I’m working with an exciting professional services company that has earned an amazing reputation and a degree of success.
The CEO – one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet – wants to change that. There is no point having a brilliant brand if it’s not translating into the revenue they deserve. So we’re helping them to gain the momentum their service deserves.
In our preliminary discussions, it occurred to me that they had a willing market, a worthy offering, and that this wasn’t translating into the revenue they deserve because there was a focus on the strategy and a few tactics, and not on gaining momentum.
I’d argue that momentum, or velocity, is at the heart of a good go-to-market plan. The very basic steps are:
- Identify your objectives.
- Set your strategy (what, to whom, through whom, against whom).
- Determine the momentum your tactics must deliver for you to meet your objectives.
- Select tactics able to generate that momentum
Here’s an extract from my coaching notes to the CEO:
“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of getting this sense of momentum. We need to get from a business generating one new $20k engagement and two repeat engagements of $40k every month, to one generating three and four respectively, by 2015. To get to that, we need to increase proposals from three new ones a month to ten, which will require a lift in first meeting rate from three to 30 every month.”
That little statement will guide every decision we make about tactics, and to some extent strategy also including which markets we target, what size of deal we chase, therefore what services we offer and how we bundle them.
Ultimately, we’ll need to review the funnel math to build this velocity model. that will entail working out Lag – how long it takes to move buyers from one stage in their journey to the next, and Leakage – what our failure rate will be between stages.
But it all starts at the bottom: how many deals of what size do we need to meet our objectives? Everything else is academic.
