There are never ending, and important discussions, about our Go To Market (GTM) strategies.
We talk about organizational structures and functions involved in our GTM implementation. We talk about metrics we leverage to understand performance, and goals driven to scale growth. The discussions about our GTM strategies are endless. And they are important.
But that’s the starting point. We need to move beyond GTM to look at our Go To Customer (GTC) strategies. Unfortunately, this is where the great disconnect occurs.
A market is not a customer. It’s an aggregation of thousands and millions of customers. We look define our markets by groupings having similar characteristics. They may be in certain market or industries. For example, technology, finance, health care, retail and so forth. Or by functions within these customer, like HR, finance, sales and marketing.We further characterize those markets by certain demographics. it may be regional location, for example North America, EMEA, APAC. Or by certain size, $1B plus, $500M-$1B, early stage.
Sometimes, we refine those strategies by defining personas within the market categories. We talk about certain roles we target, for example CFOs, CROs, Manufacturing Execs, and so forth.
As we define our GTM strategies, we we focus on grouping of large numbers of organizations and large numbers of people within those organizations. These grouping are likely to have the problems we solve. These groupings give us a 100K foot view of the issues, challenges, performance, trends, and how these organizations tend to work. Ideally, we focus our engagement strategies on the issues most critical to these grouping. But too often, we fail we focus on what we sell and not the issues within out GTM segments.
But even when perfectly executed, our GTM strategies don’t get us where we need to be–or where our customers need us to be.
A market is not a customer.
We must move from focusing on our markets to focusing on our customers. A customer is an enterprise. While they may share many characteristics with other enterprises in their markets, each is unique. They have different cultures, values, strategies, ways of getting work done, problems and challenges.
And within those enterprises, a customer is an individuals, or a collection of individuals, each with varying responsibilities, knowledge/experience, dreams, and goals.
Ultimately, our GTM strategies require us to move from GTM to GTC. Focusing not on the market, rather on the customer.
Our marketing programs, our digital interventions, our sales engagements have to focus on the enterprise and the individuals within the enterprise.
“A market is not a customer.” And customers don’t see themselves as “targets,” or segments, or even ICPs. They see themselves as businesses, or companies, and within that as people. Until we meet them on their grounds, all our GTM strategies are so much abstract impersonal pitches, no matter how well-tuned they may be. The difference you are highlighting needs to be addressed.
“Oh, the humanity!” Dave, you keep trying to remind people that in today’s data-driven initiatives, it still comes down to engaging individuals.Yes, GTM strategies are necessary to recognize and leverage trends, and it’s also important to go the extra step you’re suggesting and connect with the individual(s). As you point out, a collection of individuals, each with varying responsibilities, knowledge/experience, dreams, and goals.
Totally agree with Charles that customers/prospects do not want to be seen as “targets.” Along these same line, we should drop the term “hunters” when talking about sellers engaging/attracting new logos. Do these people and enterprises really want to be hunted?
Always love your perspectives Barry. There are so many terms that we use in selling that are offputting to customers. Hunters and the implication of hunting is one of the leading terms.