“Authentic” GTM

Tom Fishburne wrote a good blog post called “Authentic Marketing,” where he said “we frequently hear that ‘authenticity’ is the key to marketing to millennials.”

Authenticity extends beyond just millennials. Millennials, as early adopters in finding information over the internet, just valued authenticity earlier. At the Marketo Summit, Will Smith explained how technology and the connected consumer drive greater transparency, which then drives authenticity. “In the 1990s, [you could make terrible films], before people knew it sucked, you’d made what you needed to in the first weekend,” he said. “Now, people will tweet 10 minutes into the movie that it sucks. It means I have to make good movies now. You can’t hide anything.” Smith’s current focus is the concept of “complete authenticity”, or identifying the truth at the core of the product, service, and working from there.

Like Smith’s complete authenticity, Authenticity extends beyond just marketing as well. All aspects of customer engagement (including sales, customer success, product) must be authentic too. In other words, we need to practice “Authentic GTM (Go-To-Market).”

What is Authentic GTM? When the company’s GTM matches the actual customer’s product experience.

But, customer product experience is a very broad concept, since the customer can engage with the product in many ways. For Authentic GTM, the target customer product experience is successful onboarding of a new customer. After all, GTM is all about new customer acquisition. This just raises another question.

What is successful onboarding? Lincoln Murphy calls it “Onboarded Customer” in The Secret to Successful Customer Onboarding. Once successfully Onboarded, someone at the customer (ie, User) should be getting first value (hopefully, “enough value”) to actively use the product for a specific use case and be a passionate reference — we have a Passionate Active User.

In other words, Authentic GTM requires the GTM to match the experience of Onboarded customers. That matching can be found by answering these three matching questions in the affirmative.

1. Authentic GTM Question #1: Is the WOW in the sales process the same as the first value in the onboarded customers? WOW is that simple something that energizes a person inside the potential customer to become a Champion — a true believer — who really wants to use (and buy) the product. Basically, when the Champion says: “Wow! I gotta to have it.”
2. Authentic GTM Question #2: Is the Champion in the sales process the same as the Passionate Active User? Do they have the same title on Linkedin? The Champion is not necessarily the actual buyer or decision maker. But, the Champion will push the product through the company’s internal process and help overcome many obstacles raised by others. Common obstacles raised by the Champion’s boss include: I never heard of the company, there is no budget, do you really need it, what is the roi.
3. Authentic GTM Question #3: Is the pain described in the sales process the same as the use case at the onboarded customer?

The box below helps visualize the three matching Authentic GTM questions:

After using the box to complete the foundation for Authentic GTM, Authentic GTM requires completing the full picture — such as the marketing efforts prior to the 1st sales meeting and the customer journey after first value. The table below expands the box and helps visualize the full Authentic GTM and its implications.

Some implications of Authentic GTM:

1. The time-to-close exceeds the time-to-value (notwithstanding the CEO’s or board’s desires). In other words, long time-to-value drives a long sales cycle, and thus limits the GTM strategy options. In contrast, Marketo’s early financing pitch said — “We can go where they can’t” by leveraging fast time to adoption and value.
2. The tactical message should leverage how the Passionate Active Users describe the use case. Do they describe it the same way? Can they discover it in the same way? Is that description searchable?
3. The target customer profile should match the Passionate Active Users and the desired Champions. Ultimately, the customer is not a company, but an individual or a collection of individuals deciding to buy and use the product.
4. Potential users usually see the Wow and become a Champion after seeing a demo. Sometimes, it occurs after they try the product themselves (through a free trial or freemium) or after hearing the product from others.
5. Later on, it helps to understand the customer’s journey from first value to full value.

Authentic GTM also empowers the CEO in several ways.

Authentic GTM enables the CEO to ask the most important GTM question. Surprisingly, it is not part of GTM. Rather, it occurs after GTM. It is a post-sales onboarding question: how long after the signed contract does it take before the user achieves first (enough) value? In the ideal case, that time is short. Those products deliver immediate gratification. Coincidentally, we hear manytimes that millennials want immediate gratification.

Authentic GTM enables the CEO to break down departmental silo’s and have them work together using Authenticity as the rally theme. Will Smith provided that insight during the Marketo Summit, when he said: “Authenticity becomes the throughline across all aspects of your life.”

Authenticity applies not just to millennials. It applies to everyone, but the millennials are just more vocal. The non-millennials silently speak through the Sales and Marketing productivity numbers — they just don’t buy.