This article is based on a presentation given by Alysia Eve, Greg Meade, and Ivan Ereiz at #GTM23 in San Diego. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your GTM Blueprint dashboard.

Well, hey there! We're excited to be here today to share how we're redesigning our overall Go-to-Market strategy (GTM) as our market continuously changes. Here’s a taste of what we’ll cover:

  • The lessons we’ve learned as we’ve pivoted our GTM.
  • How to pivot your GTM in three steps. 

Onwards!

But first, a little context

Before diving into where we are today and how things are going, it's important to look back at our history. Like most companies, we've gone through some transitions that impact how fast we can pivot today.

ShareFile was founded in 2005 in Raleigh, North Carolina. In those early days, ShareFile helped small and medium businesses share files securely, both internally and externally. This was back in the days when people emailed files to each other and carried around flash drives. Back then, we went to market horizontally but used messaging and packaging to target specific industries like accounting and legal.

Then, in 2011, Citrix acquired us. As part of Citrix's go-to-market, we pivoted to target IT buyers with a value proposition that was all about secure content collaboration – still a horizontal approach.

Five years later, in 2016, Citrix and ShareFile were acquired by a private equity firm. ShareFile then spun out as a distinct business unit from Citrix. This let us reevaluate the market to find fresh growth opportunities.

We realized things had changed a lot since we had developed a robust standalone solution. Now, customers want everything tailored to their industry – both the marketing message and the product itself.

So, we’ve had to reevaluate our Go-to-Market and value proposition. We've already launched twice this year, pivoting to a value proposition focused on client experience and document-centric workflows. Instead of messaging for specific industries, we're building a platform to customize the product experience and marketing for each target industry.

What we’ve learned so far

We've learned a lot throughout our journey. In marketing, the best things come in threes, and broadly speaking, the lessons we’ve learned fall into three buckets:

  1. To move quickly, communication is crucial, and consistent repetition is key – especially with customer-facing teams.
  2. All across your organization, you'll get customer insights – from salespeople, customer success managers, and more. But unless you capture and operationalize those insights, they’re worthless. At ShareFile, we're working to build mechanisms to feed insights into messaging and positioning.
  3. Aligning everyone around cross-functional success metrics is the only way to move fast as an organization. 

How to pivot your go-to-market strategy in three steps

Here’s another three for you – the three steps to pivot your GTM: 

  • Step one: Understand your buyer by asking the right questions.
  • Step two: Use those insights to design a compelling buyer journey with triggers to move prospects through the funnel.
  • Step three: Enable customer-facing teams to tell stories. We buy stories, not products. Sales has to harness the power of storytelling to help new buyers see how we solve their problems.

Now, let’s dive a little deeper into each of these steps.