Adventures in alliances land #9 – permanent conversations; GTM matrix

My conversations over the last couple of weeks have been all about go-to-market (GTM) strategy and execution and it struck me that GTM is another ‘permanent conversation’.? A ‘permanent conversation’ is something that has been true forever and despite learning it well needs continual effort to align for successful partnerships.? They are points of debate, iteration and friction that are enduring and therefore need continual attention, adjustment and intervention from professional strategic alliances practitioners.?

I’ve been thinking, writing and doing strategic alliances for more than 20 years.? When something in the alliances space catches my attention that I can share, I will – so if ecosystems, partnerships and alliances are your gig and your passion too I hope you’ll find these scribblings useful.? If you enjoy this article please follow me, subscribe, like, comment and repost.? My book on strategic alliances is here if you’d like to read more adventures in alliances land.? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategic-Alliances-Fieldbook-Art-Agile/dp/103212900X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=strategic+alliances+fieldbook&qid=1691319592&sr=8-1

Last week I talked about 10 steps of a GTM blueprint, this this is about the GTM matrix in step two.? Designing the joint go-to-market for offerings/industry/geo focus is critical for identifying the right people in each organisation to execute. I wrote a little in the Strategic Alliance Field book on this topic and included an excerpt below

Excerpt from blueprint stage 3 – enable sales and delivery, pg 248

Using the simplified organisational chart will help illustrate the value of the internal stakeholder communications plan. In this fictitious example from a professional services (PS) company, their coverage is four market sectors that it serves. Each one has an overall leader and let’s imagine a board of four others who manage the clients. This is 20 senior vertical market experts for the client coverage. Now let’s imagine the offering is outsourced supply chain analytics. The consulting people required to deliver that offering are spread across four capabilities. Technology infrastructure and applications have a leader who report into the overall head of the technology practice. The business process practice also has an overall leader, with two sub-service lines, one for consulting and one for outsourcing. This is now six senior individuals for the delivery capability. Large geographies might replicate this for the North and South. There will be a similar team in each country and maybe a co-ordinating team across three global regions. Very quickly for a regional offering there are well over 100 people who need to be convinced about the alliance before it’s going to scale through all the market channels available. Identifying who these people are is the first step to securing their help.

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The excerpt from the book above explains the complexity of the industry/offering/region matrix and the large numbers of people who need to be identified and enthused about the growth potential of the GTM to proactively introduce the offering to their clients.? The original diagram I used in the book does not have the third dimension of region in it so I’ve sketched out a improvement on the graphic below.? This is still a dramatic over-simplification – it goes not have all the industries, or offerings or regions in it, so the real cube would be way more than 3 x 3 x 3.?

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This new GTM matrix is also a bit of oversimplification as it does not capture the intersections of the GSI’s internal practices for the offering as they will be unique to each company.? As an example, if the offering is for fraud prevention using AI for retail banking payments in Germany, for that one offering you might find five different practices involved.? It could be there is a team of banking regulation domain experts, the AI/data science team to build and train the models, the infrastructure group to set up the landing zone and configure the data services, a service testing team for unit and integration testing and a managed services group to feed and water the system in production.?

In the GTM blueprint in the Adventures in alliances land#8 here I’ve suggested step 1 is ‘offer build’ and the second step is to decode the GTM matrix.? Why not work out the matrix and then build the offer?? I have seen the sequence done both ways round, and actually the creation of the offering business case is easier if the GTM matrix is designed in the first step because it means the TAM for the offering is easier to isolate.? The reason I’ve suggested offering build first is that has tended to work better in my experience.? At a global level a set of offering themes can be prioritised based on the market conditions, incumbent clients and available capability.? Typically the GSI is building new offerings based on experience of winning an engagement with a client and recognising that it can be repeated, so its rare that the ’build offer’ phase starts with a completely blank sheet of paper.? Either building an offering from scratch, or more commonly iterating from a prior engagement means there is something tangible to ‘roadshow’ with the industry and practice teams which makes getting statements of intent for the GTM matrix more reliable than not having a good quality description of the offering available.?

Do you agree that GTM is a ‘permanent conversation’?? Do you recommend building offer first and then GTM matrix, or have your found another success pattern with a different sequence?

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