Question

Lincoln Electric and Target are offered as examples of international expansion that went wrong. Both companies are managed primarily by Westerners.

Reflect upon the travails of Target and Lincoln Electric. What cultural clues did they miss?

Answer 1

A go-to-market strategy will typically include the following areas:

1. What market segments you want to pursue
2. What offerings (product and services) you want to sell
3. What channels or routes-to-market (RTM) you want to use

However, your answer to the question “What is your go-to-market strategy” may vary depending on your role:

• If you are a marketer, business leader, or strategist, you may focus more on the segments, offerings, and value proposition/differentiation against the competition.
• If you are a sales leader, you are probably more concerned about routes to market (indirect v. direct selling models) and how you structure and align your sales force against market priorities.

As you define each go-to-market area, you can to begin to answer the macro question around what offerings, to what market segments, through which channels.

The channels can include direct field sales, partners, eCommerce, contact centers, or a retail storefront, among other variants. Some sub-components of the GTM definition, which I’ll address in a follow-on blog post, may include marketing tactics, value propositions, and customer experience management.

Per the above GTM areas, there are many strategic decisions that need to be made to determine a go-to-market model, which should be re-visited on a semi-annual basis or more frequently, depending on how dynamic the market and industry are (e.g., the software industry is usually more dynamic than consumer packaged goods).

We often use 4 C’s to describe the sales-centric considerations for a go-to-market strategy:

• Customer – How do you segment customers based on size, potential, needs, capacity, location, etc? Which are your highest priority segments?
• Coverage – Based on what you learned in customer analyses, how should define your coverage model to best align with your highest value segments?
• Capacity – What is the workload required to sell and service customers and how do we size/resource our team (and selling roles within it) accordingly?
• Capability – What competencies do our people need in order to engage in the right conversations with different levels of customers, which for many companies span strategic/consultative selling to tactical selling?