Folks… here’s an excerpt of Chapter 1 of my eBook, Storming the Castle: Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy That Enthralls, Intoxicates and Drives Growth.
Many organizations think of markets as castles — surrounded by difficult to cross moats, filled with hostiles, their customers and prospects and all resulting in a lot of casualties when these organizations try to storm that market castle!
STOP!
There are better ways to infiltrate and ultimately capture a market castle than to take it by force. After all, with force there are always casualties — revenues, market share, brand perception, customer experience. Have you ever tried negotiating the gates of the castle down? Bring valuable wares to the market gates, get the current castle occupants to lower it allow you to pass freely inside. to do this you must negotiate a long standing treaty, develop allies and partnerships within the castle, s
ell the finest wares in the castle’s market place and eventually be voted king of the realm by making yourself indispensable to that castle and all it surveys.
Am I stretching the metaphor? I think not young squire.
To succeed in capturing a castle these days, doesn’t take warfare, it takes the ability to convert those living in that castle to become citizens of your brand. Its about turning them into rabid evangelists for your products and services with a compelling Go-to-market strategy that puts them in control NOT you.
Wow. That’s a different concept. Shall we explore it a bit? Yeah, lets do that.
Creating Brand Citizens begins NOT at the time you actually put a product in-market but well before then. At the time you are CONSIDERING putting a given product in market is the time to be actively engaging with your customers. The flowchart for creating Brand Citizens of the Realm isn’t a flow chart at all, but a recurring cycle of interactions.
Notice that every single step in crafting a GTM strategy requires significant interaction with customers. Does your organization do that? Do they put the customer at the center of everything it does?
All activities? All strategies? All execution plans? If so then bravo for you and your organization. You can stop reading. If not, then read-on. In the following posts and eBook compilation we will discuss the steps necessary to craft an engaging end-to-end Go-To-Market strategy that will enable you to create and manage a market category — your own castle and all it surveys, while moving beyond the incrementalist approaches that most organizations suffer from today.
(Cross-posted @ AbleBrains)
