The #1 Go-to-Market Imperative
for Each Revenue Leader

Revenue growth opportunities are increasingly fleeting. The time between the opening of new markets and their saturation is decreasing exponentially. Competitive disruption more often comes from out of category than within. When combined with the reality that customer behaviors and preferences are changing ever more rapidly, you create an environment where our routes-to-market must be easily adaptable.

Herein lies the problem, sales and distribution infrastructure is inherently rigid (certainly relative to the ability of marketing to change messaging and activation tactics). Sales channels must be identified and established with sufficient capacity, sales resources must be hired and trained, and multi-channel/multi-role models must be managed to avoid conflict.

While it may not be possible to fully eliminate this rigidity, emerging principles are coming forward that enable more flexibility and adaptability. Luckily, the foundation for effectively choosing, building, and enabling routes-to-market remains largely unchanged, but CROs that layer in new elements can be more fluid and responsive to market opportunity.

Tactics for CROs looking to build agile, responsive coverage models:

1. Create Plays out of Long-Tail Data Points — Sales and distribution are the connection tissue to customers and the market. To drive scale and consistency, many execute codified plays that are repeatable and proven to drive results. But, in rapidly changing markets with fleeting opportunities, future plays must be codified before they are fully proven. To consistently be ahead of the game, use your frontline teams to identify key use cases and sales narratives that might signal a paradigm shift. For example, a seller may indirectly identify an opportunity with a new buyer set that represents a huge expansion of potential (e.g. selling agile project management tools to marketing or sales teams when the historical buying set has always been engineering teams). Keeping a pulse on deals that progress outside the current focus plays, provides a first read on where new revenue growth opportunities exist.
2. Drive Omni-Channel Collaboration and Crediting — Effective role design and coverage start with segmentation to identify logical breakpoints and complexity of the sale. Fundamentally, different motions are required to scale revenue growth in different customer segments. Historically though, this led to a lot of siloed teams and ‘hard decks’ seeking to avoid channel and role conflict. These siloes decrease collaboration, and often inhibit customers from realizing the value they desire (remember, “customers choose channels, channels don’t choose customers”). While each segment needs separate strategies, think of coverage as more ‘omni’ channel rather than discrete to drive collaboration and support 1+1=3. For example, many large enterprises desire to have purchase paths both online and with a senior salesperson depending on context; provide both of these for the different purchase types and create a crediting paradigm where a seller is encouraged to support the lower-cost channels. Essentially, focus on how to encourage shift and lift within segments and not just across segments.
3. Deploy Dynamic Territories — Translating coverage and capacity to territory design and deployment feel most logical when the ‘pie’ is deliberately allocated to sales resources. Yet, the logic behind geography to pie cutting is withering away (i.e. ‘proximity’ is increasingly less important). Additionally, the reality that the typical enterprise sales territory in any given year is almost always half ‘touched’ by a seller and half full of accounts with 0 likelihood to buy in any given year leads to poor allocation of time and resources. One technology company recently highlighted a manifestation of this issue when saying, “our East Coast team has consistently performed at about 60% of other territories.” By consistently cutting the pie where they thought was ‘equal’ (territory-based) they weren’t following the realities of demand and driving poor allocation of resources. Increasingly, companies are beginning to deploy dynamism in their territories. One technology client we work with is beginning to deploy a system where enterprise sellers have a certain ‘base’ territory defined of existing relationships and opportunities and then are distributed new accounts and opportunities as market and account signals dictate. This ensures that demand drives capacity and that sellers have equal opportunities.
4. Enable Data-Driven Motions — Enablement is no longer simply about training and providing collateral. The new mandate is to ensure data signal is translated to direct and indirect (partners, distributors, etc.) channels to set specific motions in play with the right customers/prospects at the right time. Data-driven plays, from cross-sell propensity models, new logo account scoring, buyer engagement recommendations, and everything in between, ensure productivity growth of sales forces. Without them, your competition will slowly appear to be running a different race. Think of it this way, while half of the digital sales trend is about channels, half is about the data to enable those channels.

As go-to-market organizations grow, their size, scope and structure often create an inside orientation to business innovation and strategy. Year over year strategies become more about how to reshuffle the deck across increasingly siloed functions, capabilities, and processes, and less about customer and market needs. The increasing proliferation of the Chief Customer Experience Officer (i.e. CXO) is based on the realization the customer is at the center of all strategic decisions. Whether your organization is deploying this as a specific role or embedded in another function (typically sales or marketing) matters little. There must be a mechanism that ensures an outside, customer-centric perspective.

Maintaining customer loyalty and advocacy is only getting harder amid competitive disruption and business models lowering barriers to switching. The bar is rising for CXOs to drive measurable impact, but all too often the function grasping to find a foothold. 2022 must be the year that the CXO function begins to orchestrate deliberate action across product, marketing, and sales/distribution.

Tactics for CXOs to measure and drive customer experience across the entire go-to-market:

• Ensure Solution Space Orientation — Every company competes in specific product markets, but all company’s products and services are also part of a broader solution space for customers (this is true for start-ups all the way to global enterprises). A myopic focus on the specific product-market or category inhibits a well-rounded understanding of what customers actually want and the potential substitutes and compliments that exist. To do this effectively, each year (re)articulate, and codify internally, the broader space (e.g. a health insurance company might state something around Health Outcomes as its solution space), and then deploy ongoing market research and long-tail insights development (e.g. digital listening) to keep a pulse on the bigger picture.