How do you think of GTM? What does it include, and what does it not include?

When I think of GTM, it's from demand to advocacy. You aren't responsible for every step of this journey but are a significant contributor to enabling and owning the customer buying journey. Questions I always ask myself when I join as a GTM PMM are as follows:

1. Do my fellow marketers have what they need to create demand, growth, and brand campaigns? Do they have the strategy, positioning, and message to do their job? Do they understand the persona/ICP segments? What's missing? How can I enable and support them for success? Do they have the content? 

2. Do my sales team have what they need to be successful? Can they talk about the value of my product or platform? Can they show it? Do they have assets or content? Do they know who they are targeting? 

3. How can I help with expansion? How can I help market services?  

4. Who are my partners and stakeholders in these areas?

5. Which area is most important for the company right now? Where should I prioritize my time?

These questions will help formulate what to do. Now you aren't responsible for all the activities but for strategy, positioning, messaging, content, and asset development (to a certain extent) — you will be the lead. Being best friends with your enablement org and your sales engineering org will help you far, especially for #2 and #3. The one area I didn't cover is the partner organization. For some org, GTM PMM has a say, other orgs you enable your partner marketer to do the job. 

I think of a GTM strategy as the document to get everyone aligned. As a fun analogy, imagine you’re all on one of those ancient Viking ships. Each person has an oar, and you all need to be rowing in the same direction and at the same pace. The GTM strategy is the charted path on a map that the captain uses to give appropriate instructions for direction and pace. Coming back to present-day, the GTM strategy should have the following components.

(1) North-star goal: What are you trying to achieve? What have business leaders determined as the goal for the product or portfolio? By when do you need to achieve this goal (12 months? 5 years? etc.)? In our Viking ship scenario, the north-star goal is your final destination on the map.

(2) Research: Research should address three major areas: Customer Insights, Market Insights, and Sales Date. Think back to our Viking ship scenario; you need all three to create the map itself. Customer Insights, Market Insights, and Sales Data are all inputs to help you better understand the landscape in which you are bringing your product or portfolio to market, and thus, inform your GTM strategy. Below are some key questions you need to answer for each of these research areas. 

• Customer Insights: What pains are customers facing? What do they care about? What are they trying to achieve with your product/portfolio? 

• Market Insights: How are competitors currently trying to address the customer’s pains? What works or does not work with their methods? What does the analyst community advise for your customers as they seek to address their pains, and how does your product/portfolio fit into that advice? What are analysts saying about market size and how customers are spending their dollars relative to your offerings?

• Sales data: Where are you successful today? What regions are most successful? Which products are selling into which industries? You should evaluate metrics such as pipeline and number of opportunities across regions and industries. What segments are most successful (small business vs enterprise, for example)? 

The final outputs of your research should be synthesized into a single analysis that illustrates implications for the GTM strategy. Key questions to consider here should be: Where are you seeing low hanging fruit? Where do you have the strongest ability to execute? Which industries/regions do you have the biggest deals or largest number of deals? Are there certain markets where your product could have a first-mover advantage? 

Pro-tip: Quantify as much as the research as you can and try to plot it on a graph, where the X-axis is your ability to execute (strength in pipeline) and the Y-axis is the market size (could be market size by region, industry, or segment).

(3) Narrative: This is the messaging and positioning for the product or portfolio. It’s the story that’s told through your sales and marketing channels. Back in our Viking ship analogy, this is the chant the Vikings would sing as they made their way through the journey - everyone singing the same tune at the same time, rowing their oars in the same direction, at the same pace.

When I think of GTM, I think of the sales cycle stages (often as defined in Salesforce) and what I can do to contribute at each stage in order to accelerate, differentiate, and create relevance.

That's a short answer, but sums it up completely. Let me give some examples.

• You want to get more leads in a particular vertical, so demand gen is tasked with a campaign. This can be stage 0 of the sale cycle (just get 'em in the door). Owning GTM, I want to assemble case studies. Do research on the vertical for stats that highlight the need for a solution. Find existing customers that, even if we can't do a formal case study, help us understand the solution space for that vertical. With those customers, I talk to the sales people who closed them for color. This early in the cycle little is needed. Differentiation, some key industry stats that create relevance, and a case study or two to describe the solution in context.

• You want to improve the POC win-rate. This is deeper in the cycle, maybe stage 3 or 4. This is going to require some competitive analysis. Understand your unique value prop vs what competitors think are theirs. Understand your approach to the problem being solved vs theirs. Then, using past POC nuggets, create "off the shelf" POC use cases that you know differentiate you vs the competition. Help sales integrate those as talking points earlier in the sales cycle so they become use cases in the POC.

• You want to improve the demo to POC conversion (to get more POC at-bats). That involves doing training for the team on how to do discovery, and how to tie discovery to the product and its differentiating features. How to express the problem in ways that make it compelling to customers. Also, I'd do some training for the team on how to demo better. Perhaps I'd do "debate" training, teaching them how to craft a position statement and an "argument" and to argue their position.

There are many things that can be done to accelerate the sales cycle from a "product marketing perspective". Partnerships. Case studies. Topical Relevance. Differentiation. The key thing is to understand the sales cycle and talk to sales about where they get stuck. What content is needed? What messaging is required? What speed bumps do they hit that slow them down?