B2B Go-to Market Fundamentals and Best Practices

GTM Fundamentals for 2023 with Chris Moody, Head of GTM Strategy and Thought Leadership at Demandbase

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In a recent webchat by MarTechSeries, we discussed a few of the top GTM Fundamentals and Best Practices that B2B teams should keep in mind.

There have always been several misconceptions around GTM and what a solid go-to market model should entail. In this conversation, Chris Moody helps break down a few myths and challenges while sharing some proven best practices:

Let’s Start with: Defining GTM

Most B2B teams do not have clarity on what GTM is or what it should entail, often confusing it with the larger marketing process or strategy in the company.

A go-to market strategy should be a plan that details how you engage prospects and customers. It should be a customer focused strategy, but the truth is that it is not always so!

That’s one of the first fundamentals to keep in mind when defining GTM for your own team.

A Typical GTM Strategy Needs to Be Built Around Education and Awareness

There is an education that needs to exist to help solve for the customer’s core challenge. A better understanding on what customers and prospects are truly struggling with is key here.

Mistakes that B2B teams often make is that they don’t get out there enough to talk to prospects and customers and to grab a better understanding of their problem statement. WebEx and Zoom meetings can only give you some insight into what’s happening. But both, sales and marketing leaders need to go out there and have more industry conversations.

It’s crucial to talk to more with your lost customers while at it, to gain better insights into what the brand could have done to drive long-term retention.

GTM is not One Size Fits All and It Needs to Evolve in Real-time

GTM is not one size fits all and its always evolving, it has to change every quarter to meet changing industry needs.

There is always uncertainty in business after all. A key problem today lies in having B2B teams make real-time changes to their go-to market models because they may not have the right insights in place to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Perceive GTM as a Top Tier Business Plan to Drive Cross-Functional Alignment

Your Go-to market strategy has to sit at the top of the house and everything else has to align to it. From Demand Gen or Product-led Movements, GTM has to hold it all together.

This is where marketing and other teams make another common mistake: they are not as aligned with sales or each other as they should be! This is not news though. Despite all the talks around this since decades, it still doesn’t happen well enough. Teams need to keep bridging the gap to meet this challenge.

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When Building a Go-to Market Team: Have a Dedicated Leadership

A GTM model benefits more from having a dedicated team executing on it. There has to be a clear leader who heads the initiative and helps shape that strategy and model. In most cases it’s the CEO. At Demandbase, Gabe Rogol the CEO takes the lead when it comes to aligning different business strategies as well as GTM plans.

If you’re splitting ABM and GTM, then dedicated leaderships for each function helps move the process ahead and align cross functional teams.

This kind of specialization can help drive the overall effort a lot more seamlessly.

Align on Common Goals and Metrics

There should be a common definition of success and metrics. Everyone needs to align on what it is they are striving for and why when executing a GTM strategy or for that matter, an ABM strategy.

Regular standups and communicating more on how things are going can help fix issues in real time. Sharing the right insights during these standups plays a key role. Understand the different types of target segments at the highest level. Measure different funnels team wise at a granular level to define the outcome and insights.

Understand how things are working through the funnel to have deeper conversations around why something is working well and why something isn’t, with each other.

If you have a target account that is engaging with one tactic, learn how to replicate that across campaigns and with other accounts.

The other best practice here lies in celebrating small wins. This helps drive team motivation and also the overall business effort. Even evaluating and then celebrating increased engagement within a top target account for instance should be celebrated. The little things can go a long way.

Never Fight for Credit

Sales and marketing need to align on credit and goals and take credit together. This hits on the shared definition of success (refer: above). When teams work in silos or don’t align with a common goal, the brand on the whole suffers.

This also translates to working together to fix certain metrics or lack of ROI together.

Get people to grow their network and understand industry challenges together to drive the unified goal.

Construct high value offers with the existing talent within the team and make sure everyone is credited if it leads to even marginal increased engagement.

Understand the Evolution of Go-to Market: Why does it Exist?

Marketing was always about leads. But what worked ten years ago won’t work today. It’s getting more difficult every single day to drive the right kind of engagement with the right prospects at the right time.

Today, a brand needs to have more insights on what their target buyers want.

95% of B2b buyers move ahead in their journeys without interacting with a sales rep. The days of sending campaigns to huge numbers of leads is long gone, it is not a great way to be successful anymore.

This is why modern marketers and demand gen teams need to move towards a more precision-based effort. To quality better on the front end and to give higher quality leads back to sales.

To be more precise can be challenging if a team doesn’t have the right tools, processes and alignment in place.

ABM came along over the years to refine all of this. Account-based Marketing is everything put together, marketing, sales and customer success – which is why it’s often referred to as Account-based Experience – yet, the ability to create that end-to-end experiential buyer journey is still something brands struggle with!

ABM came along to help increase engagement but it might not be as useful a strategy to help create that engagement with lower level target accounts. ABM is meant to drive high value engagement with top priority or top tier accounts. When a brand is more targeted, the GTM strategy will be more effective and all of this has to tie in at the higher levels.

Eventually, building this strategy into the product is important. Don’t go after broad accounts and spend your entire ad budget for instance on the wrong prospects within your target account. Target the right people at the right account.

GTM is moving quickly and is constantly evolving and today’s sophisticated martech tools allow marketers and sales teams to do all of this a lot more easily than before.

At the core of all of this lies – the importance of telling a story. Help build that out with a unified brand vision – answer the question: what is your brand purpose and what is it solving – if you can narrate that in a more creative manner to drive goals, it will help differentiate you in a largely crowded market.

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BONUS READ: 

GTM Fundamentals for 2023 with MarTechSeries and Demandbase; Chris Moody, Head of GTM Strategy and Thought Leadership at Demandbase shares proven tips and best practices. Download now!