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Who sits on an ideal GTM team?
There is one rallying cry we have advocated since our inception.
You don’t have a marketing problem.
You don’t have a sales problem.
You don’t have a customer success problem.
You don’t have a product problem.
You have a GTM problem.
That also means you don’t need a marketing solution, a sales solution, a CS solution, or a product solution.
You need a GTM solution.
A GTM solution requires cross-functional support and participation from all these groups and leaders.
Who should own GTM?
Most GTM leaders think the owner should be in sales or marketing.
Instead of looking for a single leader from marketing or sales to drive the entire cross-functional team, consider assigning clear roles and responsibilities to leaders from all four GTM teams.
The CEO should lead the way on the role assignment, looking for leaders who have the skills and institutional knowledge and experience to be successful.
GTM Team Roles and Responsibilities
Depending on the size of your organization, you may have different titles or individuals wearing multiple hats, but making sure you have all areas represented is critical to your GTM success.
Here’s our fantasy draft GTM team. Who are your draft picks?
GTM Owner
Ideal Person: CEO, GM, or Division Head
Mission: Align the executive team with incentives and KPIs across the business.
Challenges:
Make final decision on which bets to take and which business to walk away from.
Keep a team with varied skills - a cohesive unit with aligned priorities.
Watch the long game.
Secret Sauce:
Make RevOps your key partner and maintain a neutral POV.
Don't be afraid to combine departments to drive better cohesion if needed.
Galvanizer
Ideal Person: CMO, VP of Marketing, or CPO
Mission: Ensure resources are assigned to create a consistent Go-to-Market process from brand experience through to customer renewal.
Challenges:
Have a strong strategy and be strong in its execution.
Avoid being mired down in "big ideas" from dreamers and non-practitioners that can throw your plan off course.
Secret Sauce:
Do not rely on funnels to drive growth.
Stay connected with the CPO, CRO, and finance to expand channels as appropriate.
Orchestrator
Ideal Person: CRO, CSO, VP of Sales
Mission: Deliver the experience to future and current customers.
Challenges:
Enable your staff to execute flawlessly.
Maintain a pipeline of individual contributors that will be able to help you scale.
Secret Sauce:
Have multiple avenues for achieving the revenue goal to manage the risk of unpredictable distribution channel behavior.
Make your marquee brands wildly successful and promote them extensively.
Truth Sourcer
Ideal Person: Director of RevOps, RevOps Manager
Mission:
Single source of GTM performance data in the organization.
Be curious, ask questions, and tease out challenges before they become problems.
Challenges:
Manage, translate, interpret, and contextualize data.
Avoid data rabbit holes.
Avoid massaging data to tell stories that confirm biases or double down on what people want to hear
Secret Sauce:
Have your finger on the pulse of the organization.
Build solid relationships with all GTM leaders.
Be prepared to be their "revenue therapist."
Unifier
Ideal Person: CSO, VP of CS, Head of CS
Mission: Maintain a customer experience that will pay dividends in the future.
Challenges:
Find the right blend of connected experiences.
Keep costs as efficient as possible.
Secret Sauce:
Become best friends with your sales counterparts, help them sell, and ensure they understand the value of the relationship.
Set up a customer advisory board to have non-biased customer opinion data at the ready.
Enabler
Ideal Person: Head of Enablement, VP of Enablement
Mission:
Understand each role in the GTM team and educate on strategy changes.
Be the source of knowledge for your GTM executives and ICs.
Challenges: Find the balance: it’s critical to maintain speed and urgency without overwhelming teams with change.
Secret Sauce:
Keep your finger on the pulse of ICs.
Create strong onboarding programs to gain trust early and understand information uptake speeds.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. What are we missing?
Join Our Emerging Tech Showcase
Our research shows sales velocity is slowing down, marketing pipelines are underperforming, and revenue teams are struggling to meet goals.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of new technologies designed to help problems like these, but GTM professionals may not know about them.
You’re invited to our Emerging Tech Showcase! It’s a virtual event on October 26
Folks interested in RevOps should join 1:00-2:40 p.m. EST
Folks interested in Marketing should join 2:45-4:15 p.m. EST.
This event will highlight 13 companies that are just getting their start in helping change the way we all approach Go-to-Market.
You will hear from the 13 emerging tech companies themselves, from GTM practitioners, investors and GTM Leaders.
Folks interested in RevOps should join 1:00-2:40 p.m. EST
Folks interested in Marketing should join 2:45-4:15 p.m. EST.
Folks interested in all of it (and trust us, you should be) should join for the whole thing!
Hope you are all enjoying Fall Trade Show season…. we had a great time at Pavilion’s inaugural GTM event in Nashville last week. Let us know what shows you’re attending; we’d love to meet up if we’ll be in the same place!
Love,
the GTM Partners Team
P.S. As always, if we can help with any of your GTM challenges, book a strategy session with us anytime.
