How to Create a Go To Market Sales Strategy

Hi, I'm Kevin McCann with the Executive Strategy Group. And in this video we're going to show you how to create a go to market sales strategy and territory growth plan that's customized to fit your company's particular needs. This is meant for any small to medium sized business and even companies with only one employee. Now this can actually be used by a sales executive that's preparing for their QBR or the quarterly business review, or could be used as a sales territory growth plan for a sales rep or a business owner. Can even be used as a go to market sales strategy plan by a business owner looking to break into a new market or expanding existing markets or even to launch a brand new service or new product. So the overview in beginning the process is that when you plan your work and work your plan, great things happen. So this will outline the crucial elements of your territory plan. What you ultimately put in it is up to you. We're helping you lay out the core criteria for a go to market strategy that you can then use and leverage as a template to build your own roadmap. It's actually intended to act as a roadmap for your sales territory over the next several weeks, months, years. This will be presented actually in the first person. So you'll see a lot of I's and me and my's in here. But it's intended to provide thinking points for you to utilize as you grow your business. So the first section of your go to market strategy will be called the executive summary. Now the interesting thing is that this is actually the first part of the plan. But my recommendation is that you write this last once the rest of your plan has been completed. Because what it'll do is give you clarity around what's inside the plan. And, and this will help you summarize it and get your head clear as to what is the summary of everything I just put together into this plan, you'll want to focus on which immediate opportunities will your business be in a position to go after first so that your business can capture some customers, generate revenue, become profitable, and position itself to stay in business for the long run. So the second part after the executive summary is the mission. What's your mission? And again, this should be pretty concise. It shouldn't be any longer than a paragraph and should succinctly state your primary focus. An example would be add 25 new clients or achieve quota. If I'm a sales executive or be a significant contributor to the company, I'd recommend being as specific as possible inside that mission. You know, for instance, what would being a significant contributor mean? Would it mean, you know, going on ride alongs with other sales reps? Would it mean taking a leadership position of my peers? So try to be as specific as possible in that particular area. After the mission comes objectives. So what you want to look at is what are my primary objectives? And in this section you want to list out three to seven items that you must accomplish to realize the mission that you just put down. An example here would be overachieve quota each month or sign five new accounts by June, or develop vertical market strategy by July 1st. So whatever the goals are or the objectives are, you want to make them smart. And smart is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bounded. The next section of your go to market strategy and territory development plan is including the keys to success. You want to identify key items that over the course of this next month, quarter year that will enable attainment of those objectives to occur most easily. So if you see this, we're actually starting at like 30,000ft with the executive summary and the mission. And every step of the way we're starting to get right down to ground level. So each section is a little bit more granular, if you will, than the section before. So an example here would be identify our key value proposition. Articulate that through email, through phone and in person. How are we going to do that? So those are maybe examples of what we need to figure out to execute or to deliver on the objectives that we had in the slide previously. Another one could be solid utilization of company resources, including upper management and technical team. How are we going to make sure that we lose no deal alone. That was one thing my management always taught me, is that if you've got a talented team, make sure you leverage every possible resource on that team to win the game or to win the deal. Next is your sales territory summary. So you want to provide an overview of the territory that you're targeting. And, and when you do that overview, you want to look at what are my existing partnerships within that territory or that patch that I'm looking to penetrate. Where could I leverage their relationships and their resources to help penetrate the market? When you're looking at growing business, there's three ways to do it. You can cold call, you can network, or you can market, or you can do all three at the same time. This falls in that arena of networking. How can I leverage my network and my partnerships and to maximize my engagement with net new prospects and existing customers? Then you also want to look at if you've been in business for a while, you want to look at current customers and reference accounts that we can also leverage to support our growth of net new business. Next you want to look at the geographical description of the territory. Where are the accounts clustered? What are the vertical markets? Are we heavier in healthcare than we are in financial services industry or or is higher ed our strong suit and technology is our emerging market. So be very descriptive of what niches we have dominance in and what niches we want to go after and break into as net new opportunities. Then you also want to look at what is the current competitive landscape. So as you're mapping out your territory, you really want to be clear on this. Because a lot of salespeople and frankly business leaders tend to overlook their competition or don't give them enough credence or really don't even know how their competition is presenting themselves in the market. You have to know what the competitive threat is to be able to deal with it. Otherwise you're just shooting from the hip. So there's the sales territory summary. Next we want to get into sales strategy. So you want to define customer buying criteria by product, by service or by solution. So you want to understand what their