 |  |  |
Guest: Mary Naylor, a coach at CEO Coaching International. Mary is a repeat founder, CEO, and board member working in diverse sectors including customer loyalty, consumer services, concierge and lifestyle services, hospitality, travel, financial services, call center customer service, and technology platforms. She has 30 years of expertise in enterprise business development, go-to-market strategies, sales optimization, channel partnerships, team building, and fundraising.
Quick Background: What’s the BIGGEST mistake CEOs make about their go-to-market strategy?
Acting like it’s finished.
Consistently studying and refining your value proposition, customer profile, and messaging is the only way to keep your company competing, growing, and Making BIG Happen.
On today’s show, Mary Naylor walks us through the five steps she uses to ensure that a CEO’s go-to-market strategy stays relevant and dynamic in a constantly evolving marketplace.
Mary Naylor on Mastering Your Go-To-Market Strategy
1. Refine your products and services with clarity.
“Clarity in your product or service is crucial because it helps your customers instantly grasp your value proposition,” Mary says. “It’s not just about the initial launch. It’s about maintaining that clarity throughout the entire lifecycle of the product. As businesses grow, they often add new features or services, which can muddle that initial clarity. And this was certainly the case with my venture-backed company, VIPDesk. We initially launched with a single offering, a white-labeled concierge service. And over time, we added a digital platform, curated city destination guides and experiential offerings. So we had to expand our product definition from being a concierge service to a loyalty solutions provider, which, ultimately, by redefining our product definition, enabled us to sell more to our current clients and expand and attract new clients that were looking for a broader loyalty solution suite.”
Mary recommends that all CEOs revisit their product and service definitions every six months, or any time there’s a noticeable shift in market trends or customer feedback. Given how rapidly AI is advancing, your company is likely experiencing one of those “shifts” right now. Your tech stack, your data stream, and your team have to be ready to resolve any disconnect between what you’re offering and what your customers perceive whether that means creating more targeted marketing campaigns or providing more personalized solutions that customers don’t even realize they need yet.
“CEOs and their teams should regularly ask themselves, what specific problem does our product solve today?” Mary says. “A simple but effective exercise is to clearly articulate in a single sentence the problem their product solves for their customers. This also helps to reinforce clarity across the organization. A second thing to do is engage directly with your customers. You really need to establish a regular cadence of customer engagement, specifically around product definition. Conduct what I call a product use session to answer, how do customers describe the issues our product addresses? Understand their language and use that to reflect in your product description so you’re creating that resonating effect with your target customers and the market. What is the feedback our customer service and sales reps are hearing from prospects and customers? And finally, stay alert to your competitor’s product definition messaging and ensure that yours remains differentiated.”
2. Update your ideal customer profile (ICP).
When Peloton launched in 2012, they targeted hardcore fitness enthusiasts who wanted to bring their workouts out of the gym or off the bike trail and into their homes. Circa 2019, they expanded their customer profile to include a broader base of health-conscious consumers who wanted a convenient in-home fitness solution. And in 2020, when COVID-19 closed gyms and kept just about everyone at home, Peloton’s repositioning paid off in a BIG way.
“It’s important to turn to your customer data and analyze various customer data points from your current customers that reflect both qualitative and quantitative aspects of your ideal customers,” Mary says. “Who are our most profitable customers? Who are our best customers? What common characteristics do they have? I think something interesting to look at for your current customer is sales cycle duration, the length of time it takes to close a deal with different types of customers. How are they engaging with you and your brand? There’s a lot of data points that you can take from your current customers and use AI to segment those best customer types and analyze which one of those drive the most revenue for you. Then, once you have this ICP, and you’ve gone through this exercise to update your ideal customer profile, look at market trends. Are there new customer segments emerging that you could target that have similar characteristics to what you’ve done in your refinement process?”
You could argue that Peloton’s recent struggles are an example of a company using Mary’s process to enhance its ICP, and then forgetting what it learned. Once lockdowns ended, many of Peloton’s ideal customers went back outside. The company should have used its enormous market advantage — and earnings — to redefine its ICP for a post-pandemic marketplace where it would ease some users out while attracting the next wave.
3. Research your competition and market demand.
“The competitive landscape is never static,” Mary says. “New players enter the market, customer preferences shift, and technological advancements create new opportunities and threats. Regular research ensures that you’re not blindsided by new entrants or changes in customer preferences. This allows you to anticipate these shifts and adjust your strategy. At one of my previous companies, we developed what we called a master competitive analysis document. We identified direct and indirect competitors, and we tracked their products, their pricing, their unique value proposition, their marketing tactics, their clients, messaging, geography, white papers, press releases, etc. And now with AI, we can upload this competitive analysis document and provide detailed prompts for AI to update each of these competitive data points and even prompt it to provide suggestions on how we can directly address changes in competitor tactics and how we can be more responsive in our differentiation.”
