"We Need Better Marketing"

"We need better marketing."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

The CEO elaborated, ever so slightly. "We have a great product, and our customers love us; we just need better marketing."

"Yeah, we close almost every deal we are in. We need marketing to get us in front of more of them," the VP of Sales chimed in.

As you can imagine, this conversation doesn't typically get very far.

Even if founders, CEOs, or Sales can go a level or two deeper into specifics, it doesn't matter because it doesn't address the underlying issue.

An incomplete go-to-market strategy.

Here's how it happens for a lot of startups:

Initial Traction
Initial marketing and sales tactics are tested to see if the company can get traction and acquire customers.

Begin to Scale
The company finds a few tactics that work and begins to scale, formalize process and measurement, and build teams around those tactics.

Try to Scale More
The company raises a Series B round and now wants to scale more, faster. They want to test the limits of the channels and introduce new ones. They are maybe $5M-10M ARR, and both marketing and sales are well-staffed.

But 6-9 months after the round of funding, marketing isn't generating nearly as many leads as what was built into the aggressive, bottoms up growth model, and suddenly a large percentage of the AEs are struggling to make their quota because the pipeline isn't there.

Everyone Scrambles
Marketing begins to scramble, slowly lowering its bar for quality to allow top-line lead growth to show progress.

Sales begin to throw together outbound motion or run spiff after spiff to squeeze more out of every opportunity and decrease dependence on Marketing.

We Need Better Marketing
Inevitably, the combination of Sales, Finance, and the CEO concludes that we're all trying many things to make this work, but we need better marketing.

If you have made it this far and it doesn't really resonate, count yourself lucky.

But if this does resonate, it probably struck a nerve, so keep reading.

Why the Answer Isn't Better Marketing

As I mentioned earlier, the answer is that the company most likely has an issue with its go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

When you first start your GTM, it is like buying a nice 2BR, 1BA home. But then you add on a garage, put in a pool, add a guest suite above the garage, then an indoor basketball court, a sunroom, a wine cellar, and a second master suite.

You may have a home with many things you wanted, but it isn't how you would design it if you were starting from scratch today. And there are things you can't change about it, like the location or the schools.

This may not be my best analogy, but hopefully, you get the point.

Over time, the way you grow into your GTM strategy isn't necessarily the GTM strategy that will get you to your next revenue milestone. Instead of feeling that you need better marketing, consider that you need to modify and round out your GTM strategy.

How to Move Forward

The two biggest challenges with moving forward to resolve the GTM issues are time and people.

Time is challenging because, by the time enough pain is felt to cause real change in the organization, the company is already pretty far behind its plan. This can make it challenging to be thoughtful about changing your GTM strategy.

People are a challenge because there is a good chance you have skillsets that become less useful and are missing critical skill sets to make the change, and organizational change is never easy.

Now, acknowledging these challenges, here are 5 tips for moving forward:

1. Take the time to get the key stakeholders together and discuss what the GTM strategy needs to look like to reach the company goals. Cram it into a 2-day offsite if you need to; it doesn't need to take weeks or months.
2. From that high-level vision, determine what tactical steps can take immediately to validate the direction quickly. Spin up new ad campaigns, pull a few sales reps to do outreach, or develop an MVP of a feature. Whatever it may be, begin testing and taking steps to provide learnings to the rest of the org.
3. Figure out how tooling or platforms need to change. Teams shifting from lead gen to ABM or from sales-led to product-led typically can't do it with the same systems they already have. Even if your shift isn't that dramatic, there are likely foundational elements that will need to change — and that can take time.
4. Utilize learnings from your initial tests to validate hiring some of the new skill sets and shift the personnel to match your new strategy. For example, you don't need to hire an experienced Director of Outbound Sales and wait for them to build out a team to see if it works. Validate with a few reps first, then hire.
5. Focus and double-down. In most cases, you won't need to shift your GTM strategy fully. Identify the marketing and sales tactics that are the most effective and still aligned to your new strategy, cut the stuff that isn't, and double down on what is working. If 10% of what you were doing was driving 60% of the results, then figuring out how to double or triple that 10% can speed up the impact and buy you time to build out the other areas.

Signs That You Really Do Need Better Marketing

Okay, I'm not totally ignorant. There could be cases where the GTM strategy is fine, and Marketing is lagging.

Here are a few ways you could confirm that it is the case:

1. A competitor in your space has the same GTM strategy and very similar org structure, but their Marketing is far more effective than yours.
2. You already made the pivot to the new GTM strategy that will get you to the next revenue milestone, but Marketing has failed to evolve and mature with the rest of the organization.
3. Your company has no Marketing employees, and the founders have done any marketing to date.

Wrapping Up

If your company reaches a point where it isn't growing like it needs to be, consider taking a step back to determine if your GTM strategy is still right for where you are before shifting the focus onto Marketing, Sales, or any other singular aspect of your go-t0-market function.