The last mile of Go-to-Market. You've done all the product market fit, all the planning, the messaging and the positioning, and you want to get them in the hands of your sales team.
Obviously, there are many challenges when you're thinking about doing this globally.
Here’s our main talking points:
- What is a global go-to-market strategy?
- How to go about building a global go-to-market strategy
- Overcoming the challenges of global go-to-market strategies
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty 👇
What is a global Go-to-Market strategy?
There are many definitions of a sales play and thousands of definitions of Go-to-Market. It’s different for every organization, and in many different ways.
The two things that resonate with me every day are, what’s the relationship you have with a) the product people and b) the product marketing people.
There have been Go-to-Market plans that have been very simple where just a piece of information's been added to a sales play, and then I've seen Go-to-Market for a brand new product we're rolling out with the combined resources of the entire company, and sales enablement didn't even know when the launch was going to happen.
Making sure your position as well as the position in product marketing is clear on how you're going to be able to work together; having a seat at the table during all those launch plans is important.
Just as important, is the relationship between you and the content being built, vs being a facilitator of the content that will be built when you get it. You have a hand in suggesting what’s built and how it's built based on how your field and your channel are going to learn.
If you get all those things done up front, you can handle everything else because you've got a great relationship with the people who are building the content.
How to go about building a global Go-to-Market strategy
Being mindful of differences between your local market and your regions markets
When it comes to global Go-to-Market strategies, product market fit has to be top of mind. Many companies look at a global Go-to-Market strategy from their home market perspective. In essence, they start locally and then identify commonalities to expand.
However, that’s not the way to go about it. Instead, look at the differences in local markets first, then get together with your team to see what's common and what can be shared between different markets and build a global strategy upon it.
Start by looking at differences. It's not intuitive, we're usually thinking about what can be common and what can be scaled, especially in the US. Thinking globally doesn't necessarily mean scaling by leveraging commonalities, it's about leveraging differences and being the best in each market you're in.
The first thing to do is to align on sales practices and on methodology that would be a common practice across the world and across your geographies. Everyone likes having a common tool that drives business globally. The reality is when we roll it out, everyone hates it, because it doesn't fit their local practice and the way they're selling.
The way you pitch the product, your value proposition in the country where you’re a leading company vs. where you're a smaller player and a challenger player, is very different and your sales is in a different position and needs a very different pitch.
Don’t think about globally as centrally, but as shared. It’s helpful to have a multicultural and multinational team because it will help build bridges with the local sales and marketing teams and understand the culture and how to convey things.
Having a framework
Having a framework the whole company is aligned by and whomever is leading that idea is leveraging, and having sales enablement and product marketing involved and informed at the very beginning, is important.
Trying to slam a bunch of content together to repeat what some product marketer has created somewhere and push it in front of the field, doesn't work. However, if you’re involved from the very beginning, and you see how this product has evolved as it goes through the various stages, then you understand the business case behind it.
Overcoming the challenges of global Go-to-Market strategies
The concept of going to market globally is a reality for most businesses. If you're not doing it right now, you will be soon. As you start to think globally, these processes are starting to come up, such as: how do we infrastructure them, how do we communicate with them, do they have different selling methodologies and do we need to incorporate them in or not?
Adapting your product pitch to different markets
Often you realize that the core product pitch is not different. However, what is different in many markets is the challenges that can lead your audience to discover and value your product.
We focused on looking at different ways of selling, beyond the sales methodology, the type of tools we're using might be different from one region to another.
The three elements I look at are:
- What’s core to the product?
- What are the challenges that are current in the country that will lead to my product being the solution?
- What are the tools?
The Hub & Spoke model
Using a hub and spoke model is a good strategy, for both product marketing and sales enablement. In my old company, I had dedicated resources on both product marketing and sales enablement sitting out of EMEA.
APAC is a tough one because it's more spread out and includes ANZA, Japan, Korea, etc. so there it was more self-serve. The content and processes were standardized, but because of the time zones we had to do asynchronous learning with them, which is harder but worked well.
If you have a leader who’s willing to do more enablement you can do a lot more hands-on learning. To sum up, it depends on your sales leader and how willing they are, and if they're not, then a hub and spoke model tends to work.
How to improve your Go-to-Market strategy
Our Go-to-Market Certified: Masters course will give you all the information and knowledge you need to up your GTM game.
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