Joe Andrews, Vice President of Product and Solution Marketing, regularly contributes articles on topics including Go-to-Market Strategy,Customer Data Management, Market Planning, Account-Based Marketing and Selling and Sales Effectiveness.
The posting below is a summary from the original article published on Martech on April 04, 2019.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
As we ramp up for a successful 2019, one topic that’s top of mind for many B2B sales and marketing leaders I’ve spoken with is their go-to-market strategy. What it boils down to for many executives is whether their company is targeting the right market segments and how well they are prepared to execute their strategy.
Why does this matter? Having a strong go-to-market strategy is strongly correlated to revenue performance. In our last survey of 500 sales and marketing professionals, companies who exceeded their revenue targets last year are 5.3x more likely to have an advanced go-to-market strategy where their total addressable market is well defined, sales and marketing teams are well aligned and the company leverages programs like account based marketing (ABM) that are targeted and highly orchestrated.
For CMOs, heads of strategy, and demand generation teams, confidence in the 2019 plan means having the right targeting plan for both accounts and the key buying personas within. It also means having the right marketing programs plan that involves campaigns across different channels and tactics to engage the right targets and move them along the funnel.
For CROs and heads of sales operations, this typically means a concrete plan around sales territories and named accounts, with a focus on ensuring 1. the opportunities in pursuit have the highest likelihood to convert to revenue and 2. there are quota carrying reps with capacity to serve those accounts and, conversely, they’re equitably distributed among those quota carrying reps.
Designing and implementing a successful go-to-market strategy is not trivial. Typically data silos, manual processes, and dirty data get in the way of success. Companies may have defined what their ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like and have a notion of their total addressable market (TAM) but the data may sit on spreadsheets with executives and the corporate strategy team, and isn’t well understood, let alone visible, to the front line revenue teams. Operations teams struggle to maintain a clean and accurate data set of accounts and people within the TAM, resulting in sub-optimal sales territories. Measuring performance against the company’s plan is also difficult. Individual campaign metrics, like email responses, show part of the picture but don’t show the whole story of revenue performance and market penetration against the ICP and target segments. So, many companies miss opportunities to drive revenue and growth.
InsideView took to heart this market input and built a go-to-market decision engine that we launched last year, called InsideView Apex.It’s helped many customers like Castlight Health, Host Analytics, Salesforce, and Splunk define the right target segments and prospect accounts to accelerate revenue and measure progress as they grow.
Click the link to read more in detail on the 4 steps to help you sharpen your go-to-market focus for 2019, with guiding tips of how InsideView Apex can help:
- Define (and continuously refresh) your ICP and TAM as they are the foundation to go-to-market success
- Start to measure funnel performance across target market segments
- Align Sales and Marketing teams on plan, data, metrics and communicate with transparency for results
- Implement or improve your customer data management strategy
Sharpening your go-to-market focus in 2019 can help your company increase its growth rate and beat revenue targets. But the process for defining and executing your GTM strategy takes effort and needs to be a continued priority. If you’re looking for a good place to start, consider applying this four step plan and let me know how it goes. We’d love to help you. Here are some more resources to help you get started:
- Ebook: The Data Cleanse
- Ebook: Do You Know Your Total Addressable Market?
- Ebook: Using Account-Based Strategies to Unite Sales & Marketing