Hello, everyone! Iâm Kimberlee West, and Iâm the Director of Product Marketing at Uniphore.
Today, I'm going to talk about how to go about aligning Go-to-Market (GTM) teams.
I'll tell you the story of how I went from being a team of one to leading a team of five and Iâll reveal what I learned along the way about the seven key factors that are essential for aligning GTM teams and driving growth.
Where it all began
So, let me tell you a story. I started at Uniphore in March 2021. At the time, the company had around 300 employees.
However, when it came to our Go-to-Market team, it was just me. The product team was fairly small, as were the customer success and sales teams.
As the sole member of the product marketing team, I reported to a VP of Product Marketing, Growth, and Field (weird title, I know!)
My role was to handle product marketing, which the company didn't fully understand since they had never had a dedicated product marketing team before.
The company had been operating since 2008, and product marketing was a haphazard mix of sales engineering and product team efforts. The company's focus was on having a strong brand story and digital campaign, with sales handling the rest.
Fortunately, someone convinced the company that product marketing was important, and that's where my journey began.
Fast forward to growth and change
By October, things had changed significantly. In just six months, the company underwent a major acquisition, and I also got to hire a team.
Going from a team of one to a team of four was a challenge. On top of that, change was happening all around us. The product, sales, and customer success teams all exploded across different geographies.
I now had a product marketing team across various time zones, supporting sales teams around the world. Meanwhile, I had to figure out how to align our GTM strategies.
The ratio of product managers to product marketers wasn't ideal; there were ten people on the product team and only four product marketers. On top of all that, the company had no clear structure for bringing products to market.
Despite these challenges, I thought I was doing everything right: I had hired a team, I was working with multiple stakeholders across the company, and I was trying my best to stay on top of everything that was happening.
Facing reality
In November 2021, I had a reality check. I visited our California office, where I met with the CEO. While he acknowledged that he saw some activity on the website and so on, he told me he felt that product marketing was "M.I.A."
You know the expression âsink or swimâ? I was sinking. The problem with the sink-or-swim analogy is that itâs based on your own perception. You're constantly evaluating yourself based on your internal litmus test.
However, especially in corporate life, there are times when you may be sinking without even realizing it. You might be working hard around the clock, responding to emails, and getting work done, but still not truly making progress.
Instead of sink or swim, I prefer to think of it as life or death, but not in a morbid sense â more like in a video game (in case you couldnât tell, I have kids!).
In a video game, you get multiple lives, and more importantly, there's an external indicator showing whether you're performing well or not.
This forces you to look outside yourself and look at the indicators that show whether you're truly doing what you need to do, working with the right teams, and driving growth.
Now, without further ado, letâs get into the seven things I put in place to build alignment for a successful Go-to-Market strategy so that product marketing could respawn.
The seven things you need to build alignment for a successful Go-to-Market strategy
What the Go-to-Market process looks like can vary a lot depending on your companyâs needs and the people there.
However, it generally involves messaging, content creation, sales enablement, and campaigns. The problem with looking at it this way is that it gives a false impression of simplicity.
In reality, executing a successful Go-to-Market strategy requires dealing with people who may not want to follow the plan. The challenge lies in getting buy-in from sales, product, customer success, and leadership teams for your vision, positioning, and strategy.
That means the biggest part of Go-to-Market is the relationships you build. Weâll dig deeper into those relationships later, but for now, letâs take a look at some other key elements of successful GTM.
1) A hunger to learn
If you want to build a GTM strategy, there are three things you need to know: your market, your customers, and your competitors.
However, you personally might not know all those things. Your individual team members arenât necessarily going to know all of those things either, and thatâs okay.
Product marketingâs biggest strengths are its curiosity and its ability to carry out research.
When youâre hiring people for your team, your focus should be on hiring someone who is hungry to learn and understands that they need to look outwards to find the knowledge they need â theyâre going to have to go and talk to people.
When Iâm hiring, I like to ask candidates how they would position an e-commerce store, even if they don't have experience in that industry.
I look for a thought process on how they approach getting hold of the knowledge they need. If they use the word "I" repeatedly, that's a red flag because going to market involves working with other people.
2) Over communication and trust
The market is big, and sales may want to go after everybody. You need to make sure you focus on the segments that it makes sense to go after and make sure you clearly communicate that.
You will almost certainly have to repeat yourself because people will forget what you tell them. Over communication is key to getting everybody on the same page.
3) The ability to say ânoâ
You have to get comfortable with saying no, and that's going to be hard.
When I joined Uniphore, not only was I the Director of Product Marketing, but I was also responsible for partner marketing, industry marketing, sales enablement, competitive intelligence, and more.
I had to set up processes and structures, figure out what was being done before, and understand what products were being delivered and where we were successful in positioning them.
Beyond the regular product marketing tasks, I had people from the field marketing team asking me to write abstracts for webinars and events. Sales teams would ask me to make their slides look pretty, and customer success wanted me to put on events for customers. All of this started within 30 days of joining the company.
If you don't know how to say no, you might find yourself being expected to do everything, so it's essential to step back and evaluate your priorities. After the CEO told me they thought product marketing was missing in action, I realized I had to reassess. I needed to determine the company's goals, my role in achieving those goals, my teamâs capacity, and what we could and couldnât accomplish.
