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The C-Suite faces a lot of pressure in today’s business world. They’re responsible for aligning teams, ensuring business growth, and overcoming endless complex problems. They’re also the individuals responsible for ensuring a company’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy is poised for success.
Unfortunately, in today’s world, there are countless challenges that can prevent the C-Suite from making the most of their GTM efforts. This results in stagnation, issues with product-market fit, and even lost opportunities.
Today, we’re looking at some of the most significant C-Suite problems that can harm GTM success, and what business executives can do to overcome these challenges.
In many business environments, the C-Suite is often somewhat removed from the day-to-day operations of the company. They’re busy trying to manage everything on a high level, which means they rely on reports, metrics, and information provided by department heads to make decisions.
Unfortunately, the data C-Suite leaders use to make decisions can often be inaccurate, fragmented, or incomplete, as a result of data silos. If different teams in a GTM strategy are working “independently”, they can all provide different insights into what’s really going on within a business.
For instance, if marketing teams report that their campaigns are leading to a huge number of leads, a C-Suite leader may assume they should continue using the same strategies, without recognising that those leads aren’t actually turning into sales and opportunities.
With this in mind, C-Suite leaders need to think carefully about how they’re bridging the gaps in their data. They need a strategy for sharing insights, and connecting data across teams, to ensure they have a more holistic view of the business and opportunities for growth.
This issue is closely aligned with the problem mentioned above. Effective communication is essential for C-Suite leaders, who are often isolated from the daily operations of the organisation. However, in some hierarchical environments, information can be filtered, diluted, and altered as it moves up the chain of command. This means C-Suite leaders can’t make the most informed decisions.
To ensure success in a GTM strategy, C-Suite leaders need to establish a clear solution for communication and collaboration throughout the business. This means bridging the gaps between sales, marketing, customer service, product development, and finance teams, ensuring they can all communicate transparently about issues and opportunities.
According to McKinsey, success and sustainable growth in any industry are powered by a holistic, and collaborative approach. Building a collaborative culture for your entire organisation will help to ensure decisions are made based on unified input and feedback.
There’s no denying that metrics and key performance indicators are crucial in any business. They’re crucial to tracking the success of your GTM strategies, and ensuring you can make intelligent decisions for future growth. However, there are often issues with the metrics C-Suite leaders prioritise, and how they define “success”.
It’s easy for a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), to see an influx of new followers on social media and assume that means marketing campaigns are working. However, if they don’t dive deeper into who those followers are, where they came from, or whether they converted into customers, there’s no insight into whether the strategy is really a success.
To overcome this issue, C-Suite leaders need to ensure they’re actually capturing, visualising, and analysing the relationships between specific metrics and business goals. They need to ensure they’re not allowing vanity metrics to cloud their judgements.
Alongside focusing too heavily on the “wrong” metrics, one major problem C-Suite leaders face when optimising their GTM strategy, is they concentrate on numbers more than anything else. Quantitative feedback, such as insights into the number of customers that churn in a specific period, or how many leads convert into sales is valuable.
However, numbers can only tell us so much about the impact of a GTM strategy. To truly understand what’s driving not just sales, but retention and success, businesses need to dive deeper. They need to collect feedback from their employees and customers, which gives context to the numbers.
Paying attention to things like customer reviews and testimonials through social listening platforms can help organisations learn more about their target audience, their preferences, pain points, and more, leading to more effective sales and marketing strategies. This feedback can also assist organisations in figuring out the causes of customer churn, increasing retention rates.
In the C-Suite, success often breeds complacency. When a company appears to be doing well, and sales seem to be increasing, the tendency is often to maintain the status quo. However, simply “carrying on as normal” can only work well in a GTM strategy for so long.
Just because one GTM strategy worked for a specific product or solution, doesn’t mean it will continue to yield the right results in the future. This is particularly true as marketplace trends and buyer preferences continue to change. For instance, Gartner believes that by 2025, up to 80% of B2B interactions will occur on digital channels.
If you’ve relied on in-person sales strategies and event marketing campaigns to drive success in the past, and you fail to recognise the potential for digital transformation in the future, you could be missing out on opportunities. This means C-Suite leaders and their teams need to take a proactive approach to embracing new trends and experimenting with new strategies, even when the current GTM methods you’re using seem to be working.
Predicting the future of any business is obviously difficult. Even with the most advanced analytical tools, we can only create basic forecasts. So many factors can emerge over time that have a direct impact on the success of your GTM strategy. That’s why some C-Suite executives ignore the long-term and focus on short-term results instead.
Unfortunately, this can lead to serious problems. Prioritising immediate profits over the long-term health of the organisation can lead to decisions that harm the business in the long term. For instance, if you concentrate on converting as many customers as possible in the short-term, without thinking about how you’re going to retain those customers, this leads to high levels of churn.
If you’re all about “making the sale”, but don’t look for ways to nurture customers, retain their loyalty, and deliver excellent customer experiences, you won’t pave the way for consistent, repeated revenue. This is a particularly significant problem for B2B companies and SaaS brands, who rely on repeat sales and loyalty to thrive.
The key to success here is taking a broader look at the future of the business, not just short-term results. Stop measuring success by the number of leads converted, and start thinking about the quality of those leads, and how to maximise lifetime value.
A strong go-to-market strategy is essential for any growing business, and C-Suite executives play a crucial role in ensuring that teams are following the right strategies for success. Unfortunately, the challenges above can restrict C-Suite leaders from making the right decisions.
If you want to ensure your go-to-market strategies are truly effective in 2024, you’ll need to rethink your data analysis strategy, look more closely at metrics and feedback, unify your teams, and be ready to experiment. What’s more, you’ll need to ensure that the strategies you implement focus on long-term growth, not just short-term results.
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