Two Blind-Spots in B2B Go-to-Market Efforts

“Things that matter most should never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.” — John Wolfgang von Goethe.

Business leaders expect that their sales and marketing organizations will effectively execute the critical motions for go-to-market plan success. However, the reality is that there are often blind spots where execution matters most – at the front-line where sales, marketing, and pre-sales teams work together.

Two B2B go-to-market execution blind spots that leaders overlook often reside with the sales enablement and operations teams:

The lack of a go-to-market guide (sales playbook) prevents the pre-sales, marketing, and sales teams from working as an integrated selling machine.

In a complex sales environment, team selling is THE SPORT, so the sales playbook aligns the team on what to sell, whom to sell it to, and how to sell. Without a playbook, the organization struggles:

• Marketing is on the front end of market communications. Still, often they aren’t close enough to the sales process to appreciate what transpires in the initial prospect conversations – where the sales teams need the most marketing support materials.
• Pre-sales regularly participates in initial prospect conversations, but their technical orientation can derail strategic discussions. Importantly, pre-sales teams can help disqualify sales pursuits by understanding the target customer attributes and pain points.
• The best salespeople are resourceful, so they’ll succeed in pursuing the target market, regardless of the organizational support they get. The rest of the sales organization needs prescriptive guidance on how to sell solutions into the target markets, and they need to be in lock-step with the marketing and pre-sales teams to maximize sales pursuits.

The product team’s understanding of the target market’s critical attributes doesn’t end up in the CRM data model or the account records.

It’s hard to lose weight unless we step on the scale a couple of times a week. If we can’t see the target account attributes in the CRM, it’s hard to determine if we are executing our plan and the organization struggles:

• Sales teams can’t run reports to identify and pursue the most lucrative target segments.
• Sales leaders cannot hold themselves and their teams accountable for allocating the majority of their selling time to the best segments.
• Marketing efforts are less targeted (since they rely on CRM attributes), so they cannot deliver better leads from the target segments.
• Instead of 75%+ of efforts allocated to the target market, the organization spends 25% to less than half of its time pursuing the best targets.

Developing a go-to-market guide (sales playbook) and embedding target market attributes into the CRM are the first step to overcoming go-to-market blind spots.

The second step is to deploy the sales playbooks and CRM target market reports interactively, not just place the materials in the LMS or review them during a 1-hour webinar.

A sales playbook is not a document to read in front of the TV when the commercials are on. Deployed properly, they guide the marketing and the pursuit teams to engage more prospects and win deals with fewer resources and shorter sales cycles.

Addressing go-to-market execution blind spots can shorten the line to success and accelerate revenue growth. Does your organization have these blind spots?

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