13 signs it might be time to update your go-to-market strategy
- Disappointing growth: Your company’s growth rate is underwhelming, and/or lagging the competition, and/or below average growth rates in your industry. Other symptoms of disappointing growth: your customers buy but don’t adopt/use; your customers adopt but still churn; your customers buy once, but don’t renew; your customers renew, but don’t cross-sell or up-sell. Any of these symptoms point back to your GTM strategy (among other things).
- Misalignment: There is persistent and/or significant misalignment among your sales, marketing, product and customer success stakeholders regarding your growth goals, priorities, success measures, budgets, role clarity, integrated growth plays/motions, and how teams should be orchestrating their efforts.
- You go to market in silos: Your brand efforts operate on an island. Your demand marketing is on an island. Your product or portfolio marketing and sales enablement is on an island. Your SDR teams are on an island. Your sales teams are on an island. Your Customer Success team operates on an island. This is a growth killer. And a properly developed and executed GTM strategy and growth plan will absolutely improve it.
- No real ideal client profile (ICP): You don’t know who your best target prospects and customers are — i.e. the ones for whom you are a particularly great fit, who you win at a higher rate, who you keep longer, and who are more profitable (and because of all of that, they deserve special focus and budget). Or you have a poorly defined or an out-of-date ICP. Or you only have an ICP for prospects but not for your customers. Or you’re not defining or validating your ICP with data and AI tools.
- Disagreement about your ideal client profile: There is disagreement across your GTM team (product, marketing, sales, customer success) about your ideal client profile.
- Uncertain targeting: Not knowing how and where to efficiently reach your target prospects and customers.
- Inefficient growth: You need to improve the cost effectiveness and efficiency of your integrated growth program and its underlying campaigns. (Truth: confusion at the go-to-market strategy and cross functional alignment layer is the number one cause of inefficiency in most growth programs, campaigns and plays.)
- Weak value proposition, positioning, and messaging: There is a serious lack of confidence, disagreement, or confusion across Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and Product regarding the best positioning, value propositions, and messaging for engaging, winning, and retaining your prospects and customers. This leads your organization toward either milquetoast, me-too, jargon salad, or a Lord of the Flies-esque version of every-man-for-himself messaging. Or both. Meanwhile, your prospects and customers get confused and tune out.
- Below benchmark engagement and conversion rates: Your brand, demand, acquisition, retention or cross-sell/upsell campaigns consistently underperform as measured by your engagement or conversion rates.
- Your company is new to ABM/ABX or your ABM/ABX program is stalled: You might be able to get away with a flabby or under-defined go-to-market strategy with your brand awareness program. Less so with your one-to-many demand generation program. But when implementing an account based approach, that’s when the shit gets real. ABM/ABX requires you to know your target audience, how to engage them in relevant ways, and how to orchestrate your investments and activities across marketing, sales development, sales, and customer success.
- Your creative is boring and your content is stale: Your creative and content is undifferentiated or samey when compared to your competitors. Your content isn’t resonating with your prospects or customers. One of the best ways to create me-too creative and content is to work at a company that doesn’t have a crisp and bold understanding of its go-to-market strategy.
- Immature revenue operations: You have an under-leveraged or under-integrated RevOps/technology/data stack (Martech, Adtech, Salestech, business processes, cross functional workflows, reporting and analytics). You might be asking yourself “what does RevOps have to do with go-to-market”? The answer is quite a lot. RevOps can and should be the connective tissue that helps you translate your go-to-market strategy to an operational and efficient go-to-market reality.
- Immature use of data: The use of first party, third party and intent data by marketing, SDR/BDR, sales and customer success is ineffective, episodic, weak or immature. Again, you might be asking yourself what does data directly have to do with go-to-market? The answer: not knowing to do with data is actually a symptom of not knowing your end-to-end go-to-market strategy.
How many of these telltale symptoms do you see at your company?
Don’t feel bad if the answer is more than three or four… but if so, you should do something about it. Trust me; addressing these signs will give your entire growth program a systemic lift in performance and efficiency.
Reach out if you’d like to learn how we help improve exactly these things; we’d love to lend a hand.