This is the 72nd in a series of business tips from industry leaders that Enterprise Times has spoken to. Enterprise Times recently interviewed Leonardo Tomadon, Executive Director for go-to-market strategy at Pipefy. During the interview, he spoke about how Pipefy supports the doers in organisations with its low-code/no-code platform. It differentiates its solution based on time to value and its lower total cost of ownership. He also spoke about the convergence of BPA, RPA and Process Mining and how AI will fit in.
How to create an end-to-end go-to-market initiative
Tomadon has extensive experience in product marketing. I asked him to provide some advice for someone looking to deploy a product and create an end-to-end go-to-market initiative.
Tomadon replied, “Nothing beats being close to the customer and being customer-obsessed. One thing is for you to think or to project what the user thinks is good for him. The other is sitting down with him and discussing this. This is also a result of the strategy we’re doing here. Up to last year, we were trying to build functional vertical 25256solutions for HR for finance. Because we thought we had a great fit in there.
“We were verticalized in the product. Until we understood, hey, let’s sit down with them. Let’s understand these cases. Although a few people are using it, and extracting a lot of value. Let’s talk with non-customers, almost like going back to MVP. And really we understood that we’re not competitive in here.
“So we spent three months sitting down with CIOs. We even hired CIOs as advisors, sat down with Gartner, et cetera. We needed to understand how to go from there. Right now, we’re so obsessed with making this the fastest and the best value-for-money solution for IT. We now have a corporate goal where everybody in the company has to listen to “X” hours of customer conversations every month.
“Customer obsession is the keyword; don’t assume the customer wants something, go there and check it and orient your company, not only the ones doing the brain work, doing the strategy but the entire company, those executing it, those planning it on the more technical and operational level. Regardless, if you’re working in the back office, or they’re not a frontline rep, get close to the customer. This is the first and the last one, most important. If you want to get to product market fit, this is the most critical thing.”
Three actions to correct for the better
What should they not do in terms of creating marketing initiatives for a product?
“That’s a great question. The first one is, don’t communicate anything that is not tied to customer value. More and more, people are obsessed with outcomes. The SaaS industry has obsessed over features, but especially for selling in the B2B space or enterprise customers, you’ve got to tie it to value. Don’t communicate fluffy value propositions. You have to be clear. You have to be authentic. And this messaging has to be tested and tied to customer value.
“The second one is to break down your execution. For instance, integrated campaigns still use a waterfall mentality, but the market is changing really fast. So, your initial messaging in Q1 might need to change in Q2. If you have a tight plan, well thought out but created in a waterfall mindset, you cannot cope with that sunk cost, having already planned and created things. Break down that execution so you can iterate with the execution of the GTM. Planning. Use agile marketing, working in sprints; again, this is critical.
“The third and last one is the market. You don’t have a marketing problem, you don’t have a sales problem, you don’t have a customer success problem, you do have a go-to-market problem. So this is shared among all orgs. I’ve seen in the past that this is marketing’s responsibility; that is product’s responsibility. No! It’s the executive team’s responsibility to drive that plan forward. All executives should be vested in that plan. This is something that again, in the past, we weren’t executing like this. Now to make Pipefy succeed in this space and with the new strategies we’re deploying. It’s the entire C-suite that is responsible.”