The CEO Must Own the Go-to-Market Process
The following is adapted from MOVE: The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework by Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown.
If you’re the CEO, the go-to-market (GTM) is yours. Own it.
Maybe you didn’t realize this. You think of GTM as an execution, and you’ve got people to do that. Time to change your perspective. GTM requires an aligned executive team with shared key performance indicators (KPIs) and data. That is to say: a single source of truth.
It’s your job as CEO to keep all executives operating at the same business stage with the same understanding of the market, operations, velocity, and expansion (MOVE) GTM framework. It’s also your job to help each leader adapt metrics as you grow through maturity stages.
In short, the CEO’s role in GTM is alignment and transformation.
Different Views on GTM
In practice, GTM winds up being delegated to other leaders. However, it’s rarely clear exactly whom. Ambiguity develops between company strategy and GTM, and things break down.
In other words, CEOs own the corporate strategy driving GTM, but they rarely own the GTM process. This dynamic needs to change. One CEO who gets it, Nick Mehta from Gainsight, called GTM “an end-to-end process of how vendors help buyers along the customer journey.” Nick takes a very active role in guiding GTM across his exec team.
Or as Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, put it, “GTM is like a product. We’re obsessive about making the product better. We’re the same way in our go-to-market … We’re constantly asking, ‘What are the bugs in it? What are customers complaining about in regard to their experience with our teams and processes? What features (GTM improvements) are they requesting?’ We treat go-to-market like a product, and we track bugs and make improvements.”
What About the Future?
Often, CEOs adeptly lead their companies to a point, then plateau. They don’t know the next move to make or where the next summit is located. The company is doing fine today, but what about next quarter? Next year? If they can’t answer the four questions of the MOVE framework (who, what, when, and where), they may wind up executing the wrong thing.
CEOs want a business model that keeps adding new revenue streams: acquiring, expanding, entering new categories and markets. You can’t do that without happy customers, and CEOs know this. So creating happy customers tends to be their primary focus.
Just beware, CEOs are often focused on strategy but not the alignment or execution of that strategy. They may fail to either select a GTM champion or align leaders to a centralized GTM function, which causes silos. If you’re a CEO in the ideation stage, your job is to make sure the problem you’re trying to solve is real enough, and the market big enough, for your solution.
You won’t have a perfect product at this point, and that’s OK. Once you reach the transition stage of your maturity curve, your job is to align your organization around your product and target market. It’s equally important to prioritize and discern.
One common trap for companies at this stage is holding on to multiple enticing segments. This drains your team of energy and waters down both product experience and marketing message. Pick one segment and grow it before expanding to others.
By the expansion stage, you might have multiple product lines with general managers for each. You need to create alignment among your general managers, treating them like mini-CEOs to help them deliver an excellent, frictionless customer experience.
Eyes on the Horizon
Because you own the GTM process, it’s your job to look further than anyone else. As CEO you’re thinking about the next big acquisition or market while the rest of the team focuses on existing customers. If you don’t prioritize company-wide alignment as you grow, this can introduce chaos. Learn to recognize when your company approaches a moment of transformation so you can create alignment, change incentives, and put your executive team to work making the transformation happen.
“What got us here won’t get us there!” That’s the message when it’s time to transform. Learn to recognize when the maturity curve changes from ideation to transformation to execution, and adjust metrics accordingly. Start planting seeds for big changes long before you announce big decisions. That way, it won’t be a shock to the system of your entire company.
Get a revenue operations (RevOps) leader to help you integrate and act on better data (and a stable single source of truth). With RevOps support, you no longer have to juggle competing metrics from different teams. Yes, CEOs use their instincts, intuition, and judgment to lead, but it’s important to have data and predictability so the whole team can work in cadence.
Misaligned data = misaligned teams. Fix the data and align your teams.
Above all, remember: As CEO, you own GTM. Don’t delegate it, even in a public company. Make RevOps your best friend, regardless of the stage of your business, and work toward alignment and transformation for your entire company.
For more advice on executive leadership of go-to-marketing, you can find MOVE: The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework on Amazon.
Bestselling author Sangram Vajre co-founded Terminus in 2014 and with it, started the FlipMyFunnel movement, creating a community of innovators with an account-based marketing mindset. He’s an international keynote speaker, CMO, entrepreneur, and host of The FlipMyFunnel Podcast.
Bryan Brown is Chief Strategy Officer at Terminus and a SaaS visionary in the marketing and sales tech industry. He brings to market innovative software products, improving how thousands of businesses grow and communicate with their customers. Bryan resides in Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife and six kids.
