Startup or New Product? Building a “Route-to-Market (RTM) Bridge” as the Foundation for Revenue

In a number of my posts in the past year, I’ve talked about the importance and best practices for “Building a GTM Bridge” to create a repeatable approach to marketing and selling your products – and drive more revenue. This process is shown in Figure 1 below.

 

Figure 1: Building a “GTM Bridge”

 

Building a GTM Bridge – to Make Your GTM Approach More Effective

What I have seen is that within a vendor, many organizations are involved in supporting the marketing, selling and delivering of products and solutions through sales channels – but often this alignment does not occur. The dynamics of why this process breaks down is covered in more detail in my series, “Why do Companies Struggle to Build the GTM Bridge?”

Here are some examples of what happens without a repeatable “GTM Bridge”:

• Products: If you have multiple products being sold through a shared set of sales channels (as is normally the case in even mid-sized tech companies), each product team needs to develop their own approach to engaging with the channel – and the tendency is to market and sell as if all other company products don’t exist!
  • I recently attended a product launch call for a client, where a Product Marketing Manager reviewed the contents of a partner sales playbook. He talked for 10 minutes about the target customer, objection handling and even the ideal customer profile (all good stuff for a sales team or the channel). But then one of the Field Marketing Managers spoke up and said, something like,

“This is all really good information, but we don’t really sell this product “stand-alone”. We sell this product in conjunction with Product X and Y – as part of a Sales Play (so the playbook is not very useful …)

Unfortunately, I have found that this is the general rule, not the exception. Relatively few vendors provide overall context on the problems they solve, and where individual products fit (if they fit?) into solving these problems. As a default, each product (or product group) tries to create a sales process and connect to customers with their own GTM (which is a lot of wasted work and often is not aligned to how customers adopt your products, or how your sales team and channel sell).

 

• Alliances: Alliances GTMs have all the same challenges of selling a “product”, but in addition, they have to be coordinated between two alliances that typically have a different set of GTM practices and, are dependent on a strong the definition of the Solution.
  • If you have a number of alliances and you don’t an overall context of the problems you solve and a repeatable framework (or Bridge) that ties your alliance GTM programs together, you will find :
    • Your alliance teams have great difficulty creating GTM programs (because they reinvent the wheel each time)
    • AND your sales team and channel will complain that they can’t digest how to leverage your alliances in sales situations, because they lack a repeatable process.

Both of these situations lead to missed revenue opportunities…

 

Startups and New Products – Using the “Bridge” to Build a New Route-to-Market (RTM)

I’ve had a number of clients who are start-ups, who are building a new product that seems outside of what they have done before (new decision maker, new capability, maybe a new RTM?), or who are going through a re-positioning of their company. In these cases the GTM Bridge framework is helpful, but it does not quite fit the situation, because it assumes you already have a channel and some processes that you want to standardize.

But what if your company is building a new RTM (or starting to sell a new product that you think will require fundamentally different sales channel and approach)? I have found you can leverage the GTM Bridge Framework, but the questions you want to answer are a bit different. Figure 2 below shows how you can leverage this methodology to build an RTM.

 

Figure 2: Building your Foundational “RTM Bridge”

Below are steps you can take to build an RTM for your startup, or new product:

• Step 1: Focus Products and Target Customers – What product are you selling and what target customers do you expect to focus on?
  • Your engineering team and product managers are busy defining your product and that product is intended to meet the needs of some target customer base. You’ve fixed 2 of the elements of your RTM – the other elements all depend on these choices…
• Step 2: Solution and Sales Channel – What problems can customers solve that leverage your product (Solution), and what do you see as the primary Sales Channels to sell this Solution (field reps, reseller channel, cloud channel, System Integrators or something else?)
  • To define these 2 elements of the RTM, you should look at what is required to be successful in bridging the gap between your Products and the Target Customer:
  • Will your product need to be sold in conjunction with other products and professional services for this solution (or will it be a stand-alone product sale?
  • What is the Sales Play (i.e., what do you expect to be the average deal size $, length of sales cycle, amount of technical pre-sales work expected and the requirement for professional services to design or implement the Solution?)

• Step 3: GTM Program and Field Readiness – What is the GTM program (focus Solution, incentive, training, sales plays, demand generation, etc…)
  • To define the final 2 elements of the RTM, you need to determine a repeatable approach to bring your products to market that you can build on for initial and future launches based on the RTM elements you have already set (Focus Products/Target Customers, Solution/Sales Channel)
  • For example, a leading security vendor who I worked in their pre-IPO days, developed a simple 3-step sales process to penetrate new accounts and to upsell those accounts to buying more products from them. They based their entire GTM on this sales play and supported it with sales tools and training.
    1. Do a Demo (leveraging a shared demo system and database)
    2. Do a proof of concept at the customer site. The main requirement of the partner program was that partners needed to buy gear for on-site POCs. All benefits, such as product discounts, were based on buying demo product (not by sales volume…)
    3. Sell the product as a tactical solution to solve a specific problem (land and expand). Then go back in 6 months to upsell the customer to more units and expand how product was being used
  • They built their field and channel readiness around this sales process

A major benefit of this approach was that that as they added new products and evolved their value proposition, these new opportunities were added to their existing sales process (a foundational “Bridge”) rather than presented from scratch – and they found their sales team and channels were quite successful with the upsell…

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