Sexy new business terms come and go, and yet few have the tempting allure and appeal of a ‘go-to-market strategy.’ It sounds exciting giving off a fresh and creative plan to storm new markets. It is action-oriented—involving going from here to the market, practical-sounding with simple words, and good ones like ‘go’ and ‘market.’ Entrepreneurs love it and startups dance to it.
But here’s the dirty little secret: go-to-market is often all sizzle and no steak. Too many organizations hand the keys to critical strategy decisions to these mythical execs, while core business strategy falls by the wayside. Far from a recipe for success, this divided approach plants the seeds of failure.
Go-to-market has become a catch-all term for the full spectrum of customer-facing business decisions: who to target, what channels to use, branding, pricing, and more. That’s a lot of stuff— a lot of the core strategy levers. That’s virtually all the where-to-play and lots of the how-to-win.
In any case, handing these weighty choices to a separate GTM silo leaves precious little for the rest of the leadership team. What’s left for the rest of the leadership team to decide? Not much. And therein lies the problem.
In this divided structure, who decides the core elements of business strategy? Often, no one. Or the already overtaxed GTM execs take that on too.
If that long list of activities is a GTM Strategy, what is the rest of the strategy and how does that happen? Pretty much the only way you can do it is to have somebody as the head of ‘Product’ and somebody else as the head of ‘GTM.’ In this structure, the Product head is responsible for making all the choices on the Product and none of the GTM choices. The GTM head is responsible for exactly the opposite. Or is it?
Fragmenting key strategic decisions between GTM and product leads may seem efficient on paper. But when sales stumble, fingers start pointing. In practice, it becomes a blame game when problems emerge. Whose fault is it when sales dive? The GTM exec complains of unsellable products. The product throws up its hands at terrible distribution and marketing.
Both sides usually have a point. But this finger-pointing gets you nowhere.
Path forward? Strategy first, structure second. Rather than handing decisions to mythical execs, companies must put integrated business strategy first—spanning target customers, value proposition, and capabilities needed to win.
With this north star to guide decisions across all fronts, you can define supportive structures and processes that reinforce— not undermine— their distinctive course of action. This may include go-to-market roles, but not at the expense of cohesive strategy. The end goal stays simple: crafting a strategy built to help distinguish, deliver, and defend superior value to customers.
Don’t let the sizzle of sexy new business terms distract you from the steak of sound strategy. Spend less time chasing GTM execs— and more crafting and executing a game plan that plays to your unique strengths while delivering outstanding customer value. This is a recipe for sustainable success. The rest is just noise. What do you think?