2 frameworks to help you get past GTM Blame Bingo

Here's how to get your team focused on identifying the core problems and working across departments to identify solutions.

How many of these things have you heard in board meetings and executive offsites?

How many of them have you said yourself?

Most of us would win BINGO in about 5 minutes flat at any given GTM strategy session or leadership offsite.

Here’s an advanced game to play on Zoom… check out the comments below and circle them when someone from another team suggests them.

First to 10 points gets to leave the meeting early and take a nap.

Challenge yourself to go beyond GTM Blame Bingo and get to root causes and cross-functional, umbrella solutions.

Remember, you don’t have a problem in any one area. You have a GTM problem.

And that means you don’t have a solution in any one area, you need a GTM solution.

You cannot solve your GTM problems by addressing only one department.

And even if you DO have a problem in one silo, your solution might be in an entirely different area.

(For example, a perceived sales problem might have a marketing solution.

An inability to forecast revenue might have many underlying factors that live outside of RevOps’ control).

Start with Common Language

It is important to get consensus around your biggest challenges so that you can move into finding solutions.

Depending on the context, we have two suggestions for getting your team oriented around identifying the problem. You can use one or both.

Functional Leaders: The 15 GTM Problems

We have helped hundreds of companies identify and move through their biggest GTM challenges.

We share this list of 15 at every roadshow and usually hear wry laughter and knowing chuckles from our functional leaders because these are so familiar.

Consider a meeting with your functional leaders where everyone circles the biggest problems and you get consensus on the top 3-5.

Check out Unpacking the 15 GTM Problems for more info, or schedule a session with us or one of our licensed facilitators to get team alignment and clarity.

The Executive Team: The 5 Valleys of GTM Death

While functional leaders tend to resonate with the 15 GTM problems, c-level executives and board members tend to feel the 5 Valleys of Death are higher-level and more strategic.

Here’s the rub:

The CEO gets frustrated when a functional leader is stuck in department-level problems. “Why are we talking about discounting and feature wars when the real problem is that we can’t sell!?!”

Functional leaders are dealing with very real problems that make the big picture impossible to solve. “We can’t focus on the high-level problem of being unable to sell when we are stuck in discounting and feature wars!”

So make sure your functional leaders are heard.

Make sure executive-level strategic issues are addressed.

Use both frameworks in the appropriate setting.

Make connections between the two frameworks and start speaking the same language.

Now what?

As G.I. Joe famously said, “now you know, and knowing is half the battle.”

Once you have team alignment on your biggest issues, next steps are prioritization and execution.

You’ll need a cross-functional GTM leader to lead the initiatives to prioritize and execute.

If you don’t have someone whose full-time job is herding all the GTM cats, we can help!

GTM Partners works across business units and silos to help GTM teams identify, prioritize, and solve the issues that are holding you back.

We can help with things like:

• Finding your Total Relevant Market

• Defining your Ideal Customer Profile(s)

• Selecting the right Go-to-Market Motions and matching them to products, segments or audiences

• Defining the value of your solution through ROI

• Defining your company's Point of View (POV)

• Sales Design Strategies to Match your Go-to-Market

• Customer Journey Mapping and Improvement

• Expansion Planning

• GTM Measurement through Unified Scorecards

That’s really the tip of the iceberg. If you are experiencing any of the 15 problems or the 5 valleys of death, we can help!

We work deeply with only 10-15 companies per year. If you’d like to be one of them, we would love to chat.

ROI Study of the Week: Splash

True event-led growth means more than hosting or attending a few events each year.

It means scaling events strategically in ways that affect and involve the whole go-to-market team while also increasing demand, building pipeline, and accelerating deals.

Splash is an intuitive event management platform that allows companies to easily produce in-person, virtual, and hybrid events at scale.

Splash has made a number of technology investments all designed to save time and improve the event experience for organizers and attendees alike, including:

• Modern UI and templates that allow marketers to create and execute on-brand events quickly, starting with the event landing page all the way through to post-event emails

• Integrations with popular MAP and CRM platforms that facilitate easy follow up and attribution

• Reporting via built-in dashboards that help evaluate email campaign performance, ticket payouts, and traffic to your event page, as well as programmatic reporting that allows you to assess overall performance and trends.

Check out Splash’s full ROI study here, and if you’d like to book your own ROI study, we’d be happy to help!

One last note: our GTM Ambassador program is a rip roaring success.

GTM Ambassadors get early access to our research, tickets to events, support for speaking engagements, and award nominations. We have no participation requirements or fees. We’re just looking for folks who are passionate about GTM and want to spread the word when they see something they believe in.

Nominate a GTM Ambassador here.

Hoping you have a wonderful week, and we are here to help however you need. Stay in touch!

Love,

the GTM Partners Team