When a complex go-to-market strategy is required, getting teams working in unison is one of the most critical and difficult tasks.
Do it and you’ll unlock the hockey stick growth your senior leaders and investors want.
Ignore this necessity, and you’ll hemorrhage money and staff, which will only accelerate your loss of clients.
You’ll need to overstaff to account for the fact that too many people are new and don’t know anything. If you’re not yet profitable, that means you’ll need even more outside investment to cover those labor costs.
On the other hand, you can create an environment where everyone has a shared goal, problems are solved quickly, and you can run laps around competitors with underdeveloped cultures with a far lower headcount.
Sound appealing?
Read on for five ideas that will keep the table set for all of your teams, which means, most importantly, your clients are getting 5-star dinners.
Table of Contents
Before we talk about our five tips, let’s talk about what a complex go-to-market strategy is and what it isn’t.
Simple Go-to-Market Strategy
Selling Lemonade on the side of the road on a hot day is NOT a complex go-to-market strategy.
Why? Your marketing is your Lemonade visibly sitting on a table. Everyone knows what Lemonade is. Nearly any sign will do. Your audience is people with money on that street that day.
Putting a bank branch in a small town without one is not a complex go-to-market strategy.
Why? You offer a highly-commoditized service that is known to the entire adult population. Your bank marketing is a sign in front of your branch. The entire town will know you’re there because they see your real estate being developed. Your audience is people that live in that town.
If you’re worried at all, you can find a “rolodexer,” someone with a rolodex of small business contacts in the area.
Complex Go-to-Market Strategy
Bringing new technology or a new way of doing things to market requires a complex go-to-market strategy, however.
Why? You have to educate people, your ICP definition, about your product or service.
You have to earn trust twice:
- You have to sufficiently educate them that your way of doing things is better than the old way.
- If you’ve convinced them of the first item, you now have to convince them that your service or product will actually deliver the value advertised.
Creating marketplaces requires a complex go-to-market strategy.
Why? You need an ecosystem of both buyers and sellers. Supply and demand have to stay somewhat aligned. If supply is low, buyers will leave. If demand is low, sellers will abandon their profiles and create a bad experience for the few buyers that are coming through.
Lately, a raft of NFT and crypto marketplaces have crashed.
Playing giant killer requires a complex go-to-market strategy.
Why? You may do exactly the same thing as a company that has been around for 30 years, or maybe even do it better and/or cheaper and/or more efficiently — we see this a lot in financial institution marketing.
However, moving to you would create switching costs: vendor-to-customer relationships have to be broken, data has to migrated, staff need to learn a new system, buying habits need to be broken, etc.
So What Does a Complex Go-to-Market Strategy Require?
Teams working in unison! It’s that simple.
You won’t find solopreneurs running complex go-to-market strategies unless they are absolutely amazing at designing and using tools to create ultimate scalability.
So What Are the Teams?
For this purposes of this article, we’ll talk about technology companies. We do a lot of sales funnel audits and deployments helping SaaS, Web3, Fintech, and other companies with highly-complex offerings go to market, so let’s talk about the typical teams.
- Marketing – In a classic model, these folks are led by a Chief Marketing Officer and tasked with top-of-funnel activities. Get in front of strangers, get them talking, getting them to identify themselves, and then hand them off to sales.
- Sales – These are folks that are great at communication, particularly with strangers. They are typically tasked with consummating new relationships and graded on deals closed and net new revenue closed and similar KPIs. They may have to be “full-cycle,” which means they identify, contact, build trust, and ultimately close business with a new client OR they may receive warm leads from a dedicated marketing team.
- Business Development – This team focuses on growth opportunities especially through new partnerships.
- Implementation – Especially for complex B2B products, you typically see Sales hand off a closed client to implementation. Thyer
- Support – Because you have a complex product or service, you need a great support team. They work with already closed clients to be sure they don’t get stuck and end up churning.
- Finance – This team is responsible for being sure that earnings are tabulated and the return on internal investments is calculated. If outside funding is required, this is the team that will put together the investment thesis to raise those funds.
- Product – These are the folks that define what the technology will do. They take the end-user’s needs into account and create designs for developers to build, typically working through iterations as the product is updated and feedback on that version starts to come back.
