B2B Navigator Guiding Principles

Start with Practice

Many B2B technology companies have a set of guiding principles, such as customer-centricity, agility, or collaboration. Sometimes, action-oriented principles bleed into more ethically centred company values, such as transparency. However, we rarely see guiding principles directly linked to practice, and certainly not to common practice across the revenue team. This omission can lead to them becoming tick-box items as part of corporate policy.

We believe in establishing B2B guiding principles via practice, and that good practice can lead to the kind of positive outcomes that are sometimes enshrined in values, so this description is retrospective. We started with a set of tools, which developed into a methodology – from which we’ve derived a set of guiding principles for B2B Navigator.

What got us really interested in the documenting these guiding principles was our work with Large Language Models. Specifically, how the principles we are applying with human-only teams make AI more effective.

What Problems Are We Trying To Solve?

A quick glance at the homepage of B2B Navigator will quickly convey our perspective on the general state of B2B tech Go To Market (GTM) motions. Too often, and increasingly, they are ineffective.

The symptoms may include poor funnel performance, failed initiatives, a constantly expanding sprawl of content and messaging that resonates better internally than externally, all of which saps the energy of the revenue team and the company’s resources.

There are some well known challenges behind these, the effects of which vary from moderate levels of inefficiency to utter mayhem.

  • Few clear, agreed definitions of key GTM terms across the revenue team.
  • Poor alignment, across the revenue team, created by role-specific viewpoints
  • Seller-centric bias (from moderate to strong) that limits understanding of the audience and puts the team out of step with the buyers they are targeting.
  • Few agreed cross-functional methods in place for the many tasks that make up a B2B tech GTM.

We’ve observed these at a macro level, i.e. a developing a full GTM motion, but also for specific tasks such as creating a proposition.

B2B Navigator Guiding Principles and Their Origins

These principles were adopted whilst working to take B2B company’s offerings to market. They come from the use of specific methods and tools, and from some of the inspirational firms and individuals we have worked with over the years.

Together they describe a mindset as much as a method: one that is logical, open, collaborative, and ready to experiment where necessary. In action, we have seen revenue teams adopt common language and methods, resulting in a force multiplier effect for the company and a better working environment for the individuals.

A Flow of Guiding Logic

Roger Martin’s strategy choice cascade and logic flow in ‘Playing to Win’ were the inspiration for our adoption of a guiding flow of logic to support the decisions necessary in creating a GTM motion. We have developed a full implementation of his system to build B2B GTMs from scratch, but we take a similar approach for any substantial subsidiary task, such as messaging.

Iterative Loops

The concept of a guiding flow of logic is more useful than the idea of a rigid process, as our second principle is to embrace the loops that regularly occur between the stages of the work. Loops are required as the work is non-linear: factors that follow each other in sequence aren’t the only ones to influence each other. Loops also help us to validate our decisions as we go (sometimes via test-and-learn) and to make iterative progress.

Clear, Agreed Definitions

Early on it became clear to us that definitions for key artefacts in B2B Go Market Motions were neither clear, nor agreed. Terms like Value Proposition, Use Case and Outcome are usually poorly defined and require clear, simple, agreed definitions. Sometimes terms that are frequently confused (such as Result for Outcome) need to be agreed also.

Some terms can be decomposed into elements in the definition. For example, Sirius Decision’s (now Forrester) definition of Value Proposition includes an audience, need, assertion, outcome and distinction. This was the starting point for our use of decomposition to make large unwieldy items more usable and to create modular, reusable building blocks of value.

What has been really exciting is to see a modular interlocking structure emerge from our use of our set of well-proven tools. For example, we use a SPIN structure as a bridge between an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and a Value Proposition. We develop the Situational elements of the ICP step-by-step, working through the situation, problems, implications and landing on a well-defined need. A need is one of the elements of the value proposition and is vital in creating another of its elements – an outcome.

Perspective Shifts

We all see the world through the filter of our experience. Individuals on the seller side of the buyer/side pair think quite differently to buyers and ‘sell side’ is also far from homogeneous as Sales and Marketing, for example, are renowned for very different perspectives. Specialisation in Marketing can create an even more fragmented set of perspectives. We seek to shift perspectives to create common methods, improve collaboration and overcome seller biases.

B2B Guiding Principles in Action

The B2B guiding principles described above are used for a variety of engagements, including developing full go-to-market motions, value propositions and messaging, positioning and competitive analysis, and product category development.

Regardless of the type of engagement, what we take great pleasure in is seeing how the work and its guiding principles manifest themselves in the both the mindset and skills of the teams we work with. The shift to shared customer-centric viewpoint and the adoption of common methods to analyse and describe value are key to increasing cross functional collaboration.

Sometimes this is what we are paid for and sometimes these are side benefits of getting stuff done more effectively, more repeatably and just plain faster than it was before…

Integrating AI

Over the last few months we’ve started to use B2B Navigator’s guiding principles in hybrid human/AI workflows. This looks extremely promising as we’ve found the principles we’ve adopted to guide cross functional (human) teams also makes for much better results when we incorporate Large Language Models.

We will continue to explore this.