For some of you the new year return to work will have created a feeling of dread. Times are tough right? Buyer confidence is low, the order book is suffering from a surfeit of white space and your pipeline seems to have more leaks than a BP drilling platform. The CEO’s on your back and you can see the doubts in the eyes of your teams. “Do you REALLY know what you’re doing?” they seem to be asking.
It’s a stressful time to be a senior sales or marketing exec in the technology industry. And is it your fault? Like hell it is. In these market conditions what chance have you got?
Surely there’s got to be more to life than this. Maybe now’s the time to pursue a different course – you could give it all up and write that book you’ve always felt was inside you, or become a zumba teacher, or head off to India to get in touch with your spiritual side. Or if none of those work out, you could become an ‘independent consultant’ and focus on improving your golf.
One small problem – you couldn’t bring yourself to just quit. How would you explain it to your spouse, your friends or the 467 LinkedIn contacts you met somewhere once? So you’ll probably carry on, just about keeping afloat but getting progressively more miserable.
But there could be a way out. After extensive research we have identified twelve top Go-to-Market techniques, guaranteed to send your business the way of the dodo, video stores, and press integrity. Follow these techniques and we can pretty much guarantee that you’ll get to live the life you really deserve. And the great thing, the really cunning bit, is that there are loads of organisations out there already doing this stuff, so no-one is even going to realise that you’re implementing a brilliantly conceived exit strategy. It’s foolproof!
So here are OneGTM’s 14 Go-to-Market steps to business oblivion:
1. When formulating your go-to-market strategy try to not to let any information on market trends and customer requirements seep into the process. Ensure that decisions are made on the basis of personal prejudice, gut-feel and speculation. If people question this approach you can quote Steve Jobs famous remark that Apple don’t do market research. So why should you cloud your minds by trying to understand what customers really want? (Conveniently ignore the fact that Apple designers totally immerse themselves in the environments they’re designing products for).
2. Try to ensure that as few people as possible, particularly the marketing department, ever talk to real life customers. (You shouldn’t get much push back on this because marketing people generally avoid customer contact like the plague). You may need to make an exception for the sales-force, or people will get suspicious, but this isn’t a problem as sales people very rarely bother feeding back anything useful anyway (unless it relates to their commission plan). As long as everyone involved in developing products, defining propositions and building go-to-market plans is kept well away from customers then you greatly reduce the risk of success.
3. Involve as few people in the strategic planning process as possible and make sure you omit some key stakeholders, such as sales or service delivery, from your deliberations. You can tell people it’s because you need to be highly focused and agile to cope with today’s turbulent environment. By producing your plans in isolation and publishing without consultation, you should ensure that there is a complete lack of buy-in and commitment from the people you’ll be relying on to deliver. This will result in everyone going off and doing their own thing, ensuring that the whole thing is a complete failure which you can blame on someone else.
4. Although it’s important to publish lengthy plans which don’t have buy in (it eats up a lot of valuable time as people argue over what you’ve proposed), make sure that they’re short on specifics, just in case some over-zealous type is tempted to start doing stuff. List lots of vague things that you plan to do (e.g. ‘create social media strategy to build two-way customer conversations’), but be sure not to state how any of it will actually be delivered, resourced or funded. Whatever you do don’t publish a project plan with objectives, milestones and critical path analysis, as you may inadvertently introduce a sense of momentum and focus.
5. Encourage your teams to focus on the real competition, i.e. each other. In particular you want the sales and marketing guys to be at each other’s throats. Lack of alignment between sales and marketing is one of the most effective ways we’ve found to undermine any go-to-market plan. (You’ll find this surprisingly easy to achieve).
6. To start with, keep them well apart, preferably in different countries. If this isn’t possible then at least make sure they only communicate by e-mail, never face-to-face. Keep the reporting lines completely separate up to you, then you can effectively sow the seeds of distrust. Tell the marketing folk that the sales guys wonder what they do all day, apart from colouring in pretty brochures. Tell sales that marketing don’t believe they could close a hot lead if it sat on their lap, fluttering their eye-lashes and suggesting they whip out their big contract sharpish.
