Don't just yell & tell! Be relevant & engage!

Now more than ever, the traditional "yell and tell" go-to-market approach greatly diminishes the opportunity for buyer engagement. Blanket bombarding with buzzy jargon (yelling) and pushing a generic, feature-focused pitch (telling) is a certain path to irrelevancy within the buyer decision process.

To thrive in the go-to-market game, Sales, Marketing & Customer Success must earn a position in the buyer’s world as a value-add, trusted source. It starts with fostering a therapy-like dialogue about the buyer's desired future state, the pathway to achieve it, and the potential impact upon success.

DoDo Behavior to Avoid:

• Endless monologues. Winding up oneself like a music box and letting it rip in a one-way, firehouse blast of vendor-centric information, while occasionally asking “does this make sense?”
• Focusing on you. Overemphasizing your company, your product features, and your jargon. Most visitors to your website can’t understand what you actually do.
• Same old script. Using the same generic story for each target company and buyer. Inability to customize messaging to a vertical, segment, use case, or persona. No prep.
• Being minimized. Lacking credibility and being inconsequential within the buyer’s process - having no meaningful impact on perspectives, positioning, and decisions.

Star Behavior to Follow:

• Active conversations. Engaging through active listening and critical thinking to foster powerful buyer-focused interactions.
• Focusing on the buyer. Presenting, messaging, and discussing with a focus on the buyer's desired state, pathway, and outcomes. Active discovery and provocative credibility.
• Tailor to the audience. Crafting relevant stories and messaging for target ICPs with sensitivity to vertical, segment, use case, and persona. Earning credibility through relevancy.
• Being trusted. Becoming relevant within the buyer’s process through a deep understanding of their world. Significantly impacting perspectives, positioning, and decisions.

?Example Pitfalls:

• Marketing. Yelling! Messaging that overemphasizes product features and industry jargon – or worse tries to establish a new, nonsensical category.
• Sales. Telling! Walking into pitches with no prep, no consideration to the specific audience, and doing the standard matinee show.
• Customer Success. Talking! Wasting valuable customer time with standard reporting, providing no interpretation, insight, or recommendation. Just filling air.

?Be a Star! Don’t be a DoDo!

#sales #customersuccess #marketing #gtm

About Go-To-Market Life

As a Go-To-Market (GTM) Leader, I have maintained a journal to document
common skills and behaviors that lead to top performance in Go-To-Market
roles. To deliver performance across the buyer-customer journey, I have
used my journal for team culture, staff enablement, and role orchestration.
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In order to build fun into business life, I always imagined a cartoon
for this resource. That's why I am thrilled to present Go-To-Market Life, 
a passion project that aims to teach and entertain.
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My audience for Go-To-Market Life is Sales, Customer Success, & Marketing 
professionals – with application to RevOps, Enablement, & Partnerships.
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Please enjoy! Please subscribe! Please comment! Please like!
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Jim