Latest / What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It / Quick Fire Series: The Market Does Not Begin with Your Sales Motion

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Quick Fire Series: The Market Does Not Begin with Your Sales Motion · What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It

• 0:00
  Simon: Louis, today we're asking what happens when a company picks its favorite sales machinery before it's actually understood how the market wants to buy.
• 0:08
  Simon: What's the TL;DL("Too Long; Didn't Listen") for anyone who doesn't have time for the whole episode?
• 0:13
  Louis: A go-to-market strategy describes how a chosen market becomes aware, develops interest and trust, can be reached, buys, adopts, and becomes profitable to serve.
• 0:25
  Louis: A route to sales describes how work moves through the seller.
• 0:29
  Louis: Now, the distinction is one is customer-centric and the other isn't.
• 0:34
  Simon: Stay with us for around 15 minutes or so to learn more.
• 0:38
  Simon: Hello and welcome to episode 62 of the What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It podcast.
• 0:43
  Simon: I'm Simon Daniels…
• 0:45
  Louis: and I'm Louis Fernandes.
• 0:47
  Simon: We are exploring the challenges facing SaaS GTM leaders that Louis has been discussing in his newsletter, drilling into the topics a little further to provide some solid practical guidance for SaaS GTM success.
• 0:58
  Simon: Louis, you were in London last week for the Winning by Design Impact Roadshow.
• 1:04
  Simon: How did it go?
• 1:05
  Louis: It went really, really well actually, it was great to see so many people there, and also it was a fantastic opportunity for Jacco van der Kooij, uh, who as some of you will know because we've been banging on about it for long enough, uh, Heads Up Winning by Design, was launching the new 3X Seller paper, which may sound a bit like,"Well, what's that all about?" but it was all about how we now really can leverage AI not to take people out of the equation, from a sales perspective, but how to make them three times more effective.
• 1:40
  Louis: And it follows the, the sort of principle from Marc Andreessen, who was saying, like, you know, for the 10 times coder.
• 1:46
  Louis: It's a similar sort of thing.
• 1:47
  Louis: So it was great to be able to talk about that and actually really see how some of the actual ways of working directly impact both effectiveness efficiency.
• 2:01
  Simon: Nice.
• 2:02
  Simon: Is that paper something that's available?
• 2:04
  Simon: Can you share that with people?
• 2:06
  Louis: It should be out very early next week.
• 2:10
  Louis: And if people want to get ahold of a copy, please tap me up directly.
• 2:14
  Simon: Very good.
• 2:14
  Simon: You know where to find us.
• 2:16
  Simon: All right, let's get on to today's episode, and we are on to episode three of five in our What B2B Forgot series.
• 2:28
  Simon: So far, we've argued that revenue is a system, and that ICP without segmentation is a trap.
• 2:34
  Simon: Today, we widen the lens again, examining route to market and the crucial role that brand has to play.
• 2:41
  Simon: Let's get to it, shall we?
• 2:43
  Louis: Let's do it.
• 2:45
  Simon: Let's start with a distinction you make, Louis.
• 2:48
  Simon: A route through the company versus a route through the market.
• 2:52
  Simon: What's the difference?
• 2:53
  Louis: Okay.
• 2:53
  Louis: So the way that most organizations architect themselves, and it- this is pretty logical, right, we have a series of departments.
• 3:04
  Louis: The way that we think of the buyer journey is it goes through that series of departments.
• 3:09
  Louis: We start with, you know, what's the product gonna do?
• 3:12
  Louis: So that goes through product.
• 3:14
  Louis: We then say,"Okay, we, now that we've got the product organized, we now have to market product," it goes through marketing.
• 3:21
  Louis: when we have buyers that you know, want to engage with us, well, then that goes through sales.
• 3:26
  Louis: Once we've sold the product, it then goes through onboarding, and once it's been through onboarding, it then goes through customer success.
• 3:33
  Louis: And it's a little bit like the classic, Porter's value chain.
• 3:37
  Louis: You know, one department hands over to the next, hands over to the next, hands over to the next, and then we have the other infrastructure, things like as in internal IT, HR, finance, and so on and so forth over the top.
• 3:49
  Louis: Now, when Porter defined all of this kind of stuff, he was describing how the internal machinations of an organization work, and that's fine.
