So, it’s planning season, which also means it’s time to examine your go-to-market strategy and your growth goals heading into 2023. And, it’s no secret that economic headwinds may be in play making the next few weeks critical as you work to outline your goals and create plans to hit them.
Just as integration, automation, account based, revenue, growth, and more have been B2B buzzwords over the past decade plus, the latest challenger to the throne is “go-to-market.” I say this to illustrate that the definition of go-to-market is all over the map. We have software companies calling it account based marketing. We have other B2B leaders saying it’s the next best thing and you’re going to fall behind if you don’t embrace what they’re selling. And, others only partially defining the concept and leaving out key components of what it must include.
Honestly, go-to-market (GTM) is something that we’ve all been doing for years, but maybe we didn’t always call it that. And the lack of clarity of what GTM is, and its importance, cannot be understated. In short, if your strategy is unclear, you’re doomed to failure (or underperformance at a minimum).
So what’s the point?
The point is, if you’re not keeping the key pieces of your GTM strategy in mind, by keeping it consistently fresh, valid, and effective, then you’re likely subscribing to activity over strategy or individual tactics over integration, and that can be a recipe for disaster. Strategy has always led the way for how smart growth teams (brand, demand, sales, customer success) actually go-to-market.
As a primer for the rest of this blog, here’s an important post from our CEO, John Common, about what GTM is. Start there, then come back to read on…
So let’s start with aligning the key pieces of your GTM strategy. However, maybe not everything that could be part of your GTM is listed here because GTM is, in short, your complete marketing strategy. But, these are the most essential components, the minimum perhaps, of what a winning GTM strategy must contain.
- A tight definition of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — often customers who will benefit from your solution to grow their business (e.g., who they are, what account types, pain points, etc.).
- Competition and the economic environment — what are the constraints and levers and where there is whitespace for your solution to live in the market.
- Your solution definition — defining your offerings in a way that meets the market where they are by addressing needs and pain points and how your solution helps them achieve their goals better than your competitors.
- The strategic messaging that delivers your unique selling proposition in the market — including your value proposition, your single most important thing you want your audience to know, powered by your why.
- Established benchmarks and KPIs — what is it that you’re attempting to accomplish and how will it be measured in terms of your overall success?
- Targeted and integrated tactics and orchestrated action — guided by your GTM strategy. This is the sharp end of your GTM spear. It includes your tactical marketing plan such as messaging, content, data, advertising, media, field marketing, partnerships, events, enablement, technology platforms and analytics.
So, if you’re with me that these are the key pieces of any GTM strategy, let’s uplevel for a moment and discuss an important truth.
Your go-to-market strategy isn’t enough.
You have to not only create this, but you have to deeply embed and align it into your organization. You have to create cross-functional alignment to make this an effective part of your growth program.
And in my opinion, this is what’s new here. The strategy piece? We’ve been doing that forever. But, Aligned GTM is much more important, and potentially transformational, than what we’ve been doing over the years.
To illustrate, who’s ever launched a campaign that didn’t work? Why did it fail? Was it because your creative was bad? You had a poor understanding of your target audience? There was a recession? Perhaps. But, I’d wager that it’s probably because your efforts were not aligned to the rest of your marketing toolkit.
Aligned GTM is when all of the pieces of your go-to-market strategy are aligned and connected to your brand, demand, sales, success programs and plays to create efficient growth.
And in 2023, efficiency is going to matter more than ever.
You’re going to be asked to do more with less during a potentially difficult economy. I doubt that your goals are going to shrink, but your budgets and headcount might.
This is where Intelligent Demand comes in.
We’re doing this right now with our clients and partners — and we have been for years. We’re building Aligned GTM strategies, programs and plays that leverage smart marketing fundamentals, yes. But, we align your GTM strategy with the other components of your demand engine to create efficient growth for our clients.
And, we’d be happy to show you how.
Reach out to us and we’ll demonstrate that ID has the experience required to help brands like yours align your GTM strategy to organizational priorities and activate it across every core function of the business (e.g., brand, demand, sales, success, product, etc.).
ID has the expertise to help clients define, strategize, and most importantly, align each GTM component and we’d love to do it with you, too.