Beyond the Launch: A Case for More Holistic ‘Go-to-Market’

By Elias Franz|
Beyond the Launch: A Case for More Holistic ‘Go-to-Market’ cover image

A Popular but Ambiguous Term

In today’s world of business, ‘go-to-market’ (GTM) has become quite the buzzword. One that, depending on who you ask, can have pretty ambiguous definitions. Your organization may use it to collectively describe the functions supporting sales. Your leaders may use it to describe how your organization competes to win business. You may have even seen a ‘go-to-market plan’ for the release of a new product or service, likely with little consideration for how it will continue to be provided into the future.

Common Pitfalls

For many leaders, go-to-market pursuits can carry some fatal flaws:

  1. Go-to-market decisions are often focused overwhelmingly on sales or marketing.

    In practice, GTM strategies tend to focus overwhelmingly on the stakeholders who anticipate market needs and present solutions. We pour energy into the marketing campaign, the sales pitch, and the big reveal. But what happens after the launch? Or even more importantly, what happened before it to ensure the organization can actually deliver on the promise?

  2. Go-to-market is often treated as a synonym for ‘launch.’

    Leaders can get stuck thinking of going-to-market with an offering like a project plan; a defined start and end, a set of defined tasks, and a gold star for success once the plan is executed. The problem here is that the market doesn’t care much about the plan you agreed on with leadership, or the date you set to cut the ribbon on your new offering. The market is fickle, uncertain, and constantly changing. All the variables you assumed in your planning may be totally obsolete in the days after your big launch. Customers may have very different needs by the time you even arrive in the market.

    If your approach to a new offering only focuses on your ability to sell it when it launches, you aren't building a sustainable business. You are making a lot of noise, maybe seeing success in the short-term, and kicking the risk of lasting success to teams or leaders down the road. If you’ve worked long at mid-sized or larger company in the US you’ve likely felt an example of this short-sighted strategy causing issues. Maybe there wasn’t enough training, maybe the right teams weren’t consulted, or maybe decisions were based on bad information. Regardless of the reasons, how the company was trying to change, and what it was trying to change to, felt fragile.

To drive lasting and meaningful innovation in an organization’s portfolio, we can shift our thinking from a one-time event to a continuous program of change. We can think of go-to-market more like a holistic lifecycle.

What Does a Holistic Lifecycle Look Like?

What do we need to establish a lifecycle of continuous growth and change? How can we pursue this growth more holistically, in consideration of the success of the whole organization, not just one part?

To me, the key ingredients are:

  • Progressive Stages:

    Growing up, we aren’t expected to be perfectly successful and self-sustaining on the day that we can walk and talk. We’re given opportunities to learn in controlled settings. We’re told to get out there and try new things. We experience and learn as we repeatedly expand our exposure to and impact on the world. We go through stages of growth and change to (hopefully) become better, thriving, humans. Eventually we’re released to leave home on our own, then start our professional career, and at some point, we might be considered wise adults in our community.

    We should recognize that new ideas for business don’t suddenly emerge into the world as mature and self-sustaining offerings on launch day. Instead, they should progress on a journey of growth stages, becoming more exposed to the market and having more impact as they go.

  • Invested Stakeholders:

    Feeling a lack of confidence in leadership direction, that ‘fragile’ feeling you get when you hear a bad call, likely comes from a consistent source: not having the right stakeholders involved in making the decision. If sales is pitching things the business can’t ever provide, you’ll eventually see missed promises. Conversely, if operations is investing too heavily in interesting innovations that the market doesn’t realistically want, revenue will eventually dry up.

    A holistic group of stakeholders, all with ‘skin-in-the-game’ to achieve the business’ ultimate goals, drive better decisions and therefore better strategy. If we leave out key teams, we lose out on insight and know-how that could have better positioned us for success. If we include groups without skin-in-the-game, we burn investment pursuing their goals instead of the goals of the business. When we have the right, invested stakeholders, we become more resilient to potential challenges and therefore more effective in achieving our goals.

  • Accountable Steps:

    The ‘focus on selling at launch’ mindset does have its advantages. One of them being that the narrow focus carries more certainty in what is produced. With more certainty, clear and linear steps can be established to tactically create the desired output, almost like a math equation. I have been in situations where this proved valuable, where a critical customer was won because we met a very tailored need signed off on by a limited group of stakeholders. However, that same tailored need would have caused major issues if offered at scale throughout our business.

    I’m of the mind that these narrowly-focused approaches can’t be the entirety of our grand strategy if we want to be effective in the long-term. However, we can still take advantage of the efficiency these tactics provide. Our overall strategy should account for uncertainty and change by being holistic. It can also allow space for some narrowly-focused steps that (when we know the inputs) efficiently get us to a certain output. In practice this looks like placing clear, accountable, steps within our uncertain lifecycle where we can, engaging the right stakeholders at the right time to move us from stage to stage.

Acorn Adaptive’s Approach for More Strategic Go-to-Market

Within Acorn Adaptive’s Root to Reach™ framework we’ve established a Go-to-Market (GTM) Lifecycle that is applicable to most organizations looking to be more strategic. It is designed to be highly adoptable, with simple stages, steps, and stakeholders that any team should be able to identify in their own organization. It allows teams to start with new ideas and systematically grow them into new or changed offerings.

This GTM Lifecycle ties into the Root to Reach™ throughline of thinking about your organization’s portfolio like a tree. The GTM Lifecycle focuses on using ideas to sprout new twigs that, as they mature, thicken into strong branches. Branches that can support further ideas and new twigs as the tree winds its way towards achieving its goals.

A diagram of this GTM Lifecycle is available on our website at https://acornadaptive.com/about-us.

Going-to-Market...Then Staying There

Moving toward a holistic lifecycle isn't about finding the perfect project plan to approach the market. In an ever-evolving market, final answers are a myth. Instead, it’s about identifying certainty and embracing uncertainty. It’s about trading the fragility of focusing on launch for the resiliency of a continuous journey. The question of successful business isn't just whether you can get to market, but whether you have built an organization capable of staying there.