- Developers – This the team that takes the develops plans, usually broken out into discrete tickets, and makes adjustments to the product’s code base, resulting in different capabilities within the technology.
- Quality Assurance – These are the folks that check that the new code created from the last round of tickets behaves the way it’s supposed to.
- Operations – This team, which also may include a sub-team called RevOps, is responsible for keeping all of these teams happy and working in unison and being sure the overall organization is working towards its strategic goals.
- Strategy – Usually the overall business strategy is set by the C-Suite with ultimate decision-making power held by the CEO. For certain companies, however, the CEO serves more of an ambassador and hype-man role and the strategic decisions are left to the rest of the C-Suite.
Are you sweating already? Yes, that’s a lot of coordination, especially for your operations folks that have to “keep the plates spinning.”
So What Happens When the Teams Aren’t Working in Unison?
The blame game starts and a culture of failure emerges.
CFO: “Why are we spending all this money on marketing without getting the revenue we anticipated?”
Marketing: “Why can’t sales close all these prospects we’re sending?”
Sales: “Why are you guys asking us to sell this thing that doesn’t work/that no one wants?”
Product: “Why are we putting all of our resources on things that don’t matter?”
Developers: “When can we work on features that will actually get used?”
Support: “Uh, guys…we’ve got 100s of open tickets that truly have no solution.”
Quality Assurance: “When we said it works as designed, we didn’t say the design works.”
Implementation: “You know we’re onboarding a number of clients that are going to churn immediately…”
Business Development: “Man, this would be a lot easier if we had a great and true case study we could reference.”
Investors: “This CEO (or whole team) needs to be replaced.”
The good news…there’s a lot you can do to simplify and harmonize a complex go-to-market strategy that doesn’t take a ton of out-of-pocket expense.
Tip 1: Make “Setting the Table” for Other Teams a Goal for Each Team
As a senior leader, you create a culture that employees will love or hate. Your employees will either be highly engaged or you’ll have both quiet quitting and active quitting severely hampering your ability to accomplish goals.
One of the major reasons that employees like some jobs more than others is that they feel like their work actually matters. Instead of being siloed, they get to mix with the broader company and feel like they are trusted to contribute to the overall vision.
A great way to create this culture is to make “Setting the table” for other teams an ongoing goal for each team.
Some examples:
- The sales team goes out of its way to document feedback from demos and provide that to the product team in an organized way.
- The marketing team actively discusses their campaigns with the sales team and requests specific feedback on the quality of leads being passed through by campaign.
- The finance team precisely defines what success looks like for the investors to each team leader.
- The product team schedules active training time with sales and support teams prior to releasing new features.
To make this work, as the team leader, you have to bring it up consistently during check-ins so that it becomes habitual and ultimately part of company culture..
Your Team Lead Script:
Hey Guys,
Great work this week. Let’s talk about what Team X is doing. I hear they’re working on Initiative Y.
What can we do on this team to make that a success?
What about other teams? How can we improve those relationships?
Tip 2: Welcome Constructive Criticism
Some companies are really good at constructive criticism. For certain types of products, they can be used by the company itself or its employees.
The practice of using your own software within your own business is called “Dog-Fooding” and is a sign of an emotionally mature organization.
When you’re willing to use your own stuff, you get a very practical view of your client’s experience. If your employees are struggling, you can be sure your clients are well.
Even if dog-fooding isn’t feasible because of the nature of the product, use internal team members as a lens for overall quality and usability. Show support team members features in pre-production state and be sure they can understand it. If they can’t, you know your clients won’t.
An ideas bucket is a great system to put in place as well. Teams that use a project management tool such as Jira or Monday.com create a special board for employees to drop their ideas.
Professor’s Note
Modern technology firms use multiple versions of their tech. The one that clients touch is called “Production.”
Apps and even website servers now use “Staging Environments” where you can test new functionality before pushing it out to clients.
On the HR side, there are also anonymous survey options that can be very handy for surfacing problematic behavior, especially with senior leadership (because employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they publicly surface the issue).
Tip 3: Get Your Analytics in Order
Great sales funnel analytics help identify the entire customer journey, and most importantly, where potential clients are getting stuck.
