Jul 25, 2016 | Leadership
In my previous post, entitled The Split Personality of Great Go To Market Leaders, I said that you need to be part Yoda, you need the knowledge of the Jedi Master. Without Knowledge, the other 2 pieces of the puzzle, Skills (Da Vinci) and Influence (MLK), you can only create the scale of effort, not the level of impact or contribution that great leaders make.
What then is the knowledge necessary for to be a great go to market leader? Go to Market leaders possess deep and insightful knowledge in three areas, competition, customers and marketplace. And because of this, they are able to both understand and influence the market they are in, distinctly able to differentiate their offerings, set competitive strategy, and drive priorities into their actions.
Go To Market Jedi Masters understand the competition from not just a capabilities perspective, but they take the time to think about their strategy and challenges too. They don’t take the answer, “we just don’t know”, they invest the time (theirs or their teams) to gather data, study and assess the key competitors in the marketplace.
Secondly, Go to Market Jedi Masters intimately understand their customers. They are obsessed with knowing why customers buy, what makes them enter the market, their buying teams and processes and what problems they are trying to solve. They understand what customers value today, and are actually able to predict with a good deal of accuracy, emerging problems and opportunites facing them. They study their customers, but more importantly, they NEVER miss a chance to engage with them and they listen deeply when they do. The Masters show up at the right places and times to learn about their customer. They live, as much as possible, not with one, but with both feet in their world.
Lastly, Go To Market Jedi Masters understand the market at a macro and micro level. They understand the technology, societal, economic and social trends that impact all of the market participants. They identify and connect with key influencers, they read voraciously about their market, and focus on adjacencies and disruptions as well as trends within.
Because of their deep knowledge, they have are respected and called on for advice and strategy, and have the opportunity to contribute dramatically to the success of the organization.
How do you become a Master? There are no short cuts, but here are 3 guiding principles –
- Read, read and read – when you are in the cube, allocate time to research and read about customers, competitors and general market trends. Leverage technology to find and follow all of the market participants. Attend webinars, read filings and news clippings, monitor websites
- Get out there – You’ll never learn it all in your cube – you’ve got to get out and meet people in the market, customers, influencers and yes, competitors.
- Commit– You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, but aim to be the best informed. When you have the knowledge, you can teach. And teaching, in today’s world may be the only way to truly lead. But you must commit and persevere.
When it comes to obtaining and maintaining the knowledge needed to be a Great Go To Market Leader, always heed master Yoda’s words, “Do, or Do Not. There is no try!”
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Ken Rutsky is a Marketing Consultant and B2B Market Leadership “Ninja”. Ken helps organizations climb the ladder to market leadership. His upcoming book is entitled; Launching to Leading: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades and Ignite Movements (Morgan James 2016) and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Jul 25, 2016 | Leadership
Renaissance Man, he can do most anything, Renaissance Man, paint, sculpt, design and sing – @historyteacherz Youtube
Go to Market Leadership is hard because it requires so much of a person. Especially in today’s fast paced, technology driven market, a true go to market leader must be a Renaissance Man (or Woman). Today’s go to market leader must do most anything, she must paint a picture (messaging and positioning), she must sculpt (a set of programs and automation) she must design (a coherent offering) and sing it all out to an ever skeptical internal and external marketplace. You must be a Go to Market polymath!
In my last post, I covered the knowledge needed to be a great go to market leader, a true Jedi Master like Yoda. An in my next post, I will cover the “sing” part, how you need to be a evangelist, like MLK. But in this post, I will focus on the broad set of doing skills needed to lead a go to market initiative, team and strategy.
Paint a Compelling Picture
It’s critical to get messaging and positioning correct. Without a compelling message that answers not just tactical ROI questions, but strategic, why should I care ones, the fit and effectiveness of the offering and the programs just won’t succeed. Great automation may mean my offering can reach a lot of people, but if messaged poorly, then the value will likely go un-tapped. Great go to market leaders have awesome messaging and positioning skills.
Sculpt Effective Programs and Automation
Today, go to market is as much about method as message. I need to build a scalable and efficient machine, and feed that machine with creative and effective content, demand generation and enablement programs. I need to measure and tune both the machine and the programs I run. Great go to market leaders have excellent skills at building, tuning and perfecting automation and programs.
Design a Coherent Offering
My success in the market also means I must have a coherent offering across my pricing, packaging, product and channel. Each decision is dependent on the other. Great go to market leaders not only understand how to design the right offering, but how each piece of the total solution plays together.
To be able to paint, sculpt and design is a high bar of skills needed to run an effective go to market organization, initiative and team. Great go to market leaders build themselves and their teams to deliver across all three of these disciplines.
