An effective go-to-market strategy allocates resources across product development, marketing, and sales to deliver expected revenue growth. But how do you diagnose and fix a go-to-market strategy that is not producing results?
Diagnosing Go-To-Market Problems
Here are questions to diagnose problems in your go-to-market approach:
- Where’s the beef? Successful go-to-markets provide unique benefits that deliver value to a specific set of prospects. However, prospective customers are cautious and unlikely to believe any claims without concrete proof points—ideally, quotes and data from successful customers in a similar industry, region, and size as the prospect. Without these proof points, it is almost impossible to close new prospects cost-effectively.
- Meet The Bickersons. A go-to-market process should smoothly align key product features, marketing messages, and sales tactics. All too often, the leads generated by marketing don’t fit the requirements and skills of the sales team, leading to arguments about lousy leads and lazy salespeople that hurt morale and slow sales.
- Mr Happy. Sales teams can err by chasing every possible customer dollar, which decreases close rates as sales prospects don’t match the ideal customer profile.
Addressing Go-To-Market Issues
Addressing go-to-market issues requires trust and collaboration across the executive team:
- Assess the team: Each member of the executive team needs the self-awareness and skills to assess go-to-market issues and resolve those within their control. Often, fixing go-to-market issues requires augmenting or upgrading skills by bringing in consultants or replacing underperforming executives.
- Get back to basics: Start by reviewing the current vision, strategy and annual plan. Be clear on which business needs are currently unmet by competitors. Often, disconnects between the vision and strategy translate into unrealistic and ineffective go-to-market efforts.
- Foster collective ownership: The most critical element for fixing a broken go-to-market strategy is complete transparency and commitment across the product, marketing, and sales teams. Set clear metrics, communicate the status of those metrics, and work quickly and collaboratively to fix any problems that arise without finger-pointing.