Buyer preferences have completely changed. To keep up with these changes, your go-to-market strategy -- your GTM -- becomes more important than ever. The B2B tech startups and scaleups that consistently thrive and win in this kind of environment now approach their go-to-market strategy, their entire playbook, as a team sport.
In this video, you’ll learn why your entire go-to-market approach needs to be built as a multi-disciplinary team sport -- and what players your team must have to succeed with its growth plans and achieve its goals.
So before we get into the specifics of your company’s go-to-market team, let’s understand how we got here.
The latest research from Gartner found that 83% of a typical B2B purchase decision -- researching, comparing options, and evaluating pricing -- happens before a potential buyer engages with a vendor.
That’s a huge difference in buyer behaviors compared to just a few years earlier. For the better part of a decade, buyers were heavily influenced by digital media -- by content.
But more recently, self-service, self-propelled buyer’s journeys became the overwhelmingly predominant buyer’s journey for most buyers of B2B software as a service (SaaS), FinTech, and infrastructure.
And McKinsey & Company discovered that 70% to 80% of B2B decision-makers now prefer to make decisions digitally.
In other words -- without talking with a human.
What’s the glue that brings this all together, the fuel that makes this all happen?
In its B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, LinkedIn, in partnership with Edelman, concluded that “thought leadership remains critical to customer engagement but breaking through the noise is harder than ever.”
So when we think about a sports metaphor, regardless of whether you’re talking about basketball, football or soccer, baseball, hockey, or any other team sport, on the front of the team jerseys, everyone’s playing for the same team:
Your company’s go-to-market team.
But when each player turns around and reveals the back of their jerseys, you’ll find that your GTM team is comprised of players from diverse, interdisciplinary backgrounds:
marketing, sales, customer success, and product.
Your sales team won't get in front of most potential buyers without effective marketing in today’s buying environment for SaaS, FinTech, and infrastructure technology.
And in the sales-driven go-to-market playbook, your marketing team won’t get sales opportunities over the finish line to closed won without great collaboration with your sales team.
And in a world where most technology is subscribed to as a service, in a recurring revenue-based business, operating expenditures rather than capital expenditures, the initial sign-up, the sales opportunity going to closed won is just the starting point -- not the finish line, not even close.
So your customer success (CS) team must partner with sales so that your clients have a seamless experience with their onboarding -- for a predictable path to the initial value, intended value, and extended value -- driving potential expansion revenue.
And no matter how talented and exceptional your marketing, sales, and customer success professionals are, you still need a great product or service to sell, that solves true business problems, creates great impact within your clients’ companies, and delivers a solid return on investment. For that, your product team takes the lead, along with incredibly valuable feedback from the other customer-facing players on your GTM team in marketing, sales, and customer success.
How have you reconfigured your go-to-market playbook, strategy, and team to survive and thrive in today’s buyer-centric, digitally-propelled purchase cycle? Let me know in the comments section down below.
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