Martin Schneider is Head of Research and Chief Evangelist at Annuitas, a boutique management consultancy specializing in go-to-market transformation. As his website states, “currently, companies are stuck in a cycle of random acts of sales and marketing, trying to consistently produce high quality leads and opportunities, but failing. Leaders are facing the hard truth that they must transform their go-to-market motion – becoming more customer-centered and embracing a strategic demand state if they want to reach growth goals.”
I wanted to catch up with Martin to discuss the benefits which a go-to-market transformation can convey to an organizations, particularly in regard to better aligning the efforts of product, sales, and marketing teams.
Martin summarizes the presentation he made recently at the Ignite B2B conference in Chicago entitled “Transforming Your Go-To-Market Strategy Through a Converged Growth Lens.” “Essentially it’s that sales and marketing alignment, in the traditional sense — I won’t say it’s broken — it just never was… You can’t just throw things over the wall and turn away and just focus on the next batch of leads, the next quarter, the next month. So you really need to be thinking of a full-journey orchestration of engagement, and re-aligning even some of your organizational, let’s call them hierarchies and jobs to be done and focus and understanding… And thinking about that full-journey, and really joining up pre-sale milestones with post-sale milestones in that journey, and understanding who are the personas, what are the channels, what is the content, what are the pain points, and building what we call a conversation track architecture.”
Martin and I explore the mistakes that marketing and sales teams make when KPIs don’t correctly estimate the true value of a given lead, the fact that many KPIs are arbitrary, and the roadblocks of group decision-making on the part of B2B buyers. We trade notes on how marketers and sales teams might change their game in a recessionary environment, and discuss how organizations might go about assessing whether a better go-to-market strategy could improve their prospects for growth.
If you’re involved in any kind of B2B growth initiative, you’ll get a lot out of this interview.
