Go-to-Market Strategy

At some point it occurs to every executive. Maybe it’s a nagging thought in the middle of a meeting or while sitting at dinner. Maybe it’s a raging impatience. Hopefully it’s a strategic and permanent insight. “It” often sounds like this:

We’re spending all this time, money, and resource on marketing, sales, fulfillment, information technology, and about forty other things. Tell me again how they all fit together?

Or let’s put it in the positive.

The demand side of our business, the supply side, and the supporting infrastructure must all line up through clear strategies and initiatives that serve customers and produce value.

Well friend, you’ve just defined a go-to-market strategy.

• Go-to-market strategy. A coherent set of choices that align your people, processes, products, premises (physical and virtual channels), and partners to deliver your brand promise, the desired customer experience, and tangible value.

The words “coherent set of choices” are code for the word “strategy.” I’ve sat through more debates about how to define that word and how it’s different from initiatives and tactics than I care to remember. What gets lost in the semantic wars are the concepts of coherence and choice:

• Coherent (adj). 1. Intelligible and articulate. 2. Consistent; easily followed. 3. Cohering. 4. Physics (of waves) having a constant phase relationship.
• Choice (also decision): an irrevocable allocation of resources.

If what you’re doing on the demand side of the business doesn’t align how you’re set up to deliver on the supply side, you don’t have a coherent go-to-market strategy. If your marketing activities don’t have anything to do with your sales activities, you don’t have coherence. If you’re promising your customers one thing, and training (or not training) and paying your people to do something else, your go-to-market strategy is incoherent, in which case it can’t honestly be said that you have one.

If you decide one thing but don’t follow through, you really haven’t made a choice or a decision. Certainly not a quality decision because you’re missing the part about the irrevocable allocation. If you follow through but change course at the first sign of difficulty, you haven’t really made a decision. It was more like an intention. Same reasoning.

But where and when you’re able to make coherent choices that line up your business behind a differentiating brand promise to deliver a unique and compelling customer experience and value proposition, you have yourself an honest to goodness go-to-market strategy.

You’d like to think that because every business is unique that there are an infinitely variable range of go-to-market strategies. In truth, there aren’t. There are from what I can tell four basic go-to-market strategies, which are as follows:

  Stage 1 Transactions   Compete on efficient delivery of products and services based on price, performance, availability, and/or surety (lack of risk).   
  Stage 2 Solution   Compete on effective specification, configuration, and delivery of whole solutions to customer problems and opportunities   
  Stage 3 Strategic   Compete to use your insight to identify, frame, size, scope, and execute new approaches to delivering measurable business value.   
  Stage 4 Visionary   Compete on the ability to spot new opportunities and enroll other firms to partner with you in your vision.  

Your organization can have one go-to-market strategy or many, but should only have one per revenue stream. Multiple revenue streams require a significant depth of management and resources. If that doesn’t describe your organization, stick to one or perhaps two go-to-market strategies, even if your have multiple revenue streams.

Within this go-to-market framework, you need to make coherent choices that align the direction, investments, choices, and work you undertake in each of the following areas:

• Brand: Your functional, emotional, social, and spiritual promise of consistent value.
• Demand Side: Everything you do through Sales, Customer engagement, Marketing, Advertising, PR, Pre-sales, Education, Sales Partners, and Analyst Relations to influence targeted segments and customers to purchase and repurchase.
• Supply Side: What you do in Engineering, Manufacturing, Services, Service, and across your Supply Chain to deliver your go-to-market strategy(s)
• Platform: The choices you make around human factors, information management, finance, procurement, legal, admin to support your go-to-market strategy(s).
• Customer Experience: The guiding principles that govern how you’ll deliver your brand promise through a lifetime of personalized, valuable, branded interactions when, where, and how the customer wants
• Value: How you want your customers to denominate the value of what you sell and the method by which you make money.

I have written a lengthy paper that lays out my thinking on the drivers embedded in each of the four go-to-market strategies. It is by no means an exhaustive study or a complete list of things you need to think about. A complete work on the topic is at least a book if not more.  You can download that paper here [go]