Having a hybrid go-to-market strategy that combines product-led growth with traditional sales is crucial.
Companies need to ensure there is consistency across pricing and packaging for their product offerings.
Mapping customer journeys is crucial for understanding both the positive and negative experiences that customers have.
Deep dives
Importance of a Hybrid Go-To-Market Strategy
Having a hybrid go-to-market strategy that combines product-led growth with traditional sales is crucial. It is a misconception that these two approaches are separate entities; they are interconnected and should be treated as such. Companies need to ensure there is consistency across pricing and packaging for their product offerings. Understanding how new products fit into the overall product lineup is vital. Weekly meetings with diverse team members from different departments are essential for discussing and aligning on key performance indicators (KPIs), tactics, and strategies. In addition, mapping out the ideal customer journey and seeking feedback from actual users is crucial to improving the customer experience and achieving success.
Common Tips for a Successful Hybrid Go-To-Market Strategy
Simplifying pricing pages, adding FAQs, and focusing on clear calls to action are essential elements of a successful go-to-market strategy. These provide a straightforward and intuitive experience for potential customers when exploring a company's offerings. Another tip is to closely analyze and optimize the customer journey, mapping out each step and identifying measurable KPIs for each phase. It is important to experiment and iterate on different approaches to drive customer activation and engagement. Finally, having a weekly meeting, involving relevant team members from various departments, to review KPIs, discuss tactical execution, and address challenges is crucial for effective coordination and alignment within the hybrid go-to-market strategy.
Common Mistakes in Go-To-Market Strategies
One of the most common mistakes in go-to-market strategies is the lack of clear calls to action for potential customers. Often, the expected actions do not align with the messaging or user experience on websites or in products. Another common issue is a lack of consistency in pricing, packaging, and product offerings, which can lead to confusion and hinder customer adoption. It is also essential for companies to regularly evaluate and optimize their customer journeys, ensuring that the reality matches the ideal experience. Additionally, companies should aim to align customer expectations with their messaging and deliver on promised outcomes. These are some of the common areas where companies can improve their go-to-market strategies.
Importance of Mapping Customer Journeys and Ideal Journey
Mapping customer journeys is crucial for understanding both the positive and negative experiences that customers have. It is important to create an ideal customer journey and bridge the gap between the current journey and the ideal one. By mapping the customer journey from the point of purchase backward and defining the ideal customer journey, companies can identify broken or disparate experiences that need improvement. This process often involves experimentation, testing, and analyzing data to ensure that the changes made align with customer needs and expectations.
Impact of Experiments on Customer Journey
Running multiple experiments across different parts of the funnel can significantly impact the customer journey. Increasing the number of experiments conducted can lead to disparate or broken journeys if not connected and aligned properly. For example, at DropBox, as the number of experiments increased, the customer journey became more disjointed. To address this issue, the focus shifted to building and aligning experiences based on an understanding of the customer journey. Through experiments and testing, improvements were made to simplify messaging, design, and pricing, resulting in better customer experiences and increased monetization.
Today’s episode is with Giancarlo 'GC' Lionetti, the former CMO of Confluent and VP of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox. (GC also previously spent 6 years at Atlassian, as a sales engineer and product marketing manager for developer tools.)
He describes his career as more of a maze than a ladder, and this functional diversity combined with his deep experience at standout B2B companies gives him a unique perspective. In today’s conversation, we dig deep into why he advocates for a hybrid go-to-market strategy that brings together more traditional selling with modern product-led growth.
We start by mining lessons from GC’s time at Atlassian and Dropbox, including his takes on the differences between their business models and what it takes to make a multi-product go-to-market motion work.
Then we dive right into his advice for a hybrid approach, covering everything from his litmus tests for picking the right metrics, to the structure of his weekly meetings. GC explains how he sinks tons of time into understanding the customer journey, mapping out the delta between reality and the ideal vision.
He also shares plenty of pro-tips about pricing, packaging, and activation, as well as a broader diagnostic framework that he’s developed to evaluate a company’s go-to-market strategy. We wrap up by focusing on team building for a hybrid go-to-market strategy — from hiring profiles to team structure.
It’s a great listen for founders, product and go-to-market leaders, with tons of examples of specific impactful experiments he ran, metrics that did or didn’t work out, and common traps that he sees teams falling into.
