What Causes Products and Alliances to Miss Revenue Targets?: Two Common Gaps in the “GTM Bridge”
In a number of my posts this year I’ve talked about the key elements of a GTM program for a product or an alliance in terms of “Building a Bridge” between your products and your customers. The “Bridge” analogy is an apt description because for a product or an alliance to drive revenue, companies need to complete all of the key pieces of the bridge (who wants to go halfway across the bridge and then fall in the abyss below). The Four Key Elements of the GTM Bridge are shown below in Figure 1.
- Solution
- GTM Program
- Field Readiness
- Sales Channel Execution
The question we are looking at in today’s post is where in this process do technology vendors generally have problems? In my experience there are two parts of the GTM Bridge that consistently cause problems and lost revenue in technology vendor GTM programs. These challenges are highlighted by the Red in Figure 1 below.
- Solutions are not clearly defined and messaging does not connect with customer challenges (often “product push”)
- GTM programs are not adopted by field marketing, sales and channels teams (and programs are perceived to be “thrown over the wall”)
Figure 1: The GTM Bridge and Common Gaps in Execution
Predictions for the Future Path of the Data Center…
VMworld US is a few weeks behind us, VMworld Europe is in our sights and HP Discover will provide plenty of news to finish off the year. The stream of tech industry news keeps coming with lots of buzzwords, but also lots of real change. I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the data center and the tech industry – “Where is this path taking us?”
Regular readers of my blog will know that my focus is on the go-to-market (GTM) approach used by leading technology companies to connect their products to customers. GTM encompasses corporate strategy, product marketing, specialties within marketing, sales, sales engineering, consulting, channels of all types – and all sorts of “operations” from sales ops to channel ops to professional services packaging and delivery. All of these pieces are required to “Build a Bridge” between your offerings and your customers.
As we’ve discussed, the current “best practices” in many of these areas leave a lot to be desired. These practices reflect what worked when the leading vendors sold hardware and the channel sold and implemented hardware. Of course, that has not been true for a long time, but that does not seem to keep tech companies from trotting out the same approach to GTM…
As the industry changes and the approach to the data center changes, the levers that drive GTM success also change – which is why I keep ruminating on the current path of the industry, and its impact on GTM. I covered some of the background on my perspective on the evolution of data center technologies – particularly the dramatic changes brought on on by VMware and virtualization. Those posts were part of a 3-part series, and are a good starting point in connecting the dots backward, so we can extend them forward to the future…
Measuring Alliance Impact: Have You Moved Beyond the Stone Age of Deal Registration? (3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances Series)
Part of a Series: Are Your Alliances Missing the Money?
- 3 Steps to Monetize Your Strategic Alliances
- Step 1 – Build a Complete ATM Bridge to Your Customers
- Step 2 – Set up your Alliance and Bus Dev organizations to both “hunt” and “farm”
- Step 3 – Choose the Business Model that Matches How Alliance Solutions are Sold
- Measuring Alliance Impact:
In last week’s post, Measuring the Impact from Your Alliances and Solutions, I talked about the options to measure alliance impact and how most alliances end up with a meet in the channel business model. In another recent post, Choose the Right Model for Your Alliance , I talked about when this model makes sense, and when you should look at other models like OEM and Resale. The challenge with the “meet in the channel” business model is that it is hard to measure since there is not a unique product sku that you can report on in your systems. The key to measuring revenue impact is to tie your alliance solutions to your deal registration system.
Before we talk further about the alliance nuances of deal registration, let’s step back and look at what forces led to the creation of Deal Registration programs, their wide adoption and the value to vendors and their channel partners have evolved. Figure 1 below outlines the drivers and stages of adoption.
Figure 1: The Evolution of Deal Registration
3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Options to Measure the Revenue Impact
Part of a Series: Are Your Alliances Missing the Money?
- 3 Steps to Monetize Your Strategic Alliances
- Step 1 – Build a Complete ATM Bridge to Your Customers
- Step 2 – Set up your Alliance and Bus Dev organizations to both “hunt” and “farm”
- Step 3 – Choose the Business Model that Matches How Alliance Solutions are Sold
- Measuring Alliance Impact:
In recent blog posts, we’ve been talking about how to drive revenue from strategic alliances. It’s fair to say that for many tech companies, alliances tend to start with great promise but often have underwhelming results in terms of revenue impact. Earlier posts in this series describe the problem and the opportunity and outlined 3 key steps to take to assure that your alliances drive measurable revenue. As we discussed in last week’s post, most alliances are not well-suited to an OEM or resall business model and a better option is a soft bundle sale with a GTM model that is often called “meet in the channel”.
But how do you measure revenue impact for soft bundle through channels?
“Climbing Out of the Box”™ 