Last week I talked about an approach to driving revenue for products and channels in terms of “Three Layers of the GTM Onion” and defined the base layer of the GTM in terms of a GTM Wheel. A wheel is a good analogy for developing a GTM program because there is a center, or hub of the wheel that is the center of rotation for the “spokes “that define the critical elements of the GTM Program.
In today’s post I will talk about this base layer of the “Onion”, the GTM Program Wheel (shown below in Figure 1), and two common mistakes companies make in in defining and executing the “Hub” and the “GTM Wheel” that can lead to missed revenue.
Figure 1: The GTM Program Wheel
What Goes Wrong in “GTM Wheel” Design and Execution?
The “Hub” is the center of the GTM and what I’ve seen is that challenges in defining the “Hub” and building the spokes of the “GTM Program Wheel” are different depending on the size of the company.
- Larger Companies – tend to execute without a cohesive strategy (or “hub)”) that unites functional groups into a GTM that fits together to drive revenue
- Smaller Companies – tend to execute a few spokes of the wheel, but do not provide a complete program that meets minimum requirements across all the critical success factors of the GTM Wheel, to drive revenue
My observation is that there are two separate but related issues around defining the “hub” and the “GTM Wheel” that lead to reduced revenue
- First Common Issue: Incomplete GTM Wheel or a Wheel where Spokes are Misaligned
Look carefully at the middle layer of the onion shown below in Figure 2. Notice that the programs listed, such as “Channel Requirements and Benefits” and “Sales and Technical Enablement”, are developed by different teams within the company – yet they must align in a way that they work together as “spokes” to support the wheel. That approach can work, but quite often it leads to issues and missed revenue…
Figure 2: What Your Partners See (and how vendors are organized to support the GTM)
Here are some real world examples I’ve seen on how these challenges play out for technology vendors:
Big Company Example
When I was building the GTM Program and the team for channel marketing, enablement and channel programs at VMware about 10 years ago, we interviewed dozens of candidates (many from big vendors like HP, Sun, Cisco and IBM), looking for foundational folks who brought a knowledge of sales and channel, along with an understanding of all of the key elements of programs from Figure 2. But we often found that the candidates were siloed in their “big company” roles and did not have visibility to how the overall channel GTM worked – i.e. the entire “GTM Wheel”.
A typical conversation went like this
- Me: “So you worked on the channel program at Vendor A… How was enablement (or demand gen, or pro services,, etc…) integrated into the program? “
- Them: “I’m not sure, the ABC team handled that”
- Me: Was that part of the same team you were on?
- Them: No, it was not, it was under XYZ organization
- Me: I may know some people on that team – who ran that organization?
- Them: I’m not sure, they were at a different site, Texas I think…”
Not only did they not realize their program was “a spoke on the wheel”, but they did not even know there was a “wheel”!
I talked about this of diluted ownership and diluted expertise in some of my posts earlier this year in the “4-boxes” that prevent companies from driving revenue. This particular challenge is the “Ownership Box” and is one of the most common ways companies struggle in developing a strong GTM wheel
Small Company Example
I did a consulting project a few years ago at a startup that had some advanced converged infrastructure management products. They were finding that sales converged infrastructure sales were being driven by companies like Cisco and EMC, where the channel partners brought knowledge across virtualization, networking and storage – so the company realized they needed to build a channel.
We talked to internal stakeholders and some channel partners who fit the profile and built an initial GTM Program, using the methodology of the “GTM Wheel”. As we started to engage customers, we arranged account targeting and planning sessions for the partners and the geo sales rep – until the CEO intervened.
The discussion went something like this:
- Vendor CEO – “Why are you talking to the channel about deals that my sales team already knows about? I want them to generate new deals.”
- Me: “That is where you want to get to, but when you initiate a channel, you have to help each other. You bring them into some deals and they provide resources to support the deal (making your sales team “bigger” and providing the partner with on-the-job training). “
- Me: “After they work on a few deals and get an understanding of how your team sells, they can go into their house accounts and start discussions about your product – and create new deals. It takes time.”
- Vendor CEO – “I don’t want the partners and my team working on the same deal, that does not help me. I want them to be separate sales channels….”
I won’t go into all the issues with the CEO’s approach, but suffice it to say that this was not how the channel partners expected to do business, so the vendor had to regroup and pursue a different strategy…
What was missing in this particular conversation is that the CEO had not really thought of understood (or we did not communicate clearly…) the “Field Engagement Model” spoke of the wheel – and without that spoke, the entire GTM Program did not work. A vendors’ GTM gap could come from any weak/missing spoke – but the key message here is that a GTM Program Wheel has to be complete to be successful.
Although smaller companies lack resources and must invest carefully – to drive revenue, they need to build a strong center of the wheel and a small-scale approach for each of the spokes of the wheel (not a program with only a few spokes of the wheel…)
- Second Common Issue: Using “Product” (rather than “Solution”) at the Center of the GTM Wheel
What was the center of the most recent “launch” at your company? It is quite likely that the center was a new product, and your company created assets to market, sell and maybe even to deliver that product, and you trained the sales team and channel to sell that product. Did the message focus more on features than customer value? All-too-often that is the case, and often I’ve seen these launches not connect with customers.
I saw this issue develop in a launch in an adjacent division for one of my consulting clients. The new product extended their core product in a way that meant more value for customers and more opportunity for partners. However, the enablement presentation for sales and partners had 35 slides – and “Why should customers and partners care” was not covered until the last 5 slides! (Which of course should be the first message…) A year later they were starting to get the hang of selling the new product, and the change started when they began focusing on how it addressed customer problems (the Why rather than the What).
I’ve talked about the importance of Solutions in a GTM in a number of posts. Do you need to be Selling Solutions rather than products in your GTM? See 3 Questions that Indicate Whether You Need to Sell “Solutions” and check out the Solutions Best Practices section of my past blogs for more information.
My post next week will talk about the other components of the GTM Wheel, and how you can leverage the wheel to build programs that drive revenue for your products and channels.
I welcome any comments below — And make sure you “Follow” our blog (look for the “Follow” link on the upper left) and have your say. I’m also available as a public speaker, to support local and global events in Silicon Valley, or the rest of the flattening world… For more details, and to stay in touch with this community, contact me or Subscribe to our “Climbing Out of the Box” Newsletter via the form below.
“Climbing Out of the Box”™ 