This is the second installment in a series of articles all about B2B go-to-market (GTM). If you missed the first installment where we gave you a simple, straightforward definition of what GTM really means, click here.
I am shamelessly trying to achieve one single thing in this article: convince you that your company absolutely must have a great GTM strategy. Let’s see how good of a job I do, shall we?
5 incontrovertible ways a great GTM strategy will help your company
Unless you have an ironclad monopoly for an absolutely must-have product, then you need a great GTM strategy. (By the way, if you do have that monopoly, give me a call. I need more rich friends like you.
1. Your GTM strategy is the straight line between your growth goals and your actions.
At most companies, when you scratch their revenue growth goals with a seemingly innocent question such as “Tell me how — specifically — you are going to hit your growth goals this coming year? Show me the segments and account types you have to win and which customers you have to retain and grow?” You often hear a lot of throat clearing followed by word salad that translates to “We’re going to work our ass off and hope it works this year.” Your GTM strategy should eliminate hope as a strategy and replace it with very clear, shared direction for your acquisition, retention and expansion efforts. If your GTM strategy isn’t doing this, then it needs some work (said with love.)
2. A great GTM strategy puts your customer at the center—not your product or your brand.
Spoiler alert #1: you have competitors and despite all your trash talk, they probably don’t all suck. Spoiler alert #2: your customers truly don’t wake up every morning dying to know your brand, your products, your tagline, your webinars, your trade show booth, your outbound SDR emails, your podcast, or your latest LinkedIn post. You’re going to have to make your value proposition irresistibly relevant to them. They’re gonna make you earn it.
3. A great GTM strategy is a powerfully effective way to get (and keep) your internal stakeholders on the same page.
Your competitors are gunning for you (see above). So stop making growth even more difficult by competing with yourself. Your GTM should help you avoid the tragic misalignment and well-intended rogue behavior that destroys revenue growth, profitability, time to market, agility, and customer experience. A great GTM strategy gets all of the members of your One Revenue Team™ emphatically on the same page, and then keeps them there. I’m talking about executives, product, marketing(s), SDR/BDR, sales, customer success, and operations. Makes you think about that song by John Lennon, doesn’t it?
4. A great GTM strategy levels up the effectiveness of your integrated growth program.
One of the principal responsibilities of your GTM strategy is to focus your company’s incredibly finite resources (time, talent, money, focus) on the prospects and customers where you have the best, real world chance of winning. And it further helps you focus your value propositions and messaging to say something to those beautiful people that they actually care about. And that, my friend, drives a little thing we call efficiency in ye olde revenue growth business. Read: you will save time, budget, wasted effort, and reputational capital. These are all good things, unless you hate getting promoted and making more money.
5. A great GTM strategy helps you catch and fix potentially disastrous and costly errors.
Have you ever seen a company chase an audacious growth goal with a strategy that is filled with gaps, missed opportunities, no shared sense of priorities, under-focusing on retention, tragically misaligned stakeholders, ignoring significant product issues or market shifts, or major disconnects about the budget, cycle times and capabilities needed to deliver acceptable results? Yeah, me either. (Whistling while staring at shoes and walking away…) An executable GTM strategy serves as a kind of “pre-flight checklist” that helps you de-bug and de-risk your integrated growth program: product + brand + demand + sales + customer success + operations and CX.
How’d I do? Are you convinced? What did I miss?
Next up in this blog series: 13 telltale signs that your go-to-market strategy needs an overhaul.