Turning Organizational Strategy Into Sales Results
The translation of a company’s value proposition into bottom-line profitability
is accomplished
through its go-to-market strategy. A go-to-market strategy
is an umbrella that encompasses a
company’s market, competitive and product strategies, that together feed into the sales
strategy.
Keys to Successful Go-to-Market Strategies
Many go-to-market strategies fail to generate profitable results precisely because
one or more of
four prerequisites listed below are ignored. For your go-to-market strategy to succeed there
must be:
- A high level of understanding of,
and agreement on, the business strategies in place to
acquire, expand and retain profitable customer relationships. Is everyone
in the company
united by a shared vision and a common effort?
- A successful transfer of business
strategies to departmental and individual responsibilities that
encompasses both quantitative and qualitative objectives. Does everyone
in the company
know what he or she, individually and as part of a group, must accomplish to
successfully achieve the defined objectives?
- A monitoring and measurement capability
that enables leadership to assess the performance
of the departments and individuals as they progress toward their objectives. Can
everyone
monitor his or her progress toward the achievement of those objectives?
- A capacity to anticipate and correct
the most frequently occurring issues and obstacles
blocking the successful execution of the strategy. Can everyone learn
from his or her
mistakes and respond and adapt to changing conditions?
Two mechanisms must also be present during the creation and execution
of a go-to-market
strategy.
- First, there must be a mechanism
that can create a cohesive team, communicate and
reinforce messages, get everyone working toward the same goal, and measure the progress
toward that goal. Everyone in the organization should be concerned with how to create and
capture value for customers. Everyone should feel a responsibility
for the welfare of the
customer.
One way to
generate alignment around corporate goals is to require that each
function involved in the formulation and execution of the go-to-market strategy cycle
must go through the four phases of the Prime Process. The four stages of the Diagnostic
Business Development process — Discover, Diagnose, Design and Deliver — offer a single,
customer-centered process through which each organizational function can explore the
marketplace and ensure that its efforts are aligned with the functions.
- Second, there must be a
mechanism for communicating and applying the learning that is
generated as the strategic plan bumps up against the realities of the marketplace. Whether an
organization must respond to new opportunities, changes in the market environment, or correct
miscalculations in its own go-to- market strategy, it must have a mechanism capable of
capturing and responding to feed- back. It needs to be able to identify, communicate and
respond to customer needs throughout the value creation process. Again, when the Prime
Process is distributed across the organization, it can serve as that mechanism.
The Prime Process
requires that the various functions within the organization charged with
delivering value to customers take to the field in one voice and one process. To effectively
discover, diagnose, design and deliver, they must frame their assumptions in terms of the
customer, and they must test those assumptions against the reality of the customer’s
world. This ongoing diagnostic feedback loop creates a learning flow that, in turn, can be
used to gener- ate continuous improvement and breakthrough innovation.
Making the ‘Black Box’ Transparent
Once the go-to-market strategy is clear, sales strategy can be formulated and aligned.
That is how
to avoid the “black box” view of sales. The black box view of sales is an attitude
that is frequently
found among senior executives who do not have sales experience. To them, the workings of the
sales department are largely a mystery. They can set goals and send them into the black box of
the sales force, and they can tell whether those goals have been reached — after the fact. But
they
can’t effectively manage what happens between the two points. Sales are a black box that senior
management hopes will deliver the required results.
What executives need is a process that can make
the black box transparent, that is capable
of connecting the sales function to the rest of the organization in strategic terms and
creating a common language and process through which the go-to-market strategy is
formulated, executed and monitored.
This process should also allow management to pinpoint the source of performance
shortfalls. As one senior vice president in a Fortune 100 company has said, Thull, “The
most
frustrating things about poor sales results are not knowing where the problem originates within the
organization and the finger pointing that results when you try to trace it.” The Prime Process
enables executives to pinpoint inefficiencies in their strategies and tactics, and avoid the
black box of sales.
When the Prime Process is successfully traversed and the go-to- market strategy is
realized, value
is delivered to customers and value is returned to the business in the form of increased margins.
The byproduct of this end result is the lifeblood of corporate success — long-term, profitable
customer relationships. The corporate vision has been transformed into bottom-line results.
