The challenge appears quite simple – How can a Tech organization set up and run their organization so that they drive revenue from their products and partnerships? But think about your experiences with partnerships – like Bus Dev agreements, with Alliances, and with Indirect Channels (such as resellers and integrators), and I bet you can think of more examples of performance issues than of realized potential. As I’ve talked about in many of my posts, many Tech vendors are set up to market and sell as if they were a direct sales organization – although many, even most, are heavily reliant on their partners to drive revenue.
The root cause seems to be “boxed” strategy and execution that results from organizations pursuing approaches that were developed in a different era, but no longer directly apply to today’s complex IT world of architectures, software-defined data centers and Hybrid Clouds.
I provided an overview of some of these challenges and how to respond, in earlier posts such as:
- What 3 Questions Indicate Whether You Need to Sell Solutions (and when does Product Selling Work Better)?
- “Why do Companies Struggle to Drive Revenue from the Products and Partnerships: The Four Boxes” (a 5-Part Series that discusses each of the 4 Boxes”” in detail)
- Are You “Executing Outside of the Box”? – the Checklist
The first principle to understand is the need to build a repeatable GTM Bridge that connects your products to your customers. I’ve talked about Building the Bridge shown below in Figure 1 as the foundation for creating a repeating Route-to-Market and provided a detailed process on how to Build the GTM Bridge.
The root cause of many of execution challenges (and lost revenue) is lack of alignment. Figure 1 below shows the two most common gaps in the GTM Bridge
- Poorly defined Solutions that don’t connect with customers
- A GTM program that is either tossed over the wall, or not adopted by the field
Figure 1: Two Common Gaps in the “GTM Bridge”
Of the many, many people I have discussed this issue and model with over the years, virtually everyone immediately shakes their head in agreement. Yes, these are the problems. So let’s all do something to fix them!
At a high level, the Tech organization needs to look at two areas of alignment to drive revenue through the GTM Bridge.
- The first is “Who” is responsible for strategy, execution and alignment (Building and Executing the Bridge elements)
- The second area is “What” needs to be done to align and drive revenue over the Bridge
Figure 2: Alignment to Build the GTM Bridge
Alignment Around “Who”
A key part of developing a strong GTM Bridge is who creates the strategy and executes.
- In large companies, we’ve all seen situations where many organizations touch theGTM – and as a result strategy and execution are fragmented and ineffective. In general, I’ve seen the following distinctions in large organizations:
- Solutions are defined by Product Marketing – I’ve rarely seen a strong Solutions marketing organization and when they exist, they seem to be engineering focused, rather than in defining sales and marketing messaging for selling Solutions
- GTM Programs – are defined and executed across many teams (a big challenge) – Partial ownership by Channel Programs, Channel Marketing, Marketing Programs and Demand Generation teams,
- Field Readiness is owned by Product Marketing or Field/Channel “Enablement” – with sales tools typically created coming to Product Marketing – who create product push documents that don’t connect with customers
- Sales Channel Execution – includes demand programs from marketing, sales engagement from inside sales, the channel and even the field, with a marketing operations function trying (usually unsuccessfully) to cleanse and make sense of the mass of data
- In small companies, there are relatively few functional turf battles on setting up and runningGTM, but the gap can be skills and meeting the critical mass needed for a successful alliance or channel.
- In my experience, smaller companies struggle with focusing their scarce resources on a few opportunities or partnerships and then scaling later as needed. Instead they tend to dabble across a lot of partnerships and channels – to cover their bases or see what works – but they often do not reach critical mass for success
- Often they find that setting up and running a channel, or doing all the following up work to make an alliance successful was not really resourced and becomes a part time focus that is executed poorly – and misses revenue opportunities
The key message for the “Who” question then, is making sure that you have a defined strategy and clear functional ownership and empowerment to build the GTM programs, and drive alignment across organizations to assure results. To accomplish this goal, functional squabbling and diluted ownership makes revenue an accident – and difficult to scale.
Alignment around “What”
The second key area of alignment is around what needs to be done. The what includes all the things you are used to as part of a GTM program; sales tools, training, demand generation campaigns, battlecards, etc… With all of these different organizations involved developing the “what”for a GTM, is it any wonder there can be confusion on “What” needs to be done?
Defining the Connections in Your Bridge
A good way to prevent this problem is define the alignment interfaces shown as purple “barbells” on Figure 2 above. These barbells represent connection points between different functional groups and hand off points for project deliverables, such as messaging, assets or sales tools. For example, in many organizations the Solution definition and messaging comes from a product team, and the GTM program is designed and executed by either a channel organization, a geographic sales/marketing team or perhaps even an alliance team. For successful execution, there needs to be alignment between the organizations and also the program/task inputs and outputs. If the EMEA region wants to execute a program around a specific solution or use case, and the product BU produces an overview of their product capabilities, there is a mis-match, execution will suffer and the program will likely not generate the expected revenue,
Designing and executing a GTM program is a process that happens regularly in tech companies, so it is critical that your organization define the alignment on both the “Who” the “What” connections as part of a “Repeatable Process”. Otherwise, you will finding your organization reinventing the GTM for every program, with the roles constantly in flux. Unfortunately, that situation is is not a fairy tale – it is a nightmarish reality for many folks in the tech industry today.
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