• 4:00
  Louis: The problem is customers don't experience it that way, and if we are too wedded that, the mechanics of all of that, what ends up happening is we treat it as a series of disparate experiences that we then subject our customers to, and unsurprisingly, they see no coherence across any of that.
• 4:24
  Simon: And so what do we need to be doing to actually deal with that?
• 4:29
  Simon: How, how does that get addressed?
• 4:32
  Louis: So I think that what we need to do is we need to understand that the route through the market could look c- substantially different.
• 4:41
  Louis: start with that route through the company again.
• 4:43
  Louis: We might think of it as, like, campaign leads to lead.
• 4:47
  Louis: We then get onto qualification, opportunity, we forecast it, we close it, and then we hand it off, because we're just thinking in terms of the sales process.
• 4:55
  Louis: The consumer, the customer thinks of it maybe as, firstly, we recognize we've got a problem.
• 5:00
  Louis: Then what we need to do is we need to understand what the category that maybe can address the problem can do to help us.
• 5:07
  Louis: We rely on memory about what we've maybe seen before, which brands we trust.
• 5:13
  Louis: What's the trigger event that's gonna actually make us enter into a buying cycle?
• 5:19
  Louis: Once we're in that buying cycle, we then need to think about, well, do we have internal consensus that this is actually the right route to follow?
• 5:26
  Louis: Then we start considering different suppliers.
• 5:29
  Louis: Then we purchase.
• 5:30
  Louis: That's one single event.
• 5:33
  Louis: But then the next bit after that is we have to adopt it across the organization, make sure it's successfully rolled out, make sure that we're receiving then ultimately value from it, and that value is ongoing.
• 5:44
  Louis: Now, if we think about it from a, an organizational perspective, if we start thinking about the customer journey in those kind of terms, we would orchestrate our way very differently.
• 5:55
  Simon: And so how does the sales motion impact on that thinking and those kinds of decisions?
• 6:02
  Simon: How, how do we choose between SDR-led, product-led, partner-led and, and so on?
• 6:07
  Simon: Does, does that have a role to play in, in that thinking?
• 6:10
  Louis: Yeah, because I think ultimately what happens is it goes back to this whole idea about how the organization built, how we design the organization.
• 6:20
  Louis: And it goes back to this idea that typically we start building the sales motion around the functions we have.
• 6:29
  Louis: Whereas actually, we've gotta design the sales motions around how customers buy, not how our teams are divided up.
• 6:37
  Louis: So that, that's what I would be doing differently and that's how I'd be thinking about things.
• 6:41
  Louis: So rather than building it from a function perspective, building it from a customer perspective and how they experience that journey.
• 6:50
  Louis: And rather than having all this series of,"Right, I've, I've done my job, and I hand it off to somebody else, and I have no further involvement," it's about how do we create a continuity for the customer so that they feel it's one joined up experience, and experience it at a brand level.
• 7:08
  Simon: Right.
• 7:09
  Simon: And so talking of brand, what is the role there in terms of, again the customer experience and, and how they perceive a business?
• 7:19
  Simon: It's obviously much more than just that first point of contact.
• 7:23
  Louis: Yeah.
• 7:24
  Louis: And I, and I think this is, uh, one of the big problems,'cause I think brand within B2B, SaaS particularly, has got a bit of an image problem, and that's this.
• 7:33
  Louis: We, we tend to think of brand as, uh, like, you know, that's the logo, and it's maybe a little bit of advertising, a bit of coloring in, blah, blah, blah.
• 7:41
  Louis: It's how we arrange our fonts.
• 7:43
  Louis: Nothing could be further from the truth.
• 7:46
  Louis: In the day and age when actually all the, all the data shows that buying journeys start well before any salespeople are involved, and I think that, you know, some of the latest research from people like 6sense is suggesting it's 61% of the journey's already completed.
• 8:05
  Louis: We've seen previously data from places like McKinsey saying it's as much as 75.
• 8:12
  Louis: So if we just say that let's say somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the journey is completed before anybody gets involved, you're sitting there thinking,"What are these people doing beforehand?" And at the end of the day, this is where the memory and trust piece become important.
• 8:27
  Louis: Now, you build memory and trust in a brand by having exposure to it, whether you're in a buying cycle or not.
