The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework
E-Book, Englisch, 205 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2336-1
Verlag: Lioncrest Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction
Companies are born out of dreams. Think about it. Someone had an amazing idea. They dreamed about making something better, newer, easier, more convenient. They dreamed about doing something that had never been done before, and they formed a company to make that dream a reality. The people they hire along the way buy into the dream and want to help achieve it. Indeed, the thought of realizing that compelling vision energizes them when they come to work every day. But doing business is messy and unpredictable. Companies face challenges—competition, changing markets, limited resources, and more—that cause them to underachieve those dreams. There’s a relentless, ongoing pressure to grow the company, with employees to pay, customers to serve, and countless other funding needs. To keep it all going, you have to keep growing. But this stress leads to messy decision making and competing priorities. It becomes harder to answer the question, “What should we do next?” How do you keep a company growing when you don’t have clear alignment and don’t know exactly which direction to take? How do you keep a company growing when you don’t have clear alignment and don’t know exactly which direction to take? As a result, the people who originally bought into it begin feeling a disconnect between what they believed was possible and what they’ve been consigned to. A divide grows between the vision, hopes, and aspirations that gave birth to the company and the realities of working there. Team members can no longer map their efforts to the company’s achievement of the dream. Work begins to lose purpose, and people begin to lose passion. Consequently, it becomes harder to keep people focused and aligned. Look, even the greatest companies get stuck in this mire of confusion from time to time. Creating a product is easy enough, but building a great company and culture, having the discipline to take a product to market, is vastly more challenging. Creating a product is easy enough, but building a great company and culture, having the discipline to take a product to market, is vastly more challenging. The failure to achieve a big dream is a struggle as old as human history. Before the Wright brothers achieved sustained flight with their motor-operated airplane in 1903, there were many wild and crazy inventors who dreamed up fabulous flying contraptions. Often, they put together talented teams and built those machines, with their heads filled with visions of soaring like an eagle dancing through their heads. And then the day came when they hauled it up to the top of a ramp, or a hill, or God forbid, a sheer cliff on top of a mountain, and they launched it. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the old film footage of these failed early endeavors, where the strange winged machine sails down the ramp, briefly leaps into the air, then careens to the ground and breaks into pieces as the distraught inventor and team look on. Every single one of those failed machines started out as the wild-eyed vision of a talented team. Of course, the original dream wasn’t to simply fling a machine off the end of the ramp and somehow keep it from crashing right away. No, the dream of those early inventors was to enable humans to fly like the birds. Successfully launching a plane was only the first big step to making the dream a reality. For sustained flight to really achieve the vision, they had to figure out how to create vehicles that could reliably take people higher and higher, get them where they wanted to go, and return them to the ground safely every time. Mapping that dream to a practical reality took decades of hard work from talented, hardworking people who took a lot of risks and made smart decisions. The struggle to achieve reliable air travel gives us a perfect picture of the struggle most companies face. Achieving the dream isn’t “one and done.” It’s an ongoing business transformation from ideation to transition to execution—also known as “the three Ps” of problem-market fit, product-market fit, and platform-market fit—and somehow, you have to navigate these stages, “the three Ps,” without losing momentum and stalling out somewhere along the way. You have to navigate these stages, “the three Ps,” without losing momentum and stalling out somewhere along the way. You see, it doesn’t matter how long an airplane has been flying. At any moment, it’s possible for the plane to stall out and take a nosedive into the nearest field if wrong decisions are made. Or to be less dramatic, if the airline company doesn’t expand service to the right cities, its growth may stall because it fails to meet customer demand. This failure happens in the business world all the time. Somewhere along the way—maybe just after launch or maybe after years of hard work—the company fails to fully deliver the company vision to the customer. Leaders don’t know which next growth step to take, so the company loses focus, stalls, and gradually down it goes! But some succeed. What makes the difference? What separates the wild-eyed dreamers from the actual winners? In a single phrase: Go-to-market. More precisely, a high-performing go-to-market (GTM) team and a process for making the dream a reality. GTM does this by creating a practical path that aligns all of your people with the overarching mission, not just one time but many. It’s about ongoing transformation and continued growth. It’s about knowing what your next move should be—and your next, and your next, and so on. It’s about knowing what your next move should be—and your next, and your next, and so on. What Is Go-to-Market?
But what exactly is GTM? GTM is a transformational process for accelerating your path to market where high-performing revenue teams (marketing, sales, and customer success) deliver a connected customer experience and every touchpoint reinforces the brand, values, and vision of your company. In other words, your GTM process connects your company strategy to your customer outcomes, helping customers realize the dream that the company was built on and enjoy the benefits that dream promises to deliver. Your GTM process connects your company strategy to your customer outcomes It might be helpful to visualize the company strategy, customer outcomes, and GTM as three gears that keep your company moving forward, with GTM acting as the connecting gear between the other two. It’s these three gears working together that makes extraordinary growth possible. For most companies, the missing link is that middle gear. They have a company strategy and they have customers, but they lack a high-performing GTM function. Consequently, they underperform and underachieve, and the dream gets further and further away from achievable. As a result, customers become increasingly unhappy, and retention declines. If customer retention is suffering, if customers are complaining more and more, if employee turnover is high, then you are underachieving. Maybe there’s messiness inside of your business. Sales hit their number, but it wasn’t pretty. People are so fatigued that it feels like losing even when they win. Maybe momentum has stalled, so even though everyone is still working hard, no one feels like they’re getting ahead. Whatever the case, you want to know how to course correct and get your company on track, don’t you? Well, it’s simple. You just need a clear GTM process to ensure that your company continues to deliver the promise of your vision to both employees and customers. In this book, we intend to give you just that. But first, let’s be crystal clear. Your company strategy is not your GTM strategy. GTM operates in the service of your company strategy in order to drive your business forward faster and further—not just once but reliably and repeatedly. Your company strategy is not your GTM strategy. So what does that look like when your GTM operates in the service of your company strategy? If you’re a big online retailer like Amazon, your company strategy is to make your products and services readily accessible on the internet. That is your ongoing mission. Your GTM process, then, is how you plan to achieve some of those elements in the short term. As you probably recall, Amazon started off with one service: selling books online. Over time, they added other products and services, such as music, videos, groceries, self-publishing services, and more. They entered new markets, improved their processes, and created an increasingly robust platform. Through an ongoing process of transformation and expansion, they continue to open up more ways to provide value to customers and deliver on the promises of their vision. Amazon is truly a well-oiled GTM machine! After all, what use is your amazing company strategy if you can’t deliver it to customers? Or to use our opening story, what use are wings if you can’t make them fly, and what good is flying if you can’t go higher, faster, and farther more reliably? Why Is Go-to-Market So Hard?
This isn’t a guide for creating your company strategy, mission, or vision, and it’s not a handbook for building great products. We’re here to provide a framework for your GTM process that will help you unlock your...
