GTM Advice with Maureen West

In this GTM Advice episode, Maureen West, VP of Marketing at Brillion, answers a fast round of questions and shares her go-to-market advice with you. 

Check out how Maureen answered the following questions:

1. What is the biggest go-to-market challenge that exists today? How would you tackle this challenge?
2. Where would you focus your efforts if you had limited resources and had to drive immediate results?
3. How do you ensure there is alignment across all go-to-market functional teams? (i.e. sales, marketing, product, and customer success)
4. What’s the one “dirty little secret” in go-to-market that nobody talks about, but everyone needs to know? 
5. What do you think is the biggest misconception about having a career in go-to-market? 
6. What is one skill that all GTM professionals need to have mastered to be successful? 
7. What is one thing you wish you knew sooner? 
8. What is one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to grow their career in go-to-market?

Transcript

Stephanie Cox: Welcome to our GTM Advice episode where each guest answers a fast round of questions and shares their go-to-market advice with you. Let's hear from Maureen. 

Stephanie Cox: What is your biggest go-to-market challenge that exists today, and how would you tackle it?

Maureen West: I think the biggest challenge is getting recognized in the market. And one of the ways that I would do that is to prepare your market to be ready for your launch. I think a lot of organizations don't take the time to prepare the market. And what I mean by that is dropping hints.

Not hints about what's coming in your launch, but educating the market on something new. How do you do that? Content, email, webinars, that is preparing the market and you can use all of those tactics that ahead of time as you can, you know, during your launch execution mode.

Stephanie Cox: Where would you focus your efforts if you had limited resources and had to drive immediate results?

Maureen West: I would focus on ensuring that the salespeople understand exactly what it is that we're selling and why we're doing it. Whatever the objective is, your sellers are the first line of defense that you have in your launch. And if they don't like what you're doing, you're not going to be successful.

Stephanie Cox: How do you ensure there is alignment across all go-to-market functional areas (i.e. sales, marketing, product, and CX)?

Maureen West: I like to use a launch team. And the members of the launch team are the highest person in an organization who can make decisions about their functional area, but not so high in the organization that they will suck all the air out of the room and people are gonna defer to them. So it's usually the directors who are in the trenches of the launch team, helping build the plan, helping ensure that the message is right, and helping ensure that sellers are going to know how to function in this launch.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one dirty little secret in go-to-market that nobody talks about, but everyone needs to know?

Maureen West: Your go-to-market checklist is bullshit.

And I say, should I say why? I say that because it doesn't matter as much as your strategy. Your checklist is a good thing to make sure everything is going off on lunch day, but you need to have a strategy and a reason.

Stephanie Cox: What do you think is the biggest misconception about having a career in go-to-market?

Maureen West: That all you're doing is building decks and telling people about new products. Nope, you are solving business problems.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one skill that go-to-market professionals need to have mastered to be successful?

Maureen West: You need to master your curiosity. And I say that because you need to be genuinely interested in what's happening in the business with your buyers, with your users, and then you need to be able to harness that curiosity in a way that is going to ask questions that bring better answers.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one thing you wish you knew sooner?

Maureen West: One thing, let's see, this is a good one. I wish I knew that the disparate skill set that I have is actually valuable to a business. And I don't think I really realized that probably until about seven years ago.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one piece of advice you would give someone looking to grow their career in go-to-market?

Maureen West: Don't go to school to be a product marketer. Seriously, I think the best people who are product marketers like to consume a lot of information and can make sense of that information. know, harnessing your curiosity, reading things that are not business books, reading history, reading about the field that you're selling into, just reading. Read everything, not business books.