Elizabeth Foughty
Tl;DR It’s too silo’d and niche otherwise.
Even in large organizations, B2B go-to-market needs to be an overarching strategic ensemble cast, that seemlessly works together. You cannot and should not have a sales strategy unsupported by a marketing strategy, a product strategy not fed by market insights, a professional services team doing projects that don’t support the overall goals of the organization, or a sales engineering team handing off badly qualified projects to customer success. This might seem clear and straightforward on the surface – the reality in organizations can be quite different!”
And yet, I so frequently see that organizations treat these as distinct silos of work with highly specialized players that quickly get deeply into their own heads about their work. Also, companies tend to integrate the impact of marketing because they are not thinking holistically (either from the board or from the marketing team itself, or both!) Typically, they are failing to practice integrative thinking. Or, the practice of considering issues through more than one lens. Relatedly, systems thinking will have you thinking about how each element impacts and plays within the whole. I’m (deeply) biased, but I think folks that have experience in multiple parts of a GTM organization (e.g., sales engineering and product marketing, customer success and sales, professional services and product) are ultimately stronger GTM players because they bring a wider view even if their years of experience doing “x” are lower (because they have multiple different roles). They understand the impacts they’ll have on other teammates and intuitively think more broadly.
There’s a few ways you can encourage this type of thinking:
You can make teams beholden to other teams.
- Your marketing team’s social media strategy should have direct line of sight into supporting sales with linked KPIs. Or at a minimum, feedback from your sales team that it’s helping! If it doesn’t, don’t waste time on it.
- Your sales engineering should not only be quota’d against sales, but against successful implementations. They’ve only done half of their job if they’ve sold the technology, the other half is to actually deploy the solution! This means they’ve thoroughly vetted the buyer and unraveled any issues (usually IT security!) in advance. I once made deployment success part of quota for sales engineering, and (surprise surprise), our deployment quality massively increased.
- Professional services should sell projects that move buyers towards more standard utilization, not away from it, and be rewarded for doing so.
Just ask. Ask people to consider the impact on other groups in open forums. Expect thoughtful answers.
Names and phrasing matter. When talking about your overall success for revenue generation, don’t call it by its elements…sales strategy, marketing strategy, product strategy. Those are all PIECES of go-to-market strategy. You should be saying things like “this product feature supports our GTM strategy by…” or “our new channel approach is part of our broader GTM strategy to enter new markets”.
Because how we talk about things matters is why I always say “GTM strategy” or occasionally, “market strategy”. It’s all interconnected.
Elizabeth Foughty 