criteria needs to be in order to buy your product or service or solution. And depending on what you're selling, it could be technology, it could be a service. If it's consulting. I want to know what the pain points are that my prospects have that would make them a likely candidate for the service or the product I bring to the table. So you have to be very clear on what that is in your business. Next you want to define your company solutions by product, service and solutions. So if we understand their buying criteria, then we want to naturally be able to map our value of each of those areas, product, service and solution to their care abouts. So we'll define our solutions after we've defined their need. Otherwise you're just creating a product and hoping someone will buy it. We want to understand their pain points first and then be able to explain and articulate how our products and services help address those pain points. The third here is you want to define account list by geography, vertical market and solution categories. So we talked a little bit about that on the previous slide when we're defining your territory. But just make sure that once you boil that down to what the account list is, let's segregate them by vertical markets and industries so that we can start to get some momentum and be able to have a well launched campaign. So instead of going and talking to a technology company and then the next day we talk to a healthcare company and the next day we talk to a manufacturing company. Let's group them so that we can start to get some momentum and understand the language in those vertical accounts and then start to penetrate groups of accounts. So that's something that happens in the sales strategy section. Next is define which solutions you want to target to which group of prospects and accounts. So for instance, maybe one of the solutions that's a perfect fit for healthcare has no place being sold to a higher ed customer, for instance. So you want to be specific around what products or solutions are going to be an ideal target for the verticals. And the reason this is important is because not all products or services have the same profitability. So if your goal is to increase profitability for the year, or gross margin or gross profit, you want to make sure you're selling your most profitable solutions. Well, if your most profitable solutions can't be sold to a particular vertical, then that's gotta be noted in the sales strategy. So it sounds fundamental, but a lot of people miss this until it's too late. So having the strategy in place before you go and execute, absolutely critical. Next, we want to look at what's our sales approach. So you want to script out how you're going to approach each prospect by solution. Then you're going to script out how you're going to approach them on the phone, and then you're going to script out how you're going to approach them by email. And you're also going to script out questions for the first meeting that have to be asked in order to determine is this prospect or customer a good fit for me. So this may seem very fundamental, but this is so critical because what we find with sales organizations is that they kind of get hung up on this. It's like, okay, I've got my great product, I know my territory, now go sell. Well, then on the fly, they're trying to figure out what am I going to say, how do I handle objections? What am I going to do to overcome those objections? What if they don't take my calls? How do I communicate in writing? You have to figure these things out up front if you expect to be able to launch and go to market quickly. This is critical. Last is structure. How am I going to spend my day? Time management, time mastery. You want to look at it by the day, frankly by the hour, but by the day, the week and the month. And you should take into consideration your particular peak moments and I say that because we typically have our highest level of energy first thing in the morning. Thing is, is that we tend to do email or get caught up from the day before in the morning, which is actually backwards. You want to use that morning time where you've got the most energy to go and swallow the biggest frog, do the thing you like to do the least, like cold calling, like marketing, like going after net new customers first thing in the morning, which by the way, that's when you're going to catch them at their desk anyhow. So use your time in the appropriate peak moments and in the appropriate ways. Next, you want to create your definitive action plan. So we've got the strategy in place, the 30,000 foot, 20,010. Now we're at 5,000ft previously. This brings you right down to the street level. What am I going to get done? When is it going to be done by and has it been completed? So each one of these you want to build out and your spreadsheet will probably much larger than this one slide here. But, but you want to put each one of those next actionable items with the targeted time date and a complete stamp on it so that you see how you're rolling through your plan. So in summary, now we have a plan that's great, right? So the last thing you want to remember is you got to work the plan. Planning is great, but execution is much better. And planning without execution is basically useless. It's wasted thought and it's time wasted and it serves no point. So I guess I could say that if you have no plans to execute all the stuff that we just laid out here, then don't even bother setting up your plan. You have to work it, you have to execute it. So follow up, change things that don't work. Add new ideas to the plan each month, each quarter. The key here is to know who you want to work with, what you're doing, what you're selling, what you're going after, when you want to have it completed, how you want to go about it, where you want it to occur and why it even matters. So you got to answer those five questions, who, what, where, when and why in your go to market strategy. If you get that done and you have next actionable items to execute on it, you will be successful. Now to help give you a jump start here you can actually download and use our template and if you go to our website at bit lyesg gotomarketplan and I think the caps actually matter here. So capital esg dash capital g go to Market Plan. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us@exutivestrategygroup.com or you can reach me here at my contact information. Thanks so much for watching this video. We hope it helps you grow your business.