Creating Go to Market Strategies is a Transformative Act

Creating go to market strategies demands a methodology or a framework.  Which you choose, assuming it is tried and true, is almost inconsequential.  What makes the difference is how committed the team is to seeking out the spark that will ignite not just a go to market tactical approach, but a movement. 

Yes a movement. 

Too strong, too exaggerated?  Ultimately you will be the judge of that, but to desire the creation of a movement pushes everyone to elevate their level of performance.  It creates purpose, and brings meaning to even the most mundane of necessary tactics.  Purpose and meaning inject life into the plan, make our teams happier, challenge you to never weary of  seeking to serve customers better.  To seek out new ways to be ahead of your customers needs, and present them alternatives that they themselves would never have considered without your inspiration, creates a customer relationship grounded in trust.  A trust unified in a shared purpose.  We must strive to be transformative. 

But how?  And not a simple how, but a ‘how should everything be connected to the purpose’ how.

There are two factors that help us to become the transformative market mover that we desire to be.  Immersion and Prioritization.

Immersion

The truth is that you know your customers’ businesses better then they know it themselves.  Why?  Because they have a single marketplace perspective, theirs.  You, on the other hand, have the good fortune of serving tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of companies in that same marketplace.  That experience translates into wisdom, and that wisdom is made more impactful by committing to use that wisdom to guide your business in a way that will best improve the businesses of your customers.  In doing so sales efforts are driven not by our own internal process but from aligning ourselves to the way that our customers actively seek to better serve their customers.

This can be a dramatic shift away from minding the operational necessities of our day to day in favor of immersing ourselves in the nuance and the intangibles of the businesses of our customers.  Such immersion makes clear the trends that will have an impact on our customers businesses in the near future.  This knowledge shapes our story telling, and reaffirms for us the business that we are in by making clear the yet unforeseen needs of our marketplace.  And knowing the business we are in helps us to orient everything we do towards helping our customers achieve the opportunity that we help them identify. 

Prioritization

There is inherent danger in immersion.  We can be overwhelmed by the amount of action that is necessary to help our customers identify where opportunity in their businesses exists and helping them capitalize upon it. Therefore we must come up with a way to quickly, and logically prioritize so that we can maintain customer-centric alignment while also delivering immediate value to our sales teams that will help them advance their sales opportunities.  The best way to inject the spirit of continuous prioritization is to seek the so called low hanging fruit  that advance both of these objectives.  If your sales cycle is long enough this typically looks like targeted account penetration.  If your cycle is more transactional the priorities list will be more closely ordered to volume plays.   

Content Driven Consistency

Immersion and prioritization are made better when an editorial content development approach is employed.   Offering insight into needs before our customers are aware of those needs demands a more aggressive content approach.  Therefore we should leverage the wisdom we gain from immersion to align our content development against the natural buying process that our targeted customers use to improve their business.  The key is found in creating content that pushes our marketplace to the right decision point.   

Successful strategic marketing is movement based.  We have to know our own limitations and find the catalyst that pushes us to create a more purpose driven narrative.  We must use that catalyst to transform how we are communicating with our would be, and current, customers.