Why Marketing GTM Fails

Marketing GTM failure vs Marketing GTM success

Marketing GTM failure:

• Marketing is seen as something that is an afterthought
• Weak interplay between marketing and sales
• Marketing (just) becomes an annual planning exercise with zero execution
• The company doesn't have a clearly defined role for it
• Equates "scale" with volume
• Obsessed with tactics
• Highly reactive to metrics
• Everybody's focus is on the sales process, not marketing

Marketing GTM success:

• Marketing strategy drives the HOLISTIC company GTM
• You articulate a clearly defined role, i.e. brand building, sales activation, sales enablement support
• Aligned closely with ruthless sales execution
• "Scale" is what each incremental dollar invested does in terms of growth
• Obsessed with strategy <> tactics
• Sales understands the "value of marketing."
• Pro-active with metrics, can articulate trends in the pipeline
• Strategy is implemented iteratively and reviewed weekly
• Focus on "one commercial" engine

Remember, your destination is an investor's enterprise value creation. Marketing plays a significant role in that outcome because it's in the long term.

And the success of a company is what you call a nested probability,  so you have market execution; in that, you have seven or eight critical variables. Marketing GTM is one of those variables, so ensure you get it right.