Raise your hand if you’ve heard about the early-stage CEO/Founder who listed their #1 concern about reaching scale was boiled down to simply “getting my marketing and sales teams aligned”.

This has been happening since start-ups were started.  Let’s dive into this and understand the role Go-To-Market (GTM) can play in not only avoiding the situation described, but also in creating the balance and alignment needed to scale.

Holistic Go-To-Market can be thought of as a ‘market-centric’ approach to scaling an organization. Most companies will evolve through various stages of growth if they are successful in reaching scale. The initial stage is described simply as product-led. Here, a company focuses their investments on product, seeing what works, and determining if there is a product-market fit. Assuming the fit/need has been confirmed, the company needs to now make a decision – pivot directly to an execution phase, i.e. shift the investment focus to a sales-led approach, perhaps in response to an urgency for revenue; or take a more holistic market-led approach to ensure that all the go-to-market elements are considered and all the functional areas which contribute to GTM are involved.

While some may view this holistic approach as taking too much time “before we execute”, the contradictory argument can be made that if the strategy or build phases are neglected, execution will certainly be more difficult, or simply fail to gain traction. This doesn’t imply that no execution takes place until all elements of GTM are perfectly in order. The key difference is between simply executing, or getting to scalable and efficient execution, which requires discipline, consistency, and coordination.

Another important consideration in taking the holistic approach has to do with the interdependency of the elements involved in GTM. An example of this is creating a sales playbook prior to having first agreed on the appropriate messaging aligned to your sales stages. The sales stages must be defined by first identifying the buying stages, and who the buying persona is, which occur in the build phase. And since messaging is an expression of positioning along with the problem your solution addresses, these would have to have been determined earlier in the strategy phase, along with your competitive differentiation for use with the intended target markets. Interdependency indeed.

Who owns GTM?

The answer to this question is partly defined in the previous examples. Given the multitude of interdependent GTM elements, and considering the various functional groups involved, the answer is that ownership of GTM has to begin with the CEO and involve all functions that touch the customer, but primarily product, marketing, and sales. In many organizations, the CEO may appoint one of the functional leads as the primary GTM ‘owner’, but as we’ll discuss in the next section on alignment, ownership of GTM should be thought of as a company initiative in the pursuit of achieving revenue goals rather than being the domain of one function or person.

GTM alignment and achieving scale

Many articles have been written on the difficulty of even getting sales and marketing aligned, let alone all the functional areas described above. What then, are the keys to GTM alignment?

To best answer this, it’s perhaps easier to first think about what misalignment looks like, which occurs whenever there is an imbalance of investments across functional areas, or when initiatives are undertaken which are out of sequence. As an organization advances from Early Development to Growth to Scale, there are choices to be made with regards to these investments and initiatives.

Examples of the investment imbalance might be when there is an overemphasis on growing the sales organization without having the proper support of marketing. Or if the technology spend to support revenue operations is ignored and disjointed solutions are consequently developed in silos. As for when initiatives are out of sequence, consider the earlier discussion on the interdependence of various GTM elements. Disregarding these interdependencies and prerequisites is a sure recipe for rework and do-overs.

“I was brought into an ‘early-stage’ company once where nearly all the investment - $10s of millions of dollars – had been put into product, with many assumptions being made by the product team about the target market and the solution needed for that industry segment.  Once the CEO/Founder decided to invest in an appropriate marketing spend, many of these assumptions turned out to be wrong. While it wasn’t a complete disaster, the product roadmap had to be re-done and development was set back a full year.”

What to do instead?

First, conduct an honest assessment of where you currently are with respect to GTM assets and processes. Simply put – what’s working, what still needs work, and what is needed but doesn’t yet exist.  Consider also that as you advance from Development to Growth to Scaling stages, the maturity of these assets and processes also advance. Once you’ve properly assessed your situation, develop a cohesive GTM Execution Plan, involving all the functional areas previously described. Key elements of the Plan include which functional group will lead each segment, which segments have dependencies or prerequisites, and which phase of the plan each segment should be completed.

The benefits of this type of execution plan will not only address the need for balance and sequence, but also ensure that the entire GTM team now is on board with a singular plan with assigned responsibilities. Perhaps most importantly, most companies will report a more cohesive culture and an improvement in communications, not only within the organization but also with key constituents such as boards and investors by letting all parties know what is being worked on, why, and when. It’s a great way for internally-focused teams, such as development, finance, and HR, to understand what’s going on with the externally-focused plans and activities.

Finally, let’s address when to assess your GTM. Even when you’ve taken a holistic approach as described above and are well into executing your plan, is that enough? Perhaps – if nothing changes. But a good rule of thumb is to re-assess your GTM any time there is a disruption to your business plan. Examples include – new leadership, mergers/acquisitions, changes to the competitive landscape, new capital infusions, new product/release/technology introductions, or new market opportunities.

“A good example of this happened in a company where I was in a sales leadership role. Together with the product management and marketing teams, we were killing it in our market. Then the disruption came in the form of a very needed acquisition to fill out our product suite. We initially assumed that all the marketing and sales plays would work the same with this new product area, but they didn’t. At all. Rather than simply trudging ahead, we tapped the brakes and dove deep into the core GTM elements associated with the new product to discover what was missing, as well as what needed to be tweaked around the messaging. Turns out the new product was solving a different problem for our customers. Once we properly aligned our messaging assets, we were able to insert these into our existing lead gen processes and achieve the revenue growth the company expected from the acquisition. The time and effort we spent to examine this was extremely well worth it.”