Sales Plays vs Go-To-Market Plays

Sales is a tough job. I’ve never ‘carried a bag’ – aka have been responsible for hitting a target quota. (A fun callback to old-timey door-to-door salespeople who carried the products they needed to sell in a bag). But I’ve supported, watched, and learned from some fantastic B2B sales reps and leaders. The most successful salespeople follow a repeatable, targeted approach to discovering, nurturing, and closing deals. These folks are invited to President’s Club retreats year after year without fail because they understand their customers, market, solutions, and competition, and ultimately, they leverage their knowledge to win business.

Smaller or earlier-stage startups may only have one or a handful of products or services serving a small number of use cases, so it’s relatively more straightforward to figure out who to sell to (your ideal customer profile or ICP), what problems you’re best equipped to solve (top customer use cases), and ultimately how to build a repeatable sales process. Don’t get me wrong, selling is still hard. You’re likely fighting to differentiate yourselves from more prominent, established vendors. You may not have the brand recognition or customer-proof points to get your foot in the door, even if you’ve identified an excellent target prospect. But if you’re figuring out how to sell a single product in your portfolio, you probably don’t need to go through this comprehensive process I’m discussing.

Yet the more extensive your business, the more complex your product and services portfolio, and the more dynamic your market landscape, the harder it is for sales reps to figure out the right repeatable approaches to drive revenue.  Sales reps for large B2B tech vendors going to market with more extensive portfolios can be overwhelmed with dozens – or even hundreds – of potential use cases, entry points, or opportunities they could consider, with wasted effort if they place the wrong bets. In this environment, a coordinated cross-functional effort to define the top priority, repeatable sales plays that can grow your business is beneficial.

Wait – it’s not a sales play. It’s a coordinated go-to-market (GTM) play!

In my intro above, I started building a case for a repeatable approach to help sales reps hit their quotas, ultimately helping your business hit its revenue targets. But is it just a sales process? B2B tech sales reps won’t hit their quotas without alignment and support from their colleagues across the organization’s marketing, product, customer service, business development, and other teams.  I’m talking about an integrated, cross-functional go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

I’ll throw down the gauntlet and contend that a large B2B software company with revenues in the $250M-$1B range should ideally target 3-7 GTM plays annually (with most or all being multi-year plays). The smaller your business, the fewer plays you’ll want to define. As you’ll see below, each play requires tremendous effort, and there are diminishing returns if you stretch your resources too thin.

Those groups of GTM plays should represent 70-80% of your organization’s targeted business opportunities. (If you’ve followed my newsletter, you probably already know about my 80/20 rule obsession)

This is where your outbound sales and marketing efforts should focus. The remaining 20-30% of opportunities are represented by a long tail of hundreds of use cases that will be inbound opportunities you will still want to qualify and close to meet your organizational targets. But your deep-dive investments in marketing programs, sales enablement, content, and other GTM initiatives should primarily support those plays.

How to define the right GTM plays

Answering this question would be an article (or a book) all by itself.  In a nutshell, you need to define a cross-functional process to evaluate and select those critical few opportunities that (1) prospects are prioritizing with a budget, (2) you have a credible and differentiated solution, and (3) there’s a sufficient addressable market for you to leverage to meet your revenue targets.  Here are a few recommendations to kickstart this effort:

• Analyze deal history. While past results won’t guarantee future success, you’d be foolish to ignore it.  Work closely with your revenue and marketing operations teams to analyze customer journeys to understand which campaigns drove leads, which budgeted customer initiatives converted to opportunities, and which solutions ultimately won business. This includes understanding competitive win rates and incidents to validate how and where you’re differentiating from alternatives.
• Leverage internal experience. Speak to your most successful sales reps across the business to understand your ICP. What keeps prospects up at night? How are they prioritizing their efforts? What are their leaders expecting of them?  Your customer support and services teams will also have valuable insights, and don’t forget your renewals team – they have the best clarity on why customers renew or churn.
• Leverage external experience.  Industry analysts and your partners will often get early insights into your ICP’s upcoming priorities and challenges, so listen.
• Anticipate where the puck is going. I’m sorry for the hockey reference, especially since I know nothing about hockey, but I love this phrase. You may want one of your GTM plays to pilot or test the waters of an emerging business opportunity. It could be to grow a new product or service, ride the wave of a new market trend, or penetrate a new vertical, region, or persona.

A GTM playbook checklist

Each targeted GTM play should define the following.

