June 2024 Round-Up: How aligned are sales and marketing in your go-to-market strategy?
Discover how sales and marketing must align as part of your overall go to market strategy. Plus, learn how to leverage AI for data analysis.
The success of a Go-To-Market strategy requires three things to be in place beyond product-market fit, market message fit, customer channel match, and a target account list full of the right ideal client profiles.
These three things are:
1) Sales and Marketing working together and supporting each other. They need to be in step. They need to love each other.
2) Alignment on the Metrics that Matter
3) One cohesive Customer Journey
What does this look like in practice?
Marketing can support sales by:
- Providing a brand they are proud of and love to represent
- Creating brand awareness in the marketplace
- Providing high-intent leads that equals high-intent revenue opportunities in the pipeline
- Updating pitch decks and sales collateral that help sales sell; the collateral needs to be easy to use, easy to find, and easy to share.
- Providing talking tracks, playbooks and sequences to support the sale process
Sales supports marketing by:
- Sharing customer stories
- Having a feedback loop to provide indicators of what is working and not working
- Inviting marketing to sales meetings to do pipeline inspections together
- Inviting marketing to customer events
- Letting marketing sit in or do sales calls to gain lived sales experience
Then, you need alignment on metrics. This often looks like:
- Having one shared dashboard with company metrics
- Having neither sales nor marketing own the dashboard
- Having all the measured metrics supporting the company's critical numbers
What's a critical number? It measures what a business must do to achieve its primary goal (i.e. driving revenues, acquiring customers, reactivating customers, or increasing EBIT). Figure this out and align your team on the metrics that drive critical numbers, which then drive your business.
Then, finally, having one cohesive customer journey means all your journeys, whether it's the buyer's journey, customer onboarding, project delivery, or the customer retention journey, have to be frictionless and understood from the lens of customer value creation at every stage.
Organizations need to consider:
- What questions/needs do customers have at each stage?
- What are the drivers of value for customers at each stage?
- Do all the different parts of an organization that deliver the various stages show up and provide the same brand experience to the customer?
The impact of sales, marketing and customer delivery not working well together or being siloed is often quoted as at least a 10 - 15% lost opportunity for growth!
Why accept what can be changed with alignment and communication?
If you need help getting your teams in sync or discovering your critical number to drive your business forward, give us a call.
We're happy to help.
Book a Discovery Call
Redwood Infrastructure
Creating Strong Brands in Telecommunications
A private equity group we worked with back in 2018 needed a brand and name for its recent acquisition of over 150 communication towers across Canada. Along with these towers, the organization planned to build new infrastructure, including additional towers and fiber lines.
The Challenge
The private equity group needed support to capture the company's vision and develop a solid strategy for key brand decisions, including the name and identity elements.
The Solution
We conducted a brand workshop with key decision-makers to create a brand strategy that included the following: business overview, goals, services and benefits, values, and audience personas. The brand strategy allowed us to select a name that reflects the brand's qualities of strength, trust, and reliability. The company, named after the Redwood tree species, symbolizes the tall, strong, and stable nature of these trees. The brand elements work together to enhance the attributes defined in the strategy document.
Along with key brand elements, we created a robust set of tools for the company, including a slide deck for the sales team, social media assets, a stationery set, and photography and iconography. We also developed a website with an integrated, easy-to-update asset map and launch plan.
Using AI in Data Analysis
In this clip from our "How to Use AI" webinar, Steve explains how we use AI for survey data analysis — including prompts. You can take a large amount of data and easily start to gather trends and common sentiments, but in a fraction of the time. This can be especially helpful for gathering insight from your customer data from surveys or stakeholder interviews.
Using these AI data analysis techniques can free up a significant amount of your own "mental horsepower" as Steve puts it, for other tasks.
Ready to start using AI for your business?
Would you like us to implement a similar strategy for you?
Book a Discovery Call
