3 Methods to Keep Your GTM Planning Agile

This Week's Buzz

Author

Adam Gelles
August 17, 2023

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

I’m baaaack. Wanted to thank Joe Zappa for writing last’s weeks column. If you didn’t catch it, it’s here.

This week our topic is Strategy and Planning. And given many of us will start that process in the fall, I though I tackle planning best practices for today’s B2B go to market which requires material agility.

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3 Methods to Keep Your GTM Planning Agile

Go to market planning is difficult enough, but in today’s digital-first age, GTM planning must be flexibility enough to be functional in the breakneck pace of always-on marketing. So in this article, I tackle 3 Methodologies that will enable your planning to be, well, more agile.

Method #1: Frameworks

Frameworks are key way to develop your go to market plan. Frameworks vs. a set plan provides for the flexibility to react to the market but still operate against a shared go to market vision and measure the success of that vision. In particular, operationally it gives the various GTM teams - sales, marketing, customer success, etc. - to own the executional plan for achieving that success. Not only does this empower the team, but it also creates an area of autonomy for creative business ideas that will enable that team to flourish.

As leaders, this is an important approach since the execution occurs usually without our direct intervention. It’s not our hands that are in the tools. But we can educate our teams on messaging, executional best practices, product USPs, Brand Platforms, etc. In particular in larger go to market organizations this provides go to market solutions to be created cross-functionally. These solutions tend to deliver better outcomes than having a written plan that dictates the deliverables and stifles innovation.

Method #2: Modularity

Similar to frameworks, modularity is key to B2B go to market planning in today’s world. This allows for each go to market element (e.g., messaging) to be built upon and still codified. Take product marketing, for example. Each product in a portfolio has a particular value proposition, but may have differing use cases across various ICPs or personas. Modularity allows for the base product marketing messages to be amplified, but still allows for the nuance of the particular storyline for an ICP.

At TBM, we call these “wrappers”. That is, we wrap our core storylines (product USP, product features, brand value prop, etc.) with messaging that for our stories for a particular industry or ICP. This creates the nexus for having rigor in our messaging, yet the flexibility to tell a unique story for that segment of customer. This rationale can also be applied to visual identity, product design, email content, website design, etc. Modularity allows to create one to many at scale but still have a cohesive story across a particular customer’s experience with your brand.

Method #3: Measurement as Contribution

Measuring go to market’s outcomes are pretty straight-forward. In the B2B world we are seeking more revenue, better margins and more stakeholder value. We use metrics like NPS, and pipeline acceleration to describe those shared business outcomes.

But all go to market activities don’t deliver outcomes in a vacuum. It’s all about relative contributions. In some quarters, events are a big contributor to sales, other quarters its sales development. These aren’t mutually exclusive, yet we tend to want to measure them that way. But really measurement is to uncover how these activities collaborate to drive our desired behaviors and outcomes.

To measure contributions, we need to develop a shared set of metrics that all our tactical measures (e.g., reach of an ad campaign) tree up to. At TBM, we call this GOT mapping (Goals - Objectives - Tactics), but each quarter we need to weigh the contribution of each of those tactics to those objectives. And each of those objectives to our key goals. This method allows us to really see the performance of particular tactics that deliver the stated business outcomes which constantly change by seasonality, engaged activities, and macroeconomic factors.

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Be the “Goldilocks” of B2B Lead Quality

Marketing teams want to always provide high-quality leads to the sales team, but finding the perfect lead-scoring methodology is balancing quality and quantity. You're either in the land of high volume and low quality or high quality and low volume.

In both scenarios you're getting complaints from sales like they're one of the three bears with 'bad' porridge. So what do you do?

Here's 5 tips from 50 years of B2B marketing experience to get you started.

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