What Great Go-to-Market Looks Like

Part 2 of 3

Recent years pushed private equity partners and their portfolio companies to seek additional paths to create enterprise value. Go-to-market (GTM) – Marketing, Sales and Service – became a popular area of focus as traditional plays were insufficient.

Companies great at delivering value through GTM do three things well:

• They plan and operate holistically. They start with strategy. They align their investments in structure with strategy. They utilize management systems to reinforce strategy execution.
• They know where growth will come from. They tune their models in alignment with growth pathways. They operate agile organizations that respond to market and customer shifts.
• They utilize tactics to realize value. They invest in leadership, enablement, change adoption, communication and monitoring systems.

Part 1 of this series offered the Revenue Growth Model as a holistic framework to build, evaluate and optimize the GTM model. Part 2 of this series offers a view of “great” GTM – the strategies and tactics that high-performing organizations utilize to deliver profitable, above-market growth.

Great go-to-market (GTM) organizations know where growth will come from. Their GTM organizations are agile. They pivot with phases of growth and changing markets. They know the necessary tactics to deliver growth and deploy resources accordingly.

Those focused on new customers have marketing organizations that are great at building and nurturing awareness among ideal customers. Their product organizations keep the customer at the center. They know how to enter new geographies and adjacencies. They invest in new product launches. They use digital, content and field marketing to drive inbound leads. They have data and people-driven processes to qualify leads. They have outbound lead generation channels that include marketing (emails, social media, gated content, etc.), sales (lead generation representatives) and channel partners.

Those focused on growth from existing customers invest in adoption and solution assurance. They shift resources from new customer acquisition to fund these investments. They ensure customers are effectively onboarded and realize value. They run plays to drive expansion. They upsell customers (e.g., base to enhanced packages) and add new users (or departments). They promote use of the core solution as well as the benefits of adjacent offerings. They increase prices in a structured manner and operate tight governance on rebates and discounting. They proactively nurture relationships with current customers. They engage the customer early in the renewal or reorder window. They utilize contracting (e.g., lengths and terms) to lock out competitors.

Finally, great GTM organizations are underscored by a high-performing revenue operations function – people, process and technology. They fundamentally believe in the scale and productivity this function delivers and continuously build capabilities.

Great New vs. Existing Customer GTM

Great GTM organizations differentiate their strategy, structure and management levers by growth pathway, most notably new vs. existing customers.

New Customers

Companies great a landing new logos deploy the most effective resources at the right stage. They have a sound understanding of their ideal customer. They use multiple marketing channels to identify potential buyers. They track customers at the contact level and monitor intent (and these systems are shared and aligned across sales and marketing). They build and nurture relationships with use-case-based messaging and content.

They operate modern outbound motions. Their outbound teams are armed with data and tools to engage customers at the right time with the right messaging. Finally, they ensure awareness, nurturing, outbound and acquisition channels are aligned with the lifetime value (LTV) of the customer.

Existing Customers

Adopt

Companies great at expansion invest in solution adoption. They drive the concept of customer success into the culture of the organization (including outside of GTM). They deploy dedicated resources (people and technology) aimed at maximizing value realization and consequently use and consumption. They actively track use and consumption and proactively engage with customers to ensure they are getting the most out of the investment. Post-sales teams are aligned on common metrics and incented to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Post-sales roles play an important part in ensuring the customer is appropriately covered at every point in their journey. Roles may include project manager, customer success manager and customer support. These roles own and support different delivery activities – customer onboarding, execution and customer support/service. When deployed appropriately, these roles ensure a smooth transition between the sale and delivery of the offering.

Expand

Being great at expansion is not unlike being great at new logo acquisition. The same fundamental frameworks and tools are in play. Customers need to be made aware of the value of expanding the relationship. That awareness needs to be nurtured and buying intent actively monitored. Expansion plays (upsell and cross-sell) need to be crafted. Resources need to be deployed and assigned responsibility for running the play(s). Management systems like training, goals and incentives need to be aligned to emphasize growth and new solutions.

An important part of maximizing net revenue retention (NRR) is product and pricing. Companies great at driving NRR are armed with products designed to promote usage and consumption (intuitive interfaces, ability to add users or turn on features, suggestion engines, etc.). Pricing and packaging strategies like limited/free versions or bundles that allow for buy-up. The pricing and packaging solutions may also be consumption, pay-as-you-go oriented.

Renew

Many GTM organizations (rightfully) focus first on developing land and expand capabilities. As they build and develop these capabilities they rely on the product or service organization to retain customers. As the business scales (builds a stable based of customers), great GTM organizations shift resources to post-sales. They invest in people, process and technology to maximize gross revenue retention (GRR).

Roles may include renewal representatives and customer success. Processes feature proactive plays to anticipate churn and engage customers before small problems turn into lost customers. Technology includes platforms and applications that provide visibility into customer use and service issues. Data collected from these systems are then turned into insights that help teams make the renewal a foregone conclusion (white glove issue resolution, promotions and offers, messaging, etc.).

Conclusion

Great GTM organizations know where growth will come from. They tune their models in alignment with growth pathways (e.g., new vs. existing customers). They operate agile organizations that respond to market and customer shifts. Be sure to read part 1 of this series on driving value through go-to-market and part 3 of the series where we cover the strategies and tactics great GTM organizations utilize to realize value.