• 8:36
  Louis: And this almost goes back to some of the work that Burnett and Field were doing about saying, you know, gonna need to think about the long term versus the short term, think about brand activation versus sales activation.
• 8:46
  Louis: And as we've always argued, brand activation is just a long form, long term version of sales activation, right?
• 8:55
  Louis: just that it's not in an immediate cycle.
• 8:58
  Louis: It also talks back to some of the stuff that Gerry Hill was talking about, where he was saying even if you're having conversations in market, with, people that are in the TAM, they're maybe not ready to buy now, but it'll help them remember your brand when they are ready, I think that becomes incredibly important.
• 9:13
  Louis: So what we end up seeing is that, you know, you get into this point whereby on day one of a tender, if you are already on that shortlist and the customers your brand, you can be up to 81%, this is, uh, uh, findings from McKinsey, I believe, 81% more likely to win just by being on that day one list.
• 9:38
  Louis: Moreover, in about three-quarters of those cases, the people that they've already decided are on the day one list, couple of them are gonna be also-rans, but they may even have a brand already in mind that they wanna work with, and they're literally using the, the rest of it to benchmark.
• 9:53
  Louis: Now again, if you are entering that process as a seller on day one, you've already lost the race.
• 10:01
  Simon: Yeah, exactly.
• 10:02
  Simon: I think there's quite a few data points around that, aren't there?
• 10:04
  Simon: Which are all i- of the same sort of quantum basically saying if you're not on the long list on day one, then you've got very little chance of winning.
• 10:15
  Simon: And even if you're not at the top of the long list, you, you, you've got a lot of work to do to, to get to the, to the winning post.
• 10:21
  Simon: So that's where that brand activation comes in.
• 10:24
  Louis: Yeah totally.
• 10:25
  Louis: I, actually I've just found the stat.
• 10:26
  Louis: It's like 95% of eventual winners were already on the buyers' day one shortlist.
• 10:32
  Simon: Yeah
• 10:33
  Louis: So you got a one in 20 chance of winning if you're not on the day one list.
• 10:38
  Simon: Exactly.
• 10:38
  Louis: Which is ridiculous.
• 10:40
  Simon: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:41
  Simon: It's tough though, isn't it, for startups and, and scale-ups even, thinking about that longer term brand investment.
• 10:49
  Simon: You feel like, you know, we've gotta get leads in now, we've gotta get business in now.
• 10:53
  Simon: Thinking about longer term brand building is just really tough.
• 10:57
  Louis: It can be, but I think that's where you have to think about it in terms of really honing in on the segmentation and the ICP that we talked about last week.
• 11:08
  Louis: Pick the accounts you're going to target, and you're not targeting them to, in inverted commas,"win business." you're targeting them to learn about the category, and by investing jointly with them in developing the proposition so that you can then say,"Actually, this is now referenceable." And people will buy into those stories, and you have those stories out there, and it gives people trust.
• 11:35
  Louis: 'Cause this is one of the things that brand does for you.
• 11:37
  Louis: In today's economy where actually if I am the sole person making a decision about who to buy, I'm exposed.
• 11:46
  Louis: Because if it goes horribly wrong, on me.
• 11:50
  Louis: If I then think about it in terms of the buying group, and I know that's something you're very passionate about, and everybody has heard of a brand, some people may even have spoken people at the brand in previous lives, immediately it gets on that list.
• 12:04
  Louis: I might be the person from the line of business who's making the decision, but if my finance business partner, my HR business partner, my CIO business partner, whoever it happens to be, also heard of them and says,"Yeah, I've had some interactions with them before," or, this piece that they did," they're much more likely to say,"Actually, it's de-risking." It's not taking the risk out of it entirely, what it's saying is, got some trust.
• 12:31
  Louis: We understand that they're bona fide.
• 12:35
  Louis: They've got some thought leadership in the space.
• 12:38
  Louis: How bad can it be?" And it goes back to the old adage, nobody ever got fired 30 years ago, 40 years ago, for buying IBM.
• 12:47
  Simon: Right
• 12:48
  Louis: It's the same principle.
• 12:49
  Simon: Yeah, and the, the point about buying groups is really crucial, isn't it, insofar as, again, on the brand piece because your buyer might be, you know, who-whoever, depending on what you're selling.
