What internal and external stakeholders do you involve in your strategy development?

Before going into strategy setting, it’s important to align and joint plan with your fellow counterparts in sales, business, product, analytics, operations, PR, and other marketing functions, etc. to establish the topline business target for the year (or quarter). If your team is not currently involved in this cross planning process, I would advocate to be part of it. From there, identify the key products rollout and timing. This helps to develop the key marketing moments and activations needed to contribute toward business goals. Once your marketing plan is in a good spot, you can then walkthrough with your external stakeholders or vendors.

For strategy development, I recommend thinking about this similar to a RACI model (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed). You’ll need to include internal and external stakeholders who are involved to some capacity or need to be informed. You’ll want to be able to answer questions such as:

• Who needs to sign off on the strategy?
• Who needs to collaborate on the strategy?
• Who needs to be informed?

I like to operate from the perspective of over communicating. Transparency is key. Focus on what the goals are and who needs to be involved to accomplish said goals.

Please see my answer for this similar question: When designing a demand generation strategy, at what stage do you audit internal departments to determine if there is sufficient stakeholder buy-in and infrastructure needed to support success?

When creating a GTM strategy for a SLG company, demand generation should be pulling in sales, marketing leadership, solution marketing, content marketing and potentially others depending on the business structure.

Once there is an STP crafted (see other question on strategy) between demand generation and solution marketing, it's time to run it by sales. Getting their feedback is vital because they are the feet on the ground and have qualitative insights you cannot pull from a data warehouse. This alignment on who you are going after and what the audience cares about is vital to be aligned on because if you take similar approaches, they will be complimentary in nature. It's like steering one boat together instead of tugging at the steering wheel in opposing directions.

From there, I incorporate their feedback and run the draft STPs by marketing leadership to gather their feedback.

During all of this, it's vital to align with content marketing because you need to make sure you have content that speaks to this audience or get a plan in place to create it. And of course - looping in your digital marketing agency as well so they are treated as an extension of your team.

For a PLG company, this process may not include sales, but include growth marketing/lifecycle marketing, product marketing and more.