“What does working with you actually look like?” is a question I get asked a lot, and spend a lot of time answering. So it is high time to put something down in words (a practice that I will discuss later in this short post).

It’s a good question, and it is a fair question. The answer, unfortunately, is “it depends”.

It depends on precisely where you are as a business, what you have achieved to date, and where specifically you are having difficulty. In fact the very first thing that takes place in any engagement is getting to the bottom of those questions. I see so much time and money wasted by businesses solving problems they don’t have whilst ignoring the ones that they do.

So step one: understand what is missing and where our collective focus should lie. What follows is a checklist of what I would want to see in place. If something already exist we would sanity check it. If it doesn’t that is where I would begin. In rough order, that process would look something like this.

ICP and proposition

It sounds like a simple question: 

Who are you selling to, and what problem do you solve for those organisations, and the specific individuals who make buying decisions in those organisations? 

You would be truly amazed how many companies cannot answer it, with the result that they spend time trying to talk to irrelevant people, and talking about things the right people don’t care about.  I will work with your stakeholders until you can answer the questions, and as a result make every aspect of the sales and marketing journey more effective.

The deliverable here is a short written document for internal use that keeps everyone on the same page. That is so important. I will write about this in detail in the near future, but my golden rule is as follows: until something has been written down nobody has agreed on anything.

The process of putting conclusions onto paper forces the difficult decisions that a lot of organisations avoid, with disastrous consequences down the line. Focus is everything, and this makes it happen.

In addition, we might create a public-facing ‘what we’re all about’ piece of content that summarises what the company is about and how we solve problems that matter for our specific ICP. You can call it a manifesto if you like - that’s up to you.

Go to market plan

When we have our ICP and our proposition, I help formulate a go-to-market plan, or refine an existing one. It is very hard to summarise everything that this entails and it is imperative to understand that ‘sales and marketing’ is an organic whole, not a rag-bag set of activities we stitch together.

My usual approach is to demystify a lot of this. I lead a process that answers these questions in turn:

• Given we have agreed on our ICP, what do we need those people to believe in order to get them to buy our product?
• What are materials, content, interactions, pitches and so on that would help to generate those beliefs?
• How would we get the attention of individuals in our ICP?
• How would we manage our ongoing interactions with those individuals to get them to the point where they buy?

The answers to these questions form the basis of a go-to-market strategy. As above, we document these answers, and they almost turn into a to-do list. We create the content that generates the beliefs (remember content can take many, many forms) and we establish what tactics we need to use to get that content in front of the people we care about: our ICP. 

Let’s talk about that.

Tactics and campaigns

I hope it is obvious that nobody can or should recommend tactics until they have done the work above. That said, here’s a few observations about tactics, and how I approach them if we work together, that might prove useful:

• Other than in niche circumstances that don’t spring to mind right now, you can assume that I will build, run and report on campaigns we do need to create
• Tactics are always part of a larger conversation: “how do we generate the beliefs, and what is stopping people adopting them?” They are never an end in themselves.
• In many cases, my job is to stop you spending money, not encourage it. So many companies stumble into activity because they think they ‘should’ do it. I will always ask the ‘why?’ questions. Who are you trying to talk to with this activity? Why do you think it will work? Are there better alternatives?
• I operate on the basis that there are many ways to get someone’s attention or interest, and all of them are on the table. We don’t have to do the things everyone else does, but sometimes we might need to - that’s fine.
• In cases where resources are tight, it is often better to do one thing well and commit to it that spread those resources too thinly across a lot of channels.
• Whilst attribution is important, and we measure everything, it isn’t the be-all and end-all. Particularly when budgets are limited we are careful about reaching firm conclusions on limited data.

That’s probably enough to be going on with. If you really need to know more, we should probably talk. 

Budgets and targets

Lastly a word on budgets and targets. I like to help build these out sooner rather than later. For many growing companies these might seem like a luxury, or at the very least unnecessary bureaucracy. In some very limited cases that might be true, but in most cases, it isn’t. Here’s why.

For a company to scale, the right structures and processes need to be in place. “I think it’s a good idea” isn’t enough beyond a certain point. It definitely becomes a problem when those ideas only flow one way (down) in the organisation. 

Budgets and targets, which themselves derive from a business model, are an essential part of that structure. They ensure that everyone involved in your go-to-market effort understands the goal, and what resources they have available to make it happen. 

They help break down the ‘big number’ (total sales) into smaller numbers that individuals can influence. They encourage creative thinking when it comes to meeting those targets, rather than just an imposition of tactics from above. 

Lastly, they ensure you are testing your ideas against reality at every step of the journey. That sounds obvious, but trust me, without targets agreed across an organisation, it is very easy to drift in an ocean of zero feedback, and hard to pinpoint what isn’t working when things are going wrong.