I run the company
The story you tell investors is only as true as the one your reps tell buyers.
- You own
- Valuation.
- It rides on
- Growth the board can trust.
HOLD
Yuval Roos, CEO, Digital Asset. Russell clears him for the website. His words are not carried in the content file until he does.
Fran Orlando, Head of Marketing, Energage
“At the end of the day, you're not the one speaking to your prospects and customers - your go-to-market teams are. And so your strategy is only as good as your go-to-market team's ability to express it.”
What you are actually measured on
Not the metrics on the operating review. The three questions you will be asked the week the number moves the wrong way.
- The distance between the plan you approved and the revenue the market returned, and whether anyone in the building can tell you which of the two was wrong.
- Whether your leadership team is running one account of the strategy, or five that have never been laid beside each other.
- What the number does if two people leave.
Where it usually breaks
Three things go wrong in a scaling go to market. They happen in this order, and the fix for one is useless against the other two.
You are being asked to fund five theories at once
Every function arrives with evidence and every piece of evidence supports that function's own view of why growth stalled. Sales says the leads. Marketing says the follow up. Product says the roadmap. None of them is lying and none of them has the whole picture, so the decision that reaches you is a negotiation rather than a finding.
The number that settles it is your win rate in targeted segments against your win rate everywhere else.
If nobody can produce that split, the argument in your staff meeting is not about execution. It is about direction, and you are funding all five theories until it is resolved.
You approved a strategy you have never heard said out loud
The strategy exists. The positioning deck exists. What you have never done is sit in a first meeting and listen to whether the thing you approved is what your buyer actually hears. Most CEOs have not, and the ones who do it once rarely need to be sold anything after that.
The number here is the share of your deals where a buyer confirmed, in their own words, that they needed the capability you are differentiated on.
When that number is unknown, your differentiation is real and it is not reaching the moment the decision gets made.
The plan depends on people rather than on a system
Growth is being carried by a few people whose method nobody has written down. That is survivable while they stay. It is a forecast problem the quarter one of them leaves, and it is a valuation problem the day someone runs diligence on you.
The number is the spread between your top quartile and your median.
A wide, stable spread is not a talent success story. It is heroics, and heroics do not scale into a second region, a second product or a second sales leader.
Where people in your seat start
“There are sixty things on the go-to-market priority list and all of them are important.”
GTM Diagnosis and Focus →
Structured interviews across leadership and every go-to-market function, reduced to the few initiatives that move the needle. A day, a week or a month.
“Our investor model and our territory map describe two different companies.”
TAM and ICP →
One market model your finance team and your field both work from, a written call on the segments you are leaving, and an ideal customer profile tight enough to disqualify a live deal with.
“Every seller and CSM tells a slightly different version, so buyers hear whichever one they got.”
Conversational Messaging →
A guide your field can actually run, built with your leadership team in your buyer's terminology rather than mine.
What becomes true
Your leadership team argues from one set of findings instead of five, and the next meeting starts where the last one ended rather than from whose data wins.
You can hear the strategy you approved in a recording of a first meeting, in your buyer's terminology, from a rep who has been in the seat four months.
The number stops being an act of faith in three people. You can name what the rest of the team does differently, and so can their managers.
The numbers
- 25 → 1
- 25 stakeholder interviews, 62 recommendations reduced to six initiatives and one needle moving project to spearhead growth
- 36
- companies whose go-to-market transformation workshops I facilitated
One engagement, from your seat
enVista had growth ambitions, a generic offering in a diluted market, and no leadership agreement on where to concentrate. The market model that went to investors bore no relationship to how sales territories were drawn, which meant the company was telling two different stories about itself to two different audiences and both of them believed it.
25 stakeholder interviews, a six part go to market audit, and a keep, start and stop synthesis. 62 raw recommendations distilled to six prioritized initiatives. Explicit agreement on which retail segments to attack and which to leave alone. The segmentation was built with the leadership team and then carried into the CFO's investor materials and into territory design, so strategic focus and field execution became one document instead of two.
What you are probably asking
We ran an offsite and came out aligned. Why would this find anything different?
An offsite produces agreement in the room. What I test is whether that agreement survives contact with the market, which is a different question and is usually answered in a recording rather than in a workshop. If your leadership team already agrees and your field is already saying it, the diagnosis will be short and I will tell you so in the first conversation rather than the third.
How much of my leadership team's time does this take?
Structured interviews across leadership and every go to market function, and your executives in the room for the readout. That is the cost, and it is the reason the work holds: the story gets built with your leadership team, not handed to them. What an outsider can facilitate is the transformation. What only your own people can do is enforce it.
Is this strategy work or sales training?
Both, in the same engagement, by the same person, which is the point. What gets recommended at the top is tested against what happens in a live deal, and what a seller says in a first meeting is traced back to a decision your leadership team made. There is no translation loss between the two and no second discovery process, because it is one engagement rather than a strategy firm, a training vendor and an enablement contractor.
Everything above belongs to Align, which is your organization arriving at one account of the strategy and of the message. It is your goal. My expertise is in the helping.
You can describe your growth strategy in about two minutes. Almost no CEO can tell me what their sellers actually say in the first ten minutes of a first meeting.
I am curious how close those two things are where you are. It takes three calls to find out.
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