Sep 2, 2016 | In The News
When I first spoke with Ken Rutsky, the founder and principal consultant at KJR Asscoiates, Inc., back in the spring, I was excited to hear his ambitious plans for the summer: launch his first book and create a new website. A few months later, I am so proud of the work we have done to help Ken accomplish these goals!
The Weaving Influence design team completed a beautiful book cover design for Ken, and built his new website, kenrutsky.com, that highlights his work as a speaker, author, and consultant.
Aug 29, 2016 | Leadership
In my travels through organizations small and large, I’ve noticed how difficult it is for my clients to find great go to market leaders to build their teams. I starting thinking there must be a better way.
As organizations expand and scale, they need find more effective ways to mentor and nurture a next generation of Go To Market leaders. These future leaders need a road map and path to learn the art of go-to-market leadership so they can master not just skills, but strategy, execution and leadership
What the $#%^ is a Go To Market Leadership Dojo? Get the whitepaper and come to the webinar to learn more! You won’t be disappointed!
Aug 26, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
I was thinking about, or maybe more the case obsessing about, market leadership on my bike ride the other morning. I had just gotten a tune up and a fix up of my road bike, and was enjoying a early morning ride that was reminding me why I love living in Northern California, 68 degrees, sunny and the road nearly to myself. That is, until I got about two thirds of the way up my climb of Old La Honda Road and passed the always cruel intersection with the well marked “Upenuf Road“. Of course, to reach the summit, you are NOT up enough at all. You still have a third of the way to go.
Building and tuning the right machine isn’t enough to get you to the summit of market leadership. You must fuel the machine well.
Starting your climb is not sufficient, you must execute until you reach the summit and beyond.
And unlike cycling, which is, even when riding with a group, a fundamentally solitary endeavor, achieving and sustaining market leadership is a team accomplishment, one that requires great leadership.
Some observations (and links to more thoughts on each):
That’s right. Leading and winning in your market is HARD work. Damn hard work at that. You need the right machine, committed execution and the right leadership. I’ve blogged, I’ve spoken, I’ve consulted, and clearly, even when I am not “working” I am thinking about this. And I’ve concluded that great companies are led to market by great leaders, who build amazing go to market machines, and execute with excellence. No small task indeed.
Back on my bike, I did summit Old La Honda Road that morning. And while my execution was far from perfect, I definitely enjoyed the journey, the view from the top, and the long winding descent down and back home where fresh eggs and a warm shower awaited as my rewards.
The rewards of market leadership are many. But the journey to the top is what great leaders really enjoy. Because once you reach the summit, everything gets easier as you descend down to the other side of success, and your competitors are not “upenuf” to keep up.
I wish you all success on whatever road you are summiting as an individual or a team. Keep your machine well tuned and fueled, your execution committed, and your leadership focused, because it is all about all three!
See you on the road or in the marketplace!
Ken
Aug 26, 2016 | Leadership
As I’ve written in my previous post being a Go To Market Leader is hard. You need the knowledge of the Jedi Master, the broad skill-set of a Renaissance Man and the influence of a great evangelist. This is not only a challenge for individuals, but even more so for senior organizational leaders who must identify and develop these leaders.
Just last month, I visited a prospect, let’s call them Acme Corp. Acme’s CEO, let’s call her Connie, was nearly despondent in her inability to find true go market leaders on her team. She told me that no matter who she challenges, they seem to come up short in either skills, knowledge or their ability to lead the organization forward. “I can lead the go to market for the team, but I’ve got fundraising and product challenges that right now are consuming me,” she told me. “And hiring that person is proving to be beyond difficult.”
I’d like to say that Connie’s challenge is unique and one of. But over the last 5 yrs, and at an increasing rate lately, I see organizations of all sizes challenged with enabling the next set of Go To Market Leaders for growth and success. And without a handful of effective go to market leaders, organizations won’t leverage and innovate they way they need to in order to lead and win their markets.
I think this challenge comes down to three things.
- First, the potential Go To Market Leaders in the organization are so focused on task, they simply can’t develop the breadth of skills and knowledge they need to lead. We depend on “getting lucky” by hoping that new leaders magically emerge from the crucible of busy-ness, but this rarely happens.
- Second, the role models who must coach and nurture these up and comers, are themselves task overloaded, and when they do find time it is nearly always a skills based or crisis based intervention. Role-modeling problem solving is great, but again, when ad-hoc and crisis driven, rarely grows leadership skills in the follower.
- Lastly, when we do actually find the time to develop a person or team, it is nearly always focused on the organization meeting its goals, not growing the team. For example, the annual offsite spends most of its time on planning and tactics. In the rare time we do focus on “development”, it’s usually “team building”, which sadly usually doesn’t further organizational goals OR develop leaders. Or, we send the individual off on a seminar for “personal development”, which kinda, but never really ties much to the organization’s goals.
Clearly we need a new approach. One that not only helps drive organizational goals, but develops the leader at the same time, by aligning the participant’s personal growth with the organization’s goals. When you do this, you get engagement and results, and can grow the next generation of leaders quickly and effectively. One innovative approach to this challenge is to build a “Go To Market Leadership Dojo”. The Go to Market Dojo builds the leaders that the organization needs to meet its goals, and does it in a way that is rewarding and meaningful to the participants.
To learn more about The Go To Market Leadership Dojo, you can get the whitepaper and register for the upcoming webinar You won’t be disappointed!
Aug 9, 2016 | In The News
When you write and talk about a topic a lot, you often find like minded people. Through the work I’ve done around positioning, messaging, and storytelling, I’ve had several interactions with Ken Rutsky.
Through those exchanges, it is clear that we have similar views on many things (and enough uniqueness in our opinions to drive both of us to expand our perspectives). Recently, Ken was kind enough to send me a preview copy that I devoured quickly.
The book Launching To Leading, is available on Amazon and other sites. I highly recommend it to anyone who has a passion for messaging and storytelling.
Aug 2, 2016 | Leadership
( Part 4 in a series, starting here)
You might have the skills of Leonardo and the knowledge the Jedi master, to contribute as a Go To Market leader, but to truly have impact and scale, you need to deftly wield influence, and lead in the style of the great evangelists like Martin Luther King; you must be a Go to Market Preacher.
Go to market leaders most often can not depend on organizational power alone to lead, because of the great diversity of their three key audiences, the external market, sales, and product development. All three of these audiences are critical for success because the Go to market leader must influence not only deal flow through sales, available market through external audiences, but also the product roadmap through influence on product development teams.
When any one of these influence channels fails, than the go to market results become sub-optimal. This is another factor that makes true go to market leaders so rare. They understand how to influence all three of these markets, and by doing so, create a “virtuous cycle” of market growth and success. Let’s take a look at how these influence channels interplay.
First and foremost, the great go to market leader leverages her market and competitive knowledge and her understanding of the product roadmap to maximize the value that the market puts on her solution, growing share and available market for the company. Second, she combines her influence on the roadmap with a great sense of what sales needs to succeed, to drive pipeline faster and to bigger deals. Finally, she helps sales to understand the market dynamic and better position their story and offer to the customers they connect with.
When you see a Go to market leader who has cultivated influence with key customers, analysts and partners, also hangs out with developers at lunch and in the break room, and is the one who sales calls when they need to open an opportunity, beat a competitor, close a deal or get a feature pushed through the dev pipeline, then you know you are looking at a great one. We’ve all seen them, and many of us strive to be one.
In the final installment of this series, I’ll take a look at how organizations can empower and create great go to market leaders, and how marketers can manage their development to become one.
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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 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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