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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…)
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…)
Podcast: Driving Revenue by Bridging the Gap Between Your Alliances and Channels
Listen to the recent podcast – from Steve Andrews
Overview
Over the past couple of years, we have been talking about the challenges for vendors to drive revenue for their products and partnerships, and how many of current practices are based on old business models for selling hardware, then software, and now being misapplied for cloud.
But how can technology vendors change to drive revenue in today’s world?
- The Mission for the Andrews Consulting Group is to “Help Technology Vendors Unleash the Revenue Potential of their Products and Partnerships”
- To accomplish that goal, we’ve developed a new approach to “Climb Out of the Box”™: A New Approach to Drive Revenue for your products and Partnerships
Learn More
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…)
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
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?
3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Step 3 – Choose the Right Business Model to Drive 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 the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about how companies can drive revenue from their strategic alliances and answering the question, Are your alliances missing the money? Below are 3 steps that companies can take to drive revenue. In talking to companies over the years, I’ve found that many (most?) companies are not able to measure revenue impact from most of their alliances. In today’s high tech industry, if you can’t measure it, it does not exist – and the resources to execute will also not exist…
Figure 1 below depicts this challenge visually. As discussed in Step 1: Building the Bridge, you need to have a complete set of programs to get to the customer – AND you need to have a closed loop feedback mechanism to measure your success (in terms of pipeline and revenue).
Figure 1: Measuring Alliance Impact – Across the ATM Bridge
3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Step 2 – Set up your Organization to both “Hunt” and “Farm”
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 my most recent post I talked about the barriers that companies face as they try to monetize their alliances. I defined 3 Steps to Monetize these alliances and focused on Step 1: Build a Bridge between you and your alliance partners’ customers”. In this week’s post, I will focus on how to execute Step 2: Set up your Alliance and Bus Dev organizations to both “hunt” and “farm”.
“Hunting” and “Farming” are common analogies in the tech industry (particularly in the US) to describe different types of sales roles, and they apply to tech industry alliances roles as well. In the tech industry: (more…)
3 Steps to Monetize Your Alliances: Step 1: Build a Complete ATM Bridge to Your Customers
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 my most recent post I talked about the barriers that companies face as they try to monetize their “strategic” alliances and the Three Steps to Monetize Your Alliances and Channels. You may notice that I put quotes around “strategic”. I added the quotes because in quite a few companies that I have worked with over the years, “strategic” was viewed as a subtle jab at alliances that did not drive measurable revenue. “Why are we investing in XYZ alliance?”, someone would say. “Oh, we’ve got to invest in ABC they are “strategic”, would be the reply. You can bet that someone in the room was thinking to themselves, “that is bull, we should be investing in XYZ instead…”
I’m not saying that many alliances are not “strategic”, but what I am saying is that because it is often hard to measure alliances impact, companies often do not develop complete GTM programs or execute crisply on alliances – partly because they are not able to see the impact (or lack of impact) on revenue. Without this measuring stick, business loses one of its critical success factors – the ability to course-correct based on results. I will talk about the approaches that can be used to measure alliance revenue impact in a future part of this series.
Today I will focus on Step #1, How to Build a Bridge between your products, your alliance partners’ products and your customers.
We’ve all heard the term “go-to-market” (or GTM), but it is usually used to describe the approach of launching a product. What do you call it when you are trying to launch a joint offering with an alliance partner? (It is like a product launch, only different… ) I call a GTM program for an Alliance, an “Alliance-to-Market” (or ATM) Program.
How to “Build an ATM Bridge” (more…)
Leadership? Management? Neither? “What’s in your Company’s Wallet?”
One of the most interesting elements of being a consultant is observing the differences (and similarities) between how different companies handle a particular challenge. To get this visibility, you don’t always have to work directly with a company – often this visibility comes from networking and business development discussions about “what is working”, and “what is not” with colleagues, or more formal forums like a “Partner Advisory Council (PAC).
One area that I find is challenging for many companies in the tech industry is the dynamic of “Leadership vs. Management”. For both small and large tech companies, leadership and management are required, but the needs vary quite dramatically and I’ve often seen companies that are short one or both of these types of DNA. Table 1 below shows accepted definitions of these terms. (more…)
“Climbing Out of the Box”™ 