When you don’t have great analytics in place, you end up setting money on fire because someone misdiagnoses a broken sales funnel and then money gets spent on endless “fixes” to a part of the funnel that is actually working correctly.
When your people that understand the importance of accurate analytics are not given them, they get aggravated and ultimately quit. You can’t win at business by blindly guessing.
Modern sales funnels track potential clients from the moment they touch a digital surface or get manually entered into a system by a sales professional. If you need help explaining sales funnels to you staff or students try use our free sales funnel illustrations.
From there, all revenue teams should be able to see every web page visited, every call made in either direction (answered or not), every email read, every chat, every app page visited, and all the meaningful statistics on actual usage of the product once they are in a free trial or paying for the surface.
At Sales Funnel Professor, we configure Hubspot and other tools for capturing all of that information and making it actionable to the various teams.
We also recommend developing a RevOps function. Even if you can’t staff it fulltime, have your sales and/or marketing leaders be sure the data that’s relevant to cross-team handoffs is being captured and surfaced correctly.
Tip 4: Schedule Recurring, Cross-Team Check-Ins
Once you’ve got your analytics and “Set the table” culture in place, encourage cross-team sessions. You don’t want to meet for the sake of meeting so make the frequency something reasonable and dial it back if necessary.
During the sessions, get the most junior members talking first. Everyone who is an “individual contributor” needs to be heard. If these meetings are a new thing, use open-ended questions that presuppose a thoughtful response.
Great Questions
What can these two teams do to work together better?
What’s going on with our clients that you haven’t seen before?
What can we do to exceed our goal?
What pain points are you hearing from your teammates? From our clients?
Senior leaders should sign off on the changes, but if the ideas come from the team versus the executive, buy-in will be much faster and adoption much quicker.
If the conversation is getting toxic, be sure to reorient towards shared goals.
We all want:
- -More success for our clients
- -A better work environment
- -To move towards our personal goals faster
- -To have others treat us the right way
-So what can you do between this meeting and the next to move in that direction?
Tip 5: Use Sprints, Monthly, and Quarterly Goals for All Teams
The concept of “sprints” comes from a software development project management concept. You create discrete blocks of time and then jointly decide what can and should be accomplished within each block.
At the end of each sprint, you assess what was actually accomplished (and not), and then create the next sprint.
For your cross-team standing meetings, the time between each meeting is a natural sprint. Decide as a group what you will accomplish before the next meeting in a week, two weeks, etc.
When you’re working with complex teams, having similar goals for the organization as a whole is helpful.
In the next two weeks, we want to:
- -Add this many new clients
- -Get an important new partnership signed
- -Eliminate these 3 critical bugs
-Those goals need to be known across teams. Put them out on Slack at the start of each sprint or send a company newsletter.
If you have your culture and analytics right, each team will be able to self-police and recognize when they are blocking their teammates.
Your sprints should then naturally lead to accomplishing your company’s monthly goals, quarterly goals, and annual goals. These longer periods are generally what investors care about.
What Are the Overall Results if You Follow These Tips?
- You’re focused on the actual bottlenecks. Fix those and you have new bottlenecks to tackle next. They’re obvious with proper analytics.
- Your staff is happy and engaged. The blame game, especially when wrong and coming from senior leadership, is so counterproductive. Create a culture of honesty and then accountability is fair and appreciated. Senior leaders should always remember that if they’re doling out blame incorrectly, they’re silently being blamed for all the company’s problems by the whole organization.
- You’ll improve faster. A wise man once said the key to growing a startup fast is “to f@#$ up less tomorrow than you did today.” That’s easy when your team can work from accurate data and a culture that welcomes solutions.
- Your leaders will look brilliant. Isn’t their job really to “set the table” for everyone else?
Do You Need Help?
Getting all of these teams working in unison is tough!
First, you need to know what each team should actually be doing.
Then, you need to set up the organization to encourage the right actions within each team and the tools to get the job done.
If this sounds out of your wheelhouse, drop Sales Funnel Professor a note.
We provide Head of Growth services as well as smaller projects that surface and fix addressable issues: Sales Funnel Audits, Sales & Marketing Stack Audits, Hubspot Configuration, and similar services with other CRM and related tools as well. We also offer specialized consulting in financial institution marketing.
