. In a 2023 McKinsey survey of 625 software buyers, 65% said they strongly prefer both sales-led and product-led experiences when buying. The same study looked at 107 listed B2B software companies and found that only a few product-led ones actually achieved outsized performance.

At the same time, buyers are doing more on their own before they talk to anyone. Gartner's 2025 survey found 61% of B2B buyers prefer an overall rep-free buying experience. And 6sense's 2025 buyer research found four out of five deals were won by the supplier the buyer already favoured before first contact.

Put those together and the practical answer for most B2B companies is a blend. Let buyers learn and start on their own (published prices, clear pages, a free first step), and have a person ready when the deal gets big or complicated.

Tomasz Tunguz, a General Partner at Theory Ventures, made a broader point about where these motions come from:

Browser-based design gave Figma sharing by link. Cloud infrastructure gave Snowflake usage pricing. The motion grew out of something specific about the product. That's worth asking of your own offer: what about it makes one way of selling easier than the others?

A UK Example (Anonymised Sample)

The big-company examples are useful, but most of our readers don't sell software to the Fortune 500. Here's a smaller one. Our anonymised Go-to-Market Build sample comes from a real engagement with a UK workflow-automation company, client details redacted. Its motion followed from evidence rather than imitation:

• Segment: professional-services firms (accountancy, legal, consulting), where interviews and audience data showed the strongest response.
• Position: the main competitors used broad "for everyone" messaging and none explicitly served professional-services operations, so the position was built around that gap.
• Plan: a 90-day roadmap with the assets and indicators to test it, rather than a channel borrowed from a larger competitor.

No new product and no new sales team. Just a clear choice of segment, written into every page, slide and email. If you want to go deeper on how to find that kind of gap, our guide to competitive intelligence for B2B companies covers the method.

The Biggest GTM Mistakes These Examples Avoid

Each of the four avoided a mistake that sinks a lot of go-to-market plans:

• A motion the price can't pay for. Atlassian's low prices fitted self-serve. Snowflake's large accounts fitted direct sales.
• Targeting everyone. Each started with a defined group: software teams, large organisations, mid-market B2B companies, designers.
• Ignoring who the buyer already trusts. HubSpot reached buyers through agencies they already used.
• Treating the motion as fixed. Figma added direct sales when larger customers needed it.

The first one is the easiest to check. Work out what a typical first deal is worth and what it costs you to win one. If the second number is bigger and accounts don't grow, the motion is wrong, however well it's run.

Turning an Example Into Your Own Plan

Pick the example whose conditions match yours: your price point, your buyer, how quickly the product shows its value, and who your buyers already trust. The one you admire most is often the wrong one to copy.

For most established B2B companies with 10 to 250 staff, the honest starting point is often founder-led or senior-led sales, with the website and published material doing more of the early work. That describes a lot of firms. The UK alone had 258,520 private sector businesses with 10 to 249 employees at the start of 2025, according to the Department for Business and Trade. My guess is that few of them have accounts big enough to fund a field sales team.

Tunguz has a useful view on what that early selling really is:

In other words, the founder's early sales calls are partly product and solution design. That's worth remembering before you hire a salesperson and expect them to repeat it.

Then write your own plan using the seven parts in what is a go-to-market strategy? and its free template. Use the STP method to choose the segment, and test the offer or price change before you roll it out. Run the readiness checks before you commit the quarter, or try the free Go-to-Market Readiness Scorecard to see where you're weakest.

Where ThriveFinity Fits

We help established B2B companies make the choices in this article and build the assets that carry them. If you need one decision answered first, such as which segment to lead with or which motion your price can support, a Decision Brief (£749, 48-hour target) gives you a signed recommendation and a 90-day plan.

If you need the whole thing built, the Go-to-Market Build (£3,999, 10 days) delivers positioning, a 5-page website, a 20-slide sales deck, a 3-email sequence and a 90-day roadmap from one evidence base. The Decision Brief fee is credited in full to a Build booked within 30 days.

We're not the right choice if you need a partner programme designed and run, a sales team hired and managed, or a community built over years. Those are ongoing jobs for people inside your business. And if you're comparing fixed-price providers, our guide to fixed-price go-to-market services lists what to ask.

Pranav Unni

Founder · ThriveFinity Connect on LinkedIn →

Pranav Unni is the founder and lead verifier of ThriveFinity. He reads and signs every paid deliverable personally, and writes about go-to-market decisions for established B2B companies.