7. Treat all your customers and prospects exactly the same – never mind how large or small they are, what problems they have, or what their value is to your business. On no account segment your target market or differentiate your message to different audiences. Work on the assumption that the IT Manager of a 50 person manufacturing company has identical concerns to the CFO of a global pharmaceuticals business.
8. Make sure nobody tries to compare the attractiveness of different customer groups, or some bright spark might work out that you’re better off focusing your resources on those segments where you’re best placed to succeed. This could have serious ramifications, prolonging the life of your company by several years.
9. Chase after every big prospect that floats into view, however tenuous. Commit vast amounts of management, sales, marketing and technical resource to pursuing glory deals from prospects that are as likely to buy from you as James Murdoch and Hugh Grant are to holiday together in a small caravan in Margate. If anyone politely questions this approach, tell them that their negativity is poisoning the atmosphere and that if they can’t think like a winner there’s no place for them on the team.
10. Whenever you lose a big deal, blame it on the stupidity of the customer or the underhand tactics of your competitors. Your sales guys all do this anyway, so it will help you win their respect and trust. Make sure nobody investigates why you really lost the deal or what you could have done differently to address the customer’s requirements. Lead the troops blindly forward into the next doomed bid; telling them that to dwell on defeat is just the mindset of a loser.
11. Try to avoid any sense of alignment across your different sales channels. Never do any joint planning with your channel partners and keep communication to a minimum; let them guess what your strategy and product roadmap are (they’re probably very used to this so shouldn’t kick up too much of a fuss). Make sure the rules of engagement between the channels are opaque and encourage the direct sales guys to pinch deals from the channel if they get the chance. When the partner complains give them some waffle about the strategic importance of the customer.
12. Ensure that your promotional messages focus exclusively on the technology you’re pushing. Cram your promotional material with technical jargon that no budget-holding business manager will understand or care about. Make sure that no smart-alec starts highlighting business benefits, customer value or return on investment. If they do, put on your best Peter Key voice and point out that “customers these days just want it told straight, without all the marketing fluff”. Most people just want to know if it’s bigger, shinier, or has more gizmos. How else would Top Gear have got an audience after all?
13. To buy yourself a bit of time while your plan takes effect, you could also announce that you’re going to implement some ‘thought leadership’ initiatives. Everybody knows that thought leadership is where it’s at these days. Don’t worry if you’re not quite sure what thoughts you’re actually leading – commission some research that has a vague tenuous connection to what you do as a business and publish a few white papers. Your colleagues don’t really understand what thought leadership means either, so by the time anybody works out that your white papers achieved bugger-all it’ll be too late.
14. If you’re getting really impatient and want to speed up the process, get in some consultants to do a strategic review, preferably one of the top strategy boutiques at top-dollar rates. Make sure they bring in a whole army of consultants to do some real heavyweight analysis and then a whole load more to project manage the review and then a few more to manage the project managers. Announce internally that a Strategic Review is happening but don’t give any other details about why or how. Send the consultants out into the organisation to ask questions and collect data, but make sure they don’t tell anybody what they’re using it for. As well as enabling you to burn cash at a truly astonishing rate, this process will have a devastating effect on morale and stamp-out any lingering commitment amongst your workforce.
Well that’s it – our infallible 14 step guide to Go-to-Market Failure; offered to you at no charge, with our compliments. Implement the steps above and by this time next year the anxieties you have about your high-powered, well-paid executive job will be a thing of the past. You’ll have a whole different set of things to worry about.
Alternatively, if you think that just maybe you’d like to stick around and try to deliver a successful go-to-market strategy that builds long-term prosperity for your business, why not give OneGTM a call. It’s what we do.
