Go to market strategy is a strategy used to guide organizations on how they can introduce their offerings in the market, so that they can meet their goals of market penetration, earning revenue and profitability.
It is not a one-time activity, but an umbrella strategy that covers the entire organization and all functions and processes. It involves creating a value proposition that can be used to achieve the goals of the strategy.
Four Quadrant is a leading strategy provider for B2B, which has come out with strategies and templates to help companies implement Go-to-market in their businesses.
Since the concept of Go to market focuses on penetrating the market to get revenue and profits, sales teams have a major role to play in devising and implementing sales strategy to make go-to-market work.
Let’s take a look at how the sales function in an organization can implement go to market strategy effectively.
Devising a strategy
While making a Go to market strategy for sales, the focus would be on how the sales team will increase their conversion rate and thus bring in revenue for the organization.
While implementing go to market strategy, there are a number of challenges that the sales team would face. It is essential that these challenges are understood and action is taken so that the strategy can be effectively implemented.
Let’s first take a look at three challenges that the sales team would face.
1) Improving communication
The most important thing for a salesman is his ability to communicate the benefits and advantages of the product to the prospect so that he can be convinced and the sales can be closed.
The message delivered during the interaction with prospects must be clear without any confusion, relevant to the prospect’s needs and consistent with the rest of the sales strategy. Salespersons need to be confident about their communication abilities to convince the prospect.
A sad trend emerging is to use PowerPoint presentations where the sales executive reads out from the slides. This shows a lack of confidence in communication. The presentation is only a guide, the salesperson should be able to explain with great confidence. This is a challenge for sales teams.
2) Creating sales enablement
Sales enablement is all about enabling sales team with knowledge about the product and selling process and strategies. Companies generally organize training where salespersons are put through various sessions conducted by experts.
A lot of buzzwords and concepts are explained, making use of fancy PowerPoint slides. Putting a bunch of people in a room and expecting them to gain knowledge in a few hours could be a mistake. This will not lead to knowledge transfer.
The objective of the training should be to transfer knowledge and enable the salesperson. This is a challenge which organizations have to handle.
3) Measuring effectiveness
Sales managers and team leaders have a major challenge in assessing the work of their sales team members and measuring their effectiveness. Sales executives come from different backgrounds and possess different levels of experience.
So it is essential to track how they are performing and measure their effectiveness. This will help team leaders and managers to know if things are on track and whether conversions will happen.
If this measurement is not done properly, it could lead to the failure of the sales strategy. This is the third challenge sales team face in implementing a go to market sales strategy.
The Solution is Whiteboard selling
Whiteboard selling is an innovative concept which acts as a solution for all these three challenges. It ensures that all the sales and marketing teams of the organization work together in a coordinated manner to create and implement sales and marketing strategies.
The focus shifts from powerpoint presentations to using a simple whiteboard to explain things to customers. This also helps to enhance the confidence of sales personnel. Whiteboard selling helps salespersons to communicate the unique selling proposition of their product in an effective way and this helps the prospect to be convinced, enabling easy closure.
Whiteboard selling focuses on visuals and the concept of a story. Sales executive need to create a story around the product to attract customers and motivate them to buy. Making use of a series of visuals to create the story is what whiteboard selling attempts to do. So instead of reading from a PowerPoint presentation, sales team members would convey a story, which is a much more effective way of communicating.
The story form is a proven successful technique of communication. More importantly, using a story form makes the sales sessions interactive and this leads to better communication with the customer. This also enables sales team members and helps in bringing them all on par, so assessment and measurement becomes easier.
The go-to-market strategy focuses on market penetration. Sales teams need to be ready to implement the strategy to earn revenue. Use of whiteboard selling concept plays a key role in the success of sales strategy for go-to-market.
Also making use of CRM tool or any other free CRM tool will ensure that the sales strategy can be tracked, measured and implemented effectively.