So, the bar continues to rise on being a great go to market leader. not only must you have depth and breadth of knowledge of a Jedi Master across the competitors, customers and market, but you must have deep skills of a Renaissance Man around executing go to market initiatives. And as we will see in the final post of this series, you need to have the influence skills of a true movement leader, to move not only your sales team, but your product team, and the customers. But the rewards are great, and most leaders will say, worth the efforts to get to mastery.
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Ken Rutsky is a Marketing Consultant and B2B Market Leadership “Ninja”. Ken helps organizations and individuals climb the ladder to market leadership. His upcoming book is entitled; Launching to Leading: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades and Ignite Movements (Morgan James 2016)
I coach and mentor go to market leaders in B2B Organizations. Let me know if I can help you grow your business and your career.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Jul 7, 2016 | Leadership
Go to Market leaders in organizations are invaluable. You recognize them because they seem to anticipate your questions, they show the way to others, they have their fingers on both the pulse of the market, and possesses and uncanny sense of what to do next to build and grow the business.
Whether the CMO, the VP of Marketing, the Director of Product Marketing, the senior Field Marketing Manager in a geography, or even the Chief Technology Officer, Go to Market Leadership is not judged by title but by impact. All of these jobs have a mix of strategic, tactical and even clerical work. However, leaders rise above this to drive not only tactics, but strategy. In doing so, they not only raise their game, but create leverage and success for their organization.
When I first joined Secure Computing as a senior leader in marketing, my then boss and CMO Atri Chatterjee, tasked me with re-building the product marketing organization. His comments to me went something like this, “The product managers are seen as little more that data-sheet writers and Quarterly Business Review slide clerks. This function is not strategic and is not driving the business forward. We need to do something about this. It is the largest group on our team, yet it is not leading. Please figure it out.”
When I unraveled the team, I saw three things. First, we had a mix of skills and skill level, unevenly distributed among the team. Some were great at content creation and programs, others at packaging, messaging and channel enablement. Second, while a few of the team had mastery knowledge of their markets, some lacked the basic customer intimacy and competitive knowledge that they needed to lead. Lastly, none were influential and respected in the organization, perhaps their biggest challenge. Our task as I saw it, was to build leaders by broadening their skill set, increasing their knowledge, and teaching them to influence their peers, their management and their partners. No small task! But having identified these gaps, we re-balanced the team, put in plans for each leader, and found ways to create credibility and influence for each of them. Over the next 12 months, we grew the team to have 3 strong Go To Market leaders, one for each of the main product lines, who were able to leverage their influence, knowledge and skills to build and execute market leading strategies, programs and tactics.
Successful Go to Market leaders have the depth and breadth of specialized knowledge like the Jedi Master Yoda, the skills of the Renaissance man like Leonardo and the influence of the Evangelistic leader like Martin Luther King. Those aspiring to lead their product, division or product line to market, should put in improvement plans to reach mastery across all three of these dimensions.
Nearly 20 years ago, Ben Horowitz writing about the good product manager vs. the bad one said, “Good product managers are the CEO of their product”. Great Go To Market Leaders, wherever they are title wise in the org, are perceived and viewed in just this way, as the CEO who understands and is driving their product, division or company to market leadership.In the next 3 posts in this series, I will take a look at these three key areas, knowledge, skills and influence and dissect what it takes in each of these to rise to mastery in market leadership. Those who do, not only act like the CEO, they are destined to eventually become one!
Jul 7, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
You’ve invested in marketing automation, content marketing people and programs. You’ve just finished that new messaging project. Now what?
Having the right messaging and positioning, no small task in today’s crowded buyer centric B2B markets, puts you at the base of the mountain. To reach the summit, you must do three things.
First, execute with consistency, veracity and ferocity. You have to say it so many times, you get sick of hearing yourself say it, then you need to say it again. And yes, you may tweak it on the edges based on A/B testing and performance in programs. But you must commit. You must believe. And you must back it with facts, case studies and data.
Second, you must invest in people and programs. People and programs are the fuel of marketing success. They drive the race car, which is made of your marketing automation engine, you content marketing tires, and your high test messaging fuel. But without investment, results don’t follow.
Third, you must be comfortable with risk. In today’s markets, conservative, traditional messaging, built on feature function benefit, and delivered in descriptive whitepapers and websites just doesn’t cut it. And while your new messaging is cutting edge and powerful, you must resist the temptation to move back to the average. For example, technical marketers want to stick features functions and technical benefits. They feel they may “insult” their buyer if they push on their beliefs. But few companies can win without changing some status quo. And marketing and sales leaders know this, but can be pulled back to more conservative execution. Don’t let this happen. To the risk taker goes the rewards.
Nobody ever summits a mountain without preparation, investment, and the right amount of intelligent risk taking. And nobody wins in B2B markets without these same characteristics. Great thinking can get you ready, but consistent and ferocious execution and responsible investment, with a good chunk of measured risk taking is what can get you to the top of the mountain.
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