Focused Scope

• Business objectives. State whether the play is expected to attract new business (e.g., new logos), expand existing business (cross-sell/upsell), or both.
• Target markets and ICP. Identify the industries, company sizes, regions, and personas most receptive to your solutions.
• Top use cases. For each GTM play, your market and customer research derive a list of 3-5 initiatives or projects where target prospects are most likely to have the budget and priority to procure a solution like yours.
• Portfolio mix. Clarify which products and/or services within your portfolio would be the most critical for the play to land an opportunity (initial entry point) and those that would be valuable to expand (attach/cross-sell).
• Capability and roadmap highlights. Not every feature of every product is equally relevant when looking to win a specific GTM play.  Product managers, solutions engineers, and product marketers partner here to highlight which capabilities – existing or planned – will be most crucial to advancing the opportunities.

Positioning. These messaging outcomes below are the foundation for various deliverables, including play-specific pitch decks, website copy updates, marketing campaigns, event messaging, and more.

• Value messaging. It’s not what product the prospect wants but what challenge they want to overcome. Sales reps who lead with products and features only sell products and features. Reps who understand how to solve problems and deliver excellent outcomes keep the door open for significantly more upside when recommending a solution for their customers.
• Differentiation messaging. As I discuss in detail in my article “Differentiating your differentiators,” you must focus on the aspects of your business and solutions that are the most relevant and valuable to prospects in the context of the GTM play. And don’t forget: Sometimes, your services may provide the most compelling differentiation!
• Customer case studies and proof points. In my article “Advocacy: Through the eyes of your customer,” I reinforce the importance of letting your happy customers prove that you can deliver the promised value. A compelling customer reference is more credible than any sales or marketing pitch.

GTM Strategy

• Nurture the buyer’s journey at the top of the funnel. Your prospects do a significant amount of research on potential solutions well before they engage with vendors. Top-of-funnel GTM activities attract and qualify these leads, ideally converting them into sales opportunities. This is why marketing invests in brand awareness and demand gen activities, including analyst relations, partner marketing, public and media relations, website and content, SEO and digital engagement, social media, event sponsorship, and more. When your ICP does their research, they must discover that your company is an expert in the areas they care about most.
• Accelerate the sales cycle at the bottom of the funnel. While marketing drives many top-of-funnel activities, the sales team owns the bottom-of-funnel. Key activities include deeper discovery, objection handling, solution proposal, procurement/IT/security review, negotiations, and closing.  Each step requires play-relevant enablement, content, and processes to ensure the highest possible conversion rates.

Content Plan. Content marketing creates three distinct types of assets.

• TOFU. Your content must build market awareness and credibility with your target ICP, proving your company has valuable insights to share about a particular business challenge or opportunity. This is referred to as top-of-funnel or ‘TOFU’ content.
• MOFU. Your content should nurture the prospect through their buyer’s journey, helping them build their business case, share best practices, and recommend an approach that may lead to securing budget and priority to purchase a solution from a vendor. This type of content is often called middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content and can also be valuable in helping accelerate a sales cycle.
• BOFU. Finally, the bottom-of-funnel, or BOFU, content you create provides much more detail about your particular solution to the problem. It discusses your differentiated features and services and offers valuable demos, technical papers, and other materials that help move the sales cycle through the evaluation, selection, and procurement phases.

Sales Enablement

• Personas. Define the typical job titles or roles of the most relevant individuals who will influence your ability to win the deal. Specify who is responsible for evaluating the solution and making a purchase recommendation, who has budget authority, and who approves the final decision.
• Discovery and qualification criteria. Define the BANT questions reps should ask to determine if an opportunity has ‘budget, authority, need, and timing’ and the right technology and organizational environment to best suit your solution.
• Objection handling. Prepare for the most common reasons a prospect may push back, and have solid answers to continue nurturing the opportunity.
• Competitive intelligence. Ensure sales teams understand how to position your solution against the competition for the specific GTM play. It may be a competitor with similar functionality, a vendor offering an alternate approach, or a homegrown solution.

Executive buy-in on organizational focus is key to success.

While not exhaustive, I hope the above information helps frame the scope and complexity of building GTM plays for your organization. Throughout my career, I’ve seen this strategy drive real business results and organizational alignment, but I’ve also experienced false starts and a lack of adoption.

This is not the only way to focus resources and achieve goals. If your organization’s leadership—especially in sales, marketing, and product—doesn’t support this approach, it’s not yet time to push it.