• 13:00
  Simon: They, they could be, a, a technology person or, or, you know, whatever that might be.
• 13:05
  Simon: But of course, the buying group is gonna span the entire organization.
• 13:08
  Simon: And again, there are stats that show that if the buying group doesn't already know who you are, you, you've got a much bigger mountain to climb than if, if the CFO or procurement or legal have, have ever heard of you, uh, when they get brought into the deal or, or the, the purchase.
• 13:26
  Simon: And that, that again is, is all, all about brand and, and thinking about brand more broadly.
• 13:32
  Louis: Yeah, and it's a point that both Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp have made on numerous occasions.
• 13:38
  Louis: I think Ritson particularly, he's, made the point a lot of times in Marketing Week that marketers often obsess about differentiation about their brands, how their brand's gonna be different than to other things before they've even solved the more basic problem of being considerable, recognizable, and being salient.
• 13:57
  Louis: So, I'm so worried about how I'm gonna differentiate myself with another brand.
• 14:01
  Louis: Nobody's ever bloody heard of you, so you need to get over that problem first.
• 14:06
  Simon: Yeah.
• 14:06
  Simon: And you touch on trust and, and of course, again, when, when you're the seller in the room, that trust that, that brand awareness delivers is, is really crucial when you're having those conversations in front of the buyer.
• 14:20
  Louis: Yeah, that's something that Joel Harrison spoke to us about a while ago, and it, it hasn't changed or diminished in any way, shape, or form.
• 14:27
  Louis: I think the, the, the problem that we then sometimes have is that we undervalue brand because in tech businesses, we like to be, in inverted commas, data-driven.
• 14:40
  Louis: And so we congratulate ourselves on being able to do that.
• 14:44
  Louis: But being data-driven isn't the same thing as measuring the right things, right?
• 14:49
  Louis: And we, we always go back to this.
• 14:50
  Louis: Well, at least with, um, leads, we can measure it, or we can measure pipeline, and therefore that's important, and it's immediate, and it's within the quarter.
• 14:58
  Louis: The challenge that we have is that, you know, the brand stuff doesn't get measured quite the same.
• 15:04
  Louis: But if I then think about it, about how it de-risks a deal, treating something as economically unimportant because it's difficult to attribute isn't the same as having commercial rigor.
• 15:15
  Louis: What that is, is it's just measurement bullshit.
• 15:19
  Louis: what I prefer to think of is if we go back to, again, Binet and Field's work, if you have the long and the short, it's that the two systems that we have, as we've said before, work on very different time horizons and that's the whole point.
• 15:32
  Louis: Activation monetizes existing demand, whereas brand helps create the conditions under which future demand is more likely to be favorable to you.
• 15:41
  Louis: And the truth is, you just need both.
• 15:44
  Simon: All right, let's leave it there.
• 15:47
  Simon: So Louis, what is the headline takeaway from today's discussion?
• 15:52
  Louis: I think the thing is we just need to make sure that people understand that brand is as important, if not more so, than sales activation.
• 16:02
  Louis: People aren't gonna buy your brand if they don't know you, if they don't trust you, if they don't believe that you're able to solve the problem, and if they don't believe that whatever they're going to do with you doesn't carry an existential risk for them or their company.
• 16:19
  Louis: So we've really gotta think about it in terms of what is it, what is brand as a real asset in helping close deals?
• 16:27
  Louis: It's not gonna close deals for you, but I'll tell you what, it's gonna make it a lot easier when it's on your side.
• 16:32
  Simon: And those are our takeaways for this episode.
• 16:35
  Simon: Thank you so much for listening to episode 62 of the What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It podcast.
• 16:40
  Simon: Check out our LinkedIn page where you can find show notes relating to the episode.
• 16:44
  Simon: You can also get in touch with us via LinkedIn and follow us for regular updates.
• 16:48
  Simon: Don't forget to subscribe in your preferred podcast app to make sure you don't miss an episode.
• 16:53
  Simon: Next time, we ask what happens when the customer meets a different promise at every internal handoff, so please join us.
• 17:00
  Simon: Until then, it's goodbye from me, Simon Daniels…
• 17:03
  Louis: and it's goodbye for me, Louis Fernandes.
• 17:05
  Louis: Have a fantastic day.