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Startup or New Product? When Should You Plan and Build Your Route(s)-to-Market (RTM)?
In my post last week, I talked about planning route-to-market for a startup, or a more established company launching a new product category. The framework for approaching the situation is that you need to “Build a Bridge” to connect your products your target customers. As shown in Figure 1 below, that bridge consists of 4 key elements (Solution, GTM Model, Sales Plays, Sales Channel) that every company needs to take into account – if they want to drive revenue for their products, and alliances…
Figure 1: Building your Foundational “RTM Bridge”
But the Focus of this post is WHEN you need to plan and build this RTM Bridge?
To be honest, it is always a bit surprising to me that when I talk to folks in the industry (even very experienced executives and folks that I consider to be friends), the assumption seems to be that this needs to be done AFTER the product is ready. I’ve had quite a few discussions with prospective clients or with clients talking about future needs, where they told me something like: (more…)
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”: (more…)
Are You Jumping to the “Product Sale” Too Early (and Missing out on Revenue Opportunities)?
If you are a regular reader of my blog posts the past year you have seen a lot of discussion about the importance of “Solution” messages to connect to customers (and sell more of your products). My most recent series provides a good overview of the issues and the best practices in connecting with customers with Solution messages.
- Does Your Messaging Work in the “Cocoon”- But Fall Flat with Customers?
- How to Build the “Hook” into Your Messaging to Create “Pull” and Accelerate Revenue
- A Case Study: Building a Message Map that Connects to Your Customers and Accelerates Revenue
By now, I’m sure there are some folks out there that are saying to themselves – “This is getting old, we all know that selling products works (why else would everyone be doing it?)” It is true that I’ve made the discussion too much of a battle between “right” or “wrong” approaches, when the reality is that the right time to sell Solutions is more nuanced. (more…)
A Case Study: Building a Message Map that Connects to Your Customers and Accelerates Revenue
In my recent series “How Tech Vendor Messages Can Create Customer “Pull” and Revenue, we’ve talked about why tech vendor messaging often do not connect to customers (and miss revenue opportunities)
- Does Your Messaging Work in the “Cocoon”, But Fall Flat with Customers?
- How to Build the “Hook” into Your Messaging to Create “Pull” and Accelerate Revenue
In today’s post, I will focus on how to leverage the lessons from these posts to create strong “pull” messaging for your products that help you drive revenue. To do this, we’ll pull together principles from the first 2 posts and then do a specific case study that illustrates how you can create customer “pull” for your products (and how this “out of the box” approach is different than what most technology companies usually do in their messaging).
How to Build the “Hook” into Your Messaging to Create “Pull” and Accelerate Revenue
In my recent post “Does Your Messaging Work in the “Cocoon”- But Fall Flat with Customers?”, we discussed how critical it is that tech vendor messaging connect with customers in terms of a “hook” that gains customer interest. This “hook” is shown visually in Figure 1 below, and addresses the customer question, “Why should I care?”. The “hook”, also creates customer “Pull” that results in inbound inquiries, positive word of mouth and customer buzz that a vendor should be on the list to consider for any buying in their category. Clearly “Pull” has many positive benefits in terms of creating topline revenue and in lowering the costs for marketing and sales.
But how do you create that “hook” and customer “Pull” that accelerates sales and lowers marketing and sales costs? (more…)
Does Your Messaging Work in the Internal “Cocoon” – But Fall Flat with Customers?
I often create customer presentations for clients, and talk to friends and ex-colleagues to see how tech companies are positioning their offerings to customers. What I’ve observed is that staff inside tech organizations get very comfortable with their products and their internal acronyms and tend create messaging in a sort of internal “cocoon”, and as a result, position their products in a way that often does not connect well to customers.
We’ve all heard the term “pull marketing” and know it is a desired marketing outcome where the customer is reaching back to you as the vendor for information about your product. That makes the life of sales easier because customers are saying they want to talk to them – and that can lead to an easier and shorter sales cycle. Think of “Push” marketing as the opposite -– when a vendor broadcasts their message to customers and hopes that something about their message resonates and leads to sales pipeline and closed deals. Declaring that one of your messaging pillars is “accelerate I/O performance” sounds like a good thing, but how does it connect with a problem the customer has? In other words, Why should target customers care?
“Push” marketing is often the result of being internally focused and this is often driven by product-focused org structures, as discussed in my blog earlier this your, “Do Your Product Business Units Lead to (Product) “Push” Marketing (and Missed Revenue)?” (more…)
Are the Spokes of Your “GTM Wheel” Aligned to Drive Revenue?
If you’ve been reading this blog throughout 2014 you’ve seen a continued focus on the GTM Bridge that technology vendors need to build to connect their products and their alliances to their customers. The GTM Bridge is shown below in Figure 1 and the last couple of weeks, my posts have focused the second element of the bridge – how to build a “GTM Program Wheel”.
Figure 2 below shows the components of the base layer of the GTM “Onion”, the “GTM Wheel”. In today’s post I’ll be talking about the hub and spokes of the wheel and how you leverage those elements to drive revenue.
Figure 1: Building the GTM Bridge – GTM Program
2 Common Mistakes in Defining the “GTM Wheel” that Limit Product and Channel Revenue
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. (more…)
Is Your Channel Program an “Onion”? Leveraging the “GTM Wheel” to Build a Program that Drives Revenue
In last weeks’ post I talked about 2 Common Gaps in Most Companies’ GTM based on the GTM Bridge shown in Figure 1 below. The first element of the Bridge was Solutions. Today we will look at the second section of the bridge – Channel GTM Programs.
Channel Programs are like Ogres – and onions. Of course this is a reference to the movie, “Shrek”, where Shrek is upset that that everyone thinks he is a stupid beast and are not able to look beyond his appearance to understand the sensitive soul inside…
Shrek copyrights owned by Dreamworks Animation
People take one look at me and go “Aargh! Help! Run! A big stupid ugly ogre!” …
They judge me before they even know me. For your information, there’s a lot more to ogres than people think…
Ogres are like Onions. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers… You get it? We both have layers.
The Ogre/Onion analogy is descriptive for channels because what you see depends a lot on your role and how well you understand what it takes to deliver value to customers and channel partners in a channel program. (more…)
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
“Climbing Out of the Box”™ 