Go-to-market Strategy & Planning - in the End its All About Measurement

MassTLC’s sales and marketing community came together on Friday to discuss the various go-to-market strategies for a range of organization sizes and lifecycle, whether it be a recently-funded venture, a growing venture that has achieved scale, or a larger public software company.

David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partner discussed a common pain point, the cost of customer acquisition.  His presentation demonstrated that as human touches are added, the cost of customer acquisition is exponential.  But the internet has allowed us to be much more creative in our marketing than ever before. Working at the top of the funnel, its all about generating awareness, something HubSpot has done really well.  At the middle of the funnel it’s about nurturing and answering questions before they are ready to buy your product.  David’s presentation can be found here.

David recommended designing around your customer’s point of view.  Write down your prospects friction and concerns and what motivates them.  Look at your blockage points and learn to work around them and find a solution.  Create triggers.  A few lessons: free tools drive viral spread, build trust through clear demonstration of expertise, and use engineering for marketing.

Stop thinking what you think the funnel should look like and think from your customers’ point of view!

Next Brian Day, CFO, Apperian, Mark Lorion, VP of Marketing at TIBCO Spotfire, Mike Volpe, VP of Markeitng at HubSpot and Kyle York, CRO at DYN introduced their companies and a brief intro to their own GTM strategy. 

The panel represented the larger organization down to the start-up play.  It was interesting how Mark Lorion from TIBCO Spotfire thought many of their tactics mimic an entrepreneurial company and it is important to inject this throughout the organization.

David Skok moderated a great discussion with a very engaged audience.  It was determined that you always have to push cost of customer acquisition back to your CEO to get buy-in.  There were questions around content generation, top of the funnel vs. bottom of the funnel, market segmentation, blogging, sales compensation (a consistent topic addresses by our community, most recently by Jim Kelliher, CFO, LogMeIn) and tele-qualification.  In the end, it is all about measurement.  Measuring what you are doing to see if it is effective in driving sales and revenue.  Here are the presentations from the event: Apperian, TIBCO Spotfire, HubSpot, DYN.

I hope you can join us for our next session in the GTM series, “On Message, On Brand” being held at UKTI in Cambridge on December 4^th.