GTM – or go-to-market – is often how Private Equity prefers to talk about Marketing. It’s more strategic. More sales-centric. Whereas marketing, if we’re being honest, is difficult to have a business-level conversation about. It’s creative, subjective and hard to prove out ROI.
When helping a portfolio company think through organic growth, marketing needs to become a foundational layer. This is the engine that develops brand, fosters loyalty, and most importantly – drives demand. When under-funded and overlooked, eventually signs of flat growth will surface.
A go-to-market, or GTM, ultimately helps establish clarity about WHO you are selling to, WHY they care, and HOW you are going to capture their attention. You’d expect any mature business to have this solved by default. Unfortunately, these basics are often taken for granted, residing in the minds of leadership and sales, leading to a web of varying interpretations. Resellers and partners add to this complexity, often fragmenting and fracturing the brand. A GTM helps get all of this aligned and moving in one direction.
A GTM Playbook is an actionable series of steps meant to help teams start to build their go-to-market strategy and plan, creating alignment around all of their marketing and sales activities. Realistically, this is a monumental effort that no single document can solve. However, when crafted intentionally, leaders and teams will certainly find themselves invested as momentum has a new platform to grow from.
We’ve seen GTMs that have goals like “Own the CyberSecurity Narrative” which, while certainly bold – is entirely unrealistic. Goals like this tend to disenchant the audience and lose adoption.
A playbook means there’s a coach and players. Players have assignments to execute a play. You don’t draw up a playbook and leave it up to everyone to figure it out.
A GTM Playbook will end up challenging Rev & Marketing Ops. Data & Insights are integral. If these are not in place yet, they certainly will need to get there. Preparing for a data-centric evolution will be necessary.
You’ll hear this often referred to as an ICP – Ideal Customer Profile. Since we deal mainly with B2B, we’ll call it an Ideal Buyer Profile. Whatever you use, this is an opportunity to invest collective thinking on selling to human beings, not companies.
These are obviously the problems they are trying to solve. They may or may not be directly related to your products and services, but they should create different avenues to open doors later.
In its simplest form this is the path the buyer takes from their initial thought process through making the decision to buy. This is actually a great exercise for broader participation. “What have you experienced?” “who helps them make these decisions?” “what else is going on when they are evaluating this?” etc etc. The more ideas, the more fidelity, the better.
Here’s a simple buyer’s journey
And here’s an overly complex example of a buyer’s journey. The game-board format is helpful, but with this much going on it can be hard for leadership to take seriously and adopt in most scenarios.
Normally when you hear the word “features” your mind probably goes straight to a consumer product. An iPhone. A new SUV. A lawnmower. But really this applies to anything a business has to offer.
This exercise needs to whittle down the essence of what your business sells and what, in its simplest form, is going to benefit buyers and consumers. We’re then going to map these benefits to buyer needs later. This should not be a full cataloged list of all products and services or a log of every reason why people want what you offer. It’s a distilled, focused list.
This is an example of a simple feature/benefit map
You hear this phrase a lot no doubt. Basically, it means this: How does what you offer seem more valuable than what a buyer is willing to pay for it? Some people also think of this as a differentiator…but it goes deeper.
I work on a MacBook Pro. Love it. I don’t think about the amount of ram, the graphics chip, the aluminum shell or even the retina display. While I’m buying it? I’m comparing to other Macbooks. Not a PC. That’s brand equity, which is fueled by value proposition. I’m drawn to the sense of quality, the care put into the OS, and the simplicity. The value is really that it is designed to fit my life, instead of me having to feel like I’m operating a machine.
Now this is subjective of course, but still – this value proposition means I could spend thousands on it and feel fully justified in doing so, long after a competitor’s laptop is released with a more powerful processor.
Everything in business works this way. No exception. You don’t need Jony Ives to design beautiful products for this to work.
A few tips on designing your value proposition:
A simple example of a value proposition map
This is more or less a way to understand how your company might compare based purely on first impressions to your peers. This can also be done before Value Proposition, to better inform the direction – i.e. here’s what the competitors are doing, so here’s what we should say that’s unique.
Positioning is often done in a quadrant graph. You decide which spectrums to measure, and more or less subjectively position brands appropriately.
In this example, a fabricated consulting firm – ABS – can see some competitive congestion with firms who are A) targeting broad verticals and services and B) staying more strategic. James Button is succeeding with a more tactical/niche approach to the market, and ABS sees that as a potentially unique space to slot into.
We want to confirm how we’re going to approach sales. Generally, businesses know this already and don’t need any strategy to tell them otherwise. However, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page, and the exploration of a variety of sales models remains on the table.
This is basically a process that helps marketing and sales follow the buyer’s journey. It’s meant to help the sales team think in a more structured way about nurturing a lead into an opportunity. This helps to make sure everyone is speaking the same language.
Finally we want to see your newly minted GTM find adoption throughout the company, not just an archived document in marketing’s file share.