Mary points to Airbnb as a company that followed its research to a successful pivot. When the company launched, it was competing directly with traditional hotel and motel chains. But as boutique hotels and other P2P hospitality platforms emerged, Airbnb recognized that it had to start competing on a complete travel experience. It created Airbnb Experiences to diversify its offerings beyond accommodations, and Airbnb Plus to attract luxury travelers to more upscale vacation homes.
“By constantly researching their competition and understanding the shifts in market demand, Airbnb was able to continuously refine their offerings and stay ahead of the curve,” Mary says.
4. Evolve your unique value proposition (UVP).
Mary says this is arguably the most important step in her process, and almost always the one that struggling companies fail at.
When the going is good, some companies get so comfortable with steady profits that they don’t start preparing for the next BIG thing. Worse still, many companies don’t have the right KPIs and dashboards in place that will alert them of a potential downward swing.
“Low engagement, declining conversion rates, and feedback that indicates your customers no longer see value are signs that it’s time to revisit the UVP,” Mary says. “What made your product unique at launch certainly might need to be refined as customer needs and competitive pressures shift. Regularly revisiting your UVP ensures you’re always highlighting the most relevant aspects of your product and that it remains fresh, compelling, and differentiates from your competition.”
For example, rewind to fifteen years ago and there were a dozen music streaming services fighting for ears and subscription fees. Spotify outlasted most of them because they pivoted to personalized playlists, expanded their music selection, and invested in podcasting. All CEOs need to do a similar analysis of what their company is offering now compared to what they could be, or should be, offering in the near future.
“At CEO Coaching International, we have a tool called the UVP Identifier,” Mary says, “and it helps our clients keep their UVPs crisp, concise, and compelling by helping them to develop a clear UVP statement. That comes down to explaining the benefits of your product, how it solves the customer’s problems, why it is different from the rest, and why customers should buy it. There’s a formula that’s pretty simple for UVP: ‘We help X do Y by doing Z.’ This type of formula helps you emphasize benefits over features, and that’s what’s really critical in making a compelling and differentiated UVP.”
5. Craft and refine your key messaging.
Wherever your customers engage with your company, your brand, or your products and services, they should feel like they’re having a consistent messaging experience that resonates with them.
However, that connection can be fickle. Trends change. Tastes evolve. Flashy new competitors emerge.
Nike recognized this reality. As more and more sportswear brands competed for fitness enthusiasts and professional athletes, Nike began speaking to its customers about empowerment, inclusivity, and inspiration. “Just do it” became about more than winning championships and gold medals –it became motivation for everyone to be healthier, have more fun, and work towards becoming their best self every day.
Ideally, while wearing Nike clothing and footwear.
“Your go-to-market strategy is an ongoing, dynamic process,” Mary says. “It’s not a one-time task or exercise. It’s revisiting, refining, and doing this regularly through all five steps. And you need to build in regular check ins, whether it’s quarterly or biannually, where you sit down with your team and you review all the data we’ve discussed through these five steps, gather the insights, and assess whether your current approach is still effective. Don’t be afraid to make bold changes if the market demands it. That’s what listening to the market and dynamic go-to-market strategy is all about. Anticipate where the market is going and position your company to lead, not follow. The most successful companies are those that are not just willing but eager to embrace a dynamic go-to-market approach, to evolve with their customers and the market to win, stay ahead, and be competitive.”
Top Takeaways From Mary Naylor
1. Clarity in your product definition is key to maintaining your long-term value proposition.
2. Leverage AI to enhance competitive research and keep you ahead of the curve.
3. Messaging needs to evolve along with your offerings, customers, and growth targets.
Links:
Here’s How to Master New Product Development and Build a Culture of Innovation – CEO Coaching International’s Greg Coticchia explains his process for mastering new product development and building a culture of innovation that will Make BIG Happen.
Listen Up: This 5-Step Process Will Deliver BIG Growth – CEO Coaching International’s John Giegerich shares five ways that businesses that have a solid foundation in place can take that next step and empower their sales force to deepen client relationships and generate BIG sales.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average revenue CAGR of 31% (2.6X the U.S. average) and an average EBITDA CAGR of 52.3% (more than 5X the U.S. average).
Learn more about executive coaching | Meet our world-class coaches
