Starting Point: The Commercial Go-To-Market Strategy

Starting Point

Having a sound foundation for your sales team is critical for sustained, long-term success.  This foundation, referred to as the design of the commercial organization, has seven critical drivers that must be considered. As a sales leader, your first order of business is to ensure you have a sound go-to-market strategy (GTMS) in place.

The GTMS is your starting point for clearly articulating how you are going to drive revenue that has a long-term vision for sustained growth.  This will be a high-level general course of action, what you plan to do, and your desired state.  A strategy can be established for a specific period, or for the foreseeable future.  There are multiple reasons why this is such a critical step in your process.

First, this will allow you to organize your thoughts and establish a plan in writing.  Second, it assists in getting input from key individuals and teams to establish buy-in, begin the socialization of your ideas across the organization, and have a document (and visuals) you can refer to as you communicate, execute, and drive internally. Lastly, it becomes your roadmap for the execution of your GTMS.

It’s important to note that your strategy will look different based on where you are in the maturity or evolution of your commercial team.  A plan for a bootstrap start-up that hasn’t started generating much demand will look different from a business that is more mature and has recently acquired several bolt-ons and needs to centralize and drive consistency of execution.

Getting Buy-in

One of the primary objectives for a clearly set out GTMS is to communicate your plan at a high level to get stakeholder buy-in.  Once you have key stakeholder buy-in, it is then used to build support across the sales team and the rest of the business.  When your plan is simple, clear, and easy to communicate, your probability of success increases dramatically.  The level of detail required depends on the expectations of your stakeholders and your own needs.  Regardless of the level of detail, your general course of direction, critical strategic actions and required investments should be captured in a single-page, high-level plan.

You must fully understand, based on time with customers, time with your commercial team, and the direction of the organization, what is required to drive maximum revenue, so all elements align to clear business opportunities and the vision for your organization.

Your one-page commercial strategy visual should include the following:

1. Executive Summary: A two to three sentence summary on what you are trying to achieve and how you will get there.  Also include the period that you are covering and calling out any critical success factors that need visibility.
2. The three to five, high level strategic actions that must happen for your strategy to be a success.
3. The milestones that must be achieved to successfully execute on your three to five strategic actions.

As mentioned, based on where you are in the maturity of your organization, you will need to get clear on your top priorities.  Priorities to consider include marketing, evaluating new or expanding selling models, competitive analysis, customer support, customer targeting (personas), coverage approach, and your value proposition.

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Execution

Once you have summarized the approach and documented it in a visual, it’s time to begin leading the development and execution of the plan.

I highly recommend using a project management platform like MS Project, if it’s available, to build and manage your plan.  Things to consider when building your plan:

• Create a final one-page diagram/visual that represents the desired state of your strategy.
• Create a project team to review project progress, deadlines, and adjustments to the plan.
• Divide the work by workstream.  For example, compensation, coverage, inside test, etc.
• Assign a workstream owner to each workstream.
• Estimate resources and investments required.  
• Forecast revenue growth that will occur based on any required investments to build to ROI.
• Document and establish the critical few, most important KPI’s required to track progress.
• Document triggers and contingencies that give you guardrails on required actions to know when to change course.

Data and analytics are your friend and should be the basis for all decision making moving forward. Always show up to any discussion regarding results related to your planwith facts.

This process is evergreen.  You should always be reviewing and evolving your GTMS as required by the business.