The Brilliant Basics of a B2B GTM

Imagine the management team of a startup in a room with a facilitator. In turn, the facilitator asks the heads of Sales, Marketing and Product what their top priority needs are to be read to go to market.   What would each of them specify?  

Even disciplined organisations tend to specify a lot – with the longest list coming from Marketing.  

Although we could prioritise the list, it is much easier and more productive to start with an approach that presents a set of simple steps that require the team to work together.  

Where to Play, How to Win

Our perspective is that the foundations of a well-crafted B2B technology Go to Market are a set of decisions, which can be summarised as a matched pair of a ‘Where to Play’ (WTP) and a ‘How to Win’.

This approach comes from the Strategy Choice Cascade described in Roger L. Martin and A. G. Lafley’s “Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works” (2013). 

  • What is our winning aspiration?
  • Where will we play?
  • How will we win where we have chosen to play? 
  • What capabilities must be in place to win?
  • What management systems are required to ensure the capabilities are in place?

This set of choices, particularly the first two, is hard to make and agree on because saying ‘no’ to a wide variety of opportunities and activities is hard. In some organisations, no GTM opportunity is ever truly discounted; it is just placed lower down on the list and assigned fewer resources than those further up. Everyone then competes to get more resources. I’ve heard this approach celebrated as ‘Darwinian’, but I’ve never seen it work.   

In the words of a frustrated executive in one of those companies suffering from poor results as a result of protracted indecision: ‘We’ve re-imagined physics here – in the real world, focus means convergence to a single point. Here, there is no limit to what can be in focus at any one time!’

Why it Works

By way of contrast, Roger Martin’s approach does work. The most obvious reason is that it presents a ‘flow of guiding logic’ to make the necessary decisions, which is usually absent.

The second is that it simplifies the start point with a singular item, not a confusing trilogy like ‘mission, vision, and values.’  See the article ‘Just What is a Winning Aspiration and Why Do You Need One?‘ Suffice it to say here that it really helps get the process off to a better start.

Finally, the stages are interrelated and present loops that help refine each other iteratively. It is a simple process, but it is not unsophisticated.

The Positives of Choice

Making those choices is the essence of good strategy, and if there isn’t a good strategy behind a GTM motion, it is unlikely to be successful. As one seasoned CEO I have worked for and with over many years said to me recently – ‘You’ve got to have the courage of your convictions. If you don’t, and you present the customer with lots of options, they will see through you. If you choose something and you do it really well, you can say, ‘Come with me, I’ve done this before’ with real conviction, and customers will listen.’

The Brilliant Basics

In developing GTM motions and engagements with a smaller scope, we have found that a small number of key deliverables with cross-functional teams drawn from the Sales, Marketing, and Product teams create a concrete manifestation of the decisions of a ‘Where to Play’ and ‘How to Win’ pair. Together, they constitute what we refer to as The Brilliant Basics.

  • An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
  • A Value Proposition
  • A Point of View (POV) story

The ICP clearly defines a ‘Where To Play’, while a combination of the Value Proposition and the POV story ensures that all the decisions necessary for a ‘How to Win’ have been made.

In our implementation, the ICP also defines Where Not to Play, as it incorporates exclude as well as include logic.

The Search for Insights

To win, we need more than just good choices. The process of constructing a rigorous, well-structured ICP, Value Proposition, and POV story enables us to dig deeper into the customer and the value delivered by the solution. It also enables us to construct a vehicle that will convey the solution to the audience, breaking the status in the process. To do that requires insights, and the canvases we use present three opportunities to uncover those insights.

The ICP

An ICP synthesises insights from segmentation data, combining various attributes (e.g., firmographics, technographics, buying behaviours) to create a composite picture of the ideal customer, whilst also reflecting the targeting strategy and pinpointing the most valuable segment(s) to focus on.   It’s essential to get past the firmographics to gain real insights, so we include ‘Attitudes and Preferences’, ‘Decision Making’ and ‘Competitive Landscape’ sections. The Situational aspect of the ICP is moved into a SPIN analysis to ensure that we can contrast the Problems with the Situational Context that generates them.

The Value Proposition

The Value Proposition presents a concise summary of the value of your offering, why it solves the target audience’s needs​​, and how it is distinct from the competition. SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) described five components of a successful value proposition (audience, needs, assertion, outcome, and distinction) as part of their Messaging system, Nautilus. We use a variant of this to define and describe the value of the solution on the audience’s terms.

The Point of View (POV) Story

A Point of View (POV) Story is used to convey the value proposition, with a ‘hook’ designed to break the status quo at the customer, power the messaging and form the nucleus of a Sales Play. We’ve found the SCR (Situation, Complication, Resolution) story structure an ideal canvas to construct a powerful Point of View story.

Each of these is best created when the Sales, Marketing and Product teams work together to produce them, using a specific canvas and a clear set of definitions.   Not only does quality increase, but so does operational alignment. The process of working through these step-by-step with clear definitions breaks down barriers and helps to improve collaboration. We have found this to be rare, and quality suffers accordingly.  

The Brilliant Basics – Next Generation

One of the benefits of putting these three Brilliant Basics in place is that many of the other deliverables to build an effective Go To Market motion become much more straightforward:

Use Case: We define a business use case as an audience and a set of goals they need to meet. The technical variant describes the paths of meeting those goals. By agreeing the ICP, value prop and SCR story the elements of the business use case will already have been defined, it simply needs to be documented.

Sales Play: With a defined audience, value proposition and story in place, creating a Sales Play also becomes much more straightforward. If we take the simple structure for a Sales Play such as ‘What to Know’, ‘What to Say’ and ‘What to Show’, for example, we can easily map what we have developed into it and then add the required details.

Message House: We can decompose ‘the hook’ of our POV story into the pillars of a message house, add blocks below each for ‘Needs Met’ and ‘Key Messages’.   This simple structure has proven to work well.

Cautions

Now we’ve made our case for the Brilliant Basics we should inject some cautions. The first is that static artefacts are dangerous – there needs to be room for experimentation and feedback from customers and Sales. Accordingly, the ICP needs to be refreshed regularly.

The second concerns personas. Building an ICP around a single role is more straightforward but ineffective, whilst attempting to tackle too many roles from the buying team can create so much work that it compromises the effort altogether. We’ve found it better to start with the strategic priorities of the collective buying team and then add prioritised buyer personas, starting with the decision maker. 

The last is related to the amount of segmentation data you choose to crunch to support your targeting strategy. If you pick a target and then test it as a hypothesis, the amount of data will be much more manageable than if you attempt to find ‘the answer’ in the data.  

Wrap Up

A friend of mine who has spent her entire professional life in Demand Generation jokes about three immutable truths about her chosen profession: ‘The funnel’s not good enough, the budget’s not big enough, and the latest initiative isn’t helping as much as we thought it would’.   I know where she is coming from – scaling and sustaining demand performance is tough. 

Our argument is simple: the best way to develop and sustain performance is to combine clear focus with sound positioning and messaging foundations. Understand your audience better, develop a stronger value proposition, and tell a more compelling story. Everything downstream of those Brilliant Basics then works better.