Go-To-Market Toolkit

About the Guest

Philip Moyer is the Vice President of Strategic Industries, Google Cloud. Philip and his team manage the relationships with Google’s largest enterprise customers as they leverage Google Cloud to innovate within their industries (Retail, Healthcare, Telecomm, Media, Entertainment, Gaming, Manufacturing).

Connect with Philip Moyer

Key Takeaways

• Some challenges transcend and are common across all industries, but Philip focuses on differentiators as well as specific customer needs.

• There are three primary things to consider when verticalizing your sales organization:

• Market dynamics

• • • Technology
    • ISVs and Partners
  • Philip shares a five-pronged strategy for breaking down an industry go-to-market focus:

• Selecting the customer

• Building the team
• • Your vision
  • Technical/Security landscape
  • Repeatability
• Four major roles within the overall organizational structure:
  • Sales
  • Technical (identifying/interfacing)
  • Solutions (combination of sales/technical with a roadmap for repeatability)
  • Partnering
• Listening to customers is an invaluable starting point for capturing information that will shape your product, its repeatability, and scalability.
• Philip’s must-haves for effective marketing:
  • Learn the industry’s ethos and specific customer goals, then deploy messaging that is tailored to each particular language.
  • Highlight successes and secure referrals to establish credibility.
• Industries that are heavily regulated will work (and be patient) with tech companies that demonstrably grasp and can solve systemic problems.
• It all starts with getting a meeting; that all-important foot in the door.
  • Trade shows and conferences are great networking opportunities.
  • Covid19 has made connections harder to cultivate.
  • Become a speaker, ideally with a customer presenting a case study.
  • Don’t skip calls for speakers!
• Whatever you’re selling, understand what people are actually buying. Look at the whole marketplace and be honest about what’s being spent by the industry.
• Phil’s Top 3 Lessons Learned:
  • When it comes to verticalization, have patience. People say “Fail fast,” but I say “Fail small” because then you’ve had lots of experiments. Be prepared for a three-year journey.
  • Take risks on senior industry talent. Bring in a few people that set the pace, set the tone, know the language, and what great looks like. Don’t replace your entire field or have a set of elite outsiders, but do invest in people who have been there. It will save you months of work.
  • Be brutally honest as to whether you’re differentiating yourself. Speak directly and specifically about what your value-add is to the industry.
• Would-be super-execs are well-served by tethering closely to customer value. Assessing the quality of your sales team, pricing, whether you should be in a particular market – these are all decisions best made through the customer’s prism.

Quotes

“I encourage sellers not to talk in generic language … Speak in the customer’s language.”

“When I’m going in to meet a customer I try to have two or three ideas that I can give them … Your job is to go in with ways for them to improve their business.”

Highlights From the Episode

To Consider When Thinking About Go-to-Market Strategy.

All industries are based in some form of disruption, have legacy systems, have too much-disconnected data, and not enough insights. Everyone is competing for talent. What you need to think about is what makes an industry different. How can you focus on compelling specificity?

Defining Market Dynamics

What are the factors affecting your market? Where are the influences, business requirements, constraints, and opportunities? What are the metrics by which they’re valued?

Regarding Technology

Every industry has its own unique systems and data sets for its markets. Regulatory structures vary according to industry and are often layered with complexity. What are the systems of record? The impact of not staying on top of compliance issues can be devastating.

ISVs and Partners

Systems Applications and Products in (SAPs) are critical across sectors. There are variables that affect which specific vendors and partner organizations are most important to work with in order to be successful.

Thoughts Specific to Regulated Industries

After you’ve run the gauntlet of the security architecture team and regulatory team and the purchasing and infrastructure teams, suddenly you become the easy button for everyone else inside the organization.

All About Picking Your Customers

Be wary about whipsawing back and forth in your verticalization journey. Don’t verticalize everything. Instead, pick just the top 10 in each critical area where you have messages. Define the sectors you’re targeting. Cluster where possible to enable traction for sales teams trying to make their quotas. Consider putting a handful of disruptive or startup organizations into the mix.

Effective Teams are Built on Balance

Bring together talent from both within and outside your organization. Look for new, outside salespeople with strong contacts and mix them in with more seasoned in-house team members. You want people who understand selling to the industry as well as the specifics of selling your product. Share the vision and invest in your talent so they too can evangelize.

There’s Magic in Great Solutions-Sales Pairings

A great solutions person picks out the overall market and is able to prioritize and then look for patterns ( why we’re winning, why we’re not) and capitalize quickly to accelerate more wins. And sellers should be talking to customers and discovering new patterns in their language. The two go hand-in-hand.

Scaling at the Mid-Phase and Beyond

Managing critical partners is crucial. Understand trusted advisors and how to fit in with them and integrate your product into their solutions with ease. Ensure that you’ve got the talent to implement smoothly. It’s important that your team demonstrates competence and the ability to execute through the project lifecycle.

Recommended Reading/Resources

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White

Masters of Scale Podcast with Reid Hoffman