Saying no isn't rude; it's a way to communicate that you don't have the capacity to take on a task because you're focusing on other important things. If something is truly important, then additional resources need to be allocated, and new people may need to be hired.
In the initial stages, it might not be comfortable. I remember when my CMO asked me to put together a customer marketing program. Old Kimberlee would have hopped to it, but new Kimberlee had to explain that she could build this program, but doing so would mean sacrificing a product release meant to help grow sales.
From there, we were able to have a serious discussion about strategy and hiring new resources.
4) Focus
Focus is not just about managing time effectively, but also understanding your purpose within the organization, what you're trying to achieve, and how youâre going to achieve that. Saying ânoâ to lower-priority tasks frees you up to focus on the things that matter; in my case, that was growth.
To make sure we were all aligned on how product marketing was going to deliver this, I put together a short deck for my CMO to educate her on what product marketing does.
I outlined our key deliverables and emphasized that product marketing is about more than pretty graphics, whitepapers, and ebooks. Yes, we do those things, but we do them to support sales and close deals.
After aligning with my CMO, I was able to present my focused approach to other teams. I ran a virtual roadshow to get everyone on board with our product marketing strategy.
I'm a big advocate of having a plan on a single page. Whenever I present to other teams, I always start with a slide outlining product marketingâs deliverables to remind everyone of our focus and what we're trying to achieve. Having this reference point helps everyone understand our value.
5) Processes and subject-matter expertise
I never realized I liked process until I entered an environment where it didn't exist at all. To give you some context, on my first day in this role, I had 300 emails in my inbox. My boss had forwarded them to me to ensure I was up to speed.
I asked if there wasn't a folder where this information was saved, but it turned out everything was saved on personal drives. That was the first thing we needed to change.
A big part of stepping back and focusing is considering what structures need to be built to support that focus. If there isn't a structure in place, it's your responsibility to create one. We already had a SharePoint site, so I created a product marketing folder where everything would be saved.
I was also thinking ahead; I knew I would be building a team soon and there was no way I was going to onboard new team members the way Iâd been onboarded. I needed a central place where they could go to find clear information about our products, positioning, and resources.
I also looked beyond product marketing and considered where marketing, sales, and product teams could access this information. I cleaned up the SharePoint site and made it the central location for updates, communicating this to the broader team.
My goal was to build a single source for messaging, emphasizing that no one else should be consulted for this information. This was important because sales had previously relied on sales engineering for messaging, as product marketing didn't yet exist.
By positioning myself as the GTM subject-matter expert and advisor, I could more effectively foster collaboration and support other teams within the organization.
If you want to be a subject matter expert (SME) and advisor, you can't just quote Gartner or point out what competitors are doing all the time; you have to curate information and add insight as to why it's valuable for the particular situation.
For example, when weâre going through our annual market assessment, we analyze the market for each of our four key products, drawing from relevant data points to inform the product team and shape the roadmap for the next year.
I made that process up, guys! If you don't have a process in place and thatâs something you need, create one. This is the power of product marketing. You are responsible for building strategy and guiding the team. If you want to build a strong GTM but youâre noticing gaps or misalignment, take the initiative to address them.
6) Data and insights
Coming back to the importance of data and insights, as a product marketer, you need to have access to relevant data as well.
It's very easy as a PMM to get comfortable with feeling like only the growth team needs to look at data on website traffic, and only the sales ops team needs data on what deals are closing, but thatâs just not true.
I have my own dashboard. Did I create that dashboard? No! I'm not an expert in Salesforce. I went to sales ops because the sales dashboard was only looking at deals closed, with some regional insights in terms of regions. I needed that data parsed out by pipeline, product, and persona.
We also use a tool called 6sense. This, together with my dashboard has helped me to see which personas are fully engaged and we now use these insights to inform our strategy.
As a side note, don't be afraid to explore the tools available to you. I once worked at a company that didn't realize they had 6sense, and once we started using it, it transformed how we went to market.
My final piece of advice on insights is to always consider your audience. The insights that are going to support the marketing team are different from the insights that are going to support the sales team.
Theyâre also different from the insights that are going to help the product team and customer success.
7) Relationship management
A big part of building trust with other teams is relationship management. My team and I brainstormed different ways to be active, intentional, and purposeful in building relationships with key groups throughout the year, not just during product releases.
You donât just go to people at Christmas and demand presents â you have a relationship with them throughout the whole year.
We identified key people to connect with, activities we could do with them, indicators we could track together, types of information we could exchange, and gaps we could close.
As an example, competitive intelligence was something we needed to be able to collaborate with other teams on, so we set up a process for using Klue, which we laid out during our meetings with other teams.
In summary, Go-to-Market is a people-first activity. If you focus only on flashy marketing tactics without considering the people you're working with, you'll struggle to succeed.
Thatâs a wrap!
I'll leave you with a quote that I love: "The grass is greener where you water it." If you're unhappy with your company's current state, take a step back and consider how you can make the necessary changes and guide your organization toward success.
