GTM Strategy for the £10 Million Boutique Consultancy with Danny Philamond

Danny Philamond is Partner at Magnus Consulting, a B Corp certified growth consultancy recognised by the Financial Times as one of the UK's leading management consultancies. Danny is also a Forbes Council Member and specialist in go-to-market strategy and complex enterprise account growth.

In this conversation, Craig and Danny explore why increasing activity is almost never the right response when growth stalls, the uncomfortable finding that only 9% of commercial leaders are confident in hitting their targets, why go-to-market strategy has to be treated as a living operating system rather than a document on a shelf, and how decision discipline, once it loosens, is one of the hardest things to rebuild.

This is a practical, data-informed conversation with a growth consultant who has worked across PE-backed firms and large enterprises, and has a very clear view of where the real leverage is when commercial growth starts to stall.

Host: Craig Herd, MD at Consultancy Growth
Guest: Danny Philamond, Partner at Magnus Consulting

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, and welcome to the Consultancy Growth Podcast. I'm Craig Hurd, and in this episode, I'm joined by Danny Philemon, partner at Magnus Consulting. B Corp certified growth consultancy, recognized by Financial Times as one of the UK's leading management consultancies. Danny is also a Forbes Council member and specialist in GTM strategy and complex enterprise account growth. We discuss his GTM confidence index and what it can uncover about the gap between growth ambitions and execution confidence. And we discuss what consultancy leaders should focus on first when building out their go-to-market strategy. If you get value from this episode, I would encourage you to subscribe. You get brand new episodes before anyone else. But without further ado, here's Danny Philemon. Let's get into it. So you work with enterprise B2B businesses where growth is stalled or targets have been missed. When you get into those businesses, what is the gap between what the leadership team think is the problem and what you observe or see as the actual problem?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Yeah, so we don't just work with stalled businesses here. So there can be kind of high growth, P-backed. There's that strong appetite for growth. But regardless, I guess the first step is usually a diagnostic. So whether that is the kind of sprint diagnostic that we go in and do over two weeks, or just getting under the skin of kind of speaking to the senior team across the business, really it's the current kind of trends or themes, I guess, in what we see in the business is either the fundamentals. So things like the ideal customer profile, it could be the strategy itself, it could be looking at the market opportunity and where that sits, where's that coming from, where has that changing over time, could be in place, or they aren't in place, and that's kind of the key gap. If they are in place, they may have drifted over time. So things have changed, the market's moved, customers have moved, the business itself is has shifted. And those fundamentals haven't ultimately kept pace with that. So there could be a gap there. There could be also a gap between what the leadership may be seeing is true, and then what almost the layer below. So the teams that are activating, that are doing, that are going into market, kind of working on the strategic account growth or sector growth or whatever it may be, then actually there's a gap there in actually what the leadership believes is in place and actually what the team are needing to work from. So it could be a gap in terms of things missing. There could be a capability gap or a capacity gap, really. I've said gaps quite a lot. But yeah, typically there is that missing piece somewhere in the business.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

What is typically required to help bridge the gap between what leadership sees and what you see or what seems evident? Is it a negotiation with leadership on like I understand why you see what you see, but actually here's what we see, or do you find typically that leadership is really pretty open to being told this is what needs to be fixed first?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

I think it depends on their openness going into the process or the approach or how we're working together. There's always going to be those examples where especially PE may have brought us in and there is a hesitancy or a nervousness or a defensiveness that may come through initially, and you have to work harder to build that confidence in us as partners, but also in what we're there to achieve, on whose side we're on, and kind of that we're there to help the business grow ultimately is the goal. I would say though, that how that gap is almost fixed or resolved or worked on is gaining better clarity. So clarity on is fundamental. So why are we prioritizing growth in X place and where is that going to come from? And naturally from that comes the confidence then of almost why are we committing to certain things as a business? What we are seeing is that commitment and the clarity on those commitments being right or as right as they can be is where leadership teams are asking for advice and support at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

That makes sense. And you've written before about really when the pipeline does slow. So obviously you get those that are fast growing and they want to grow faster and more systemized in their method. And then you get those that have stalled or can see a stalling coming over the horizon. The instinct when things stall is often to just increase activity. So more leads, more marketing effort, more campaigns, more sales pressure. I mean, what is your experience of that? Is that instinct a good first step? Or in fact, is that normally a misplaced action?

SPEAKER_00 4:07

And it's natural, right? So that instinct to do more of everything and try and pull as many levers as you can is really to try and say that we're doing everything that we can. So it's that kind of natural, reassuring reaction. I'd say that businesses are structurally forced to do that. So you're measured in months, enterprise deals take years. So you could be working on a pursuit that is an 18-month, kind of 24-month process, and then contracting after that could take another 12 months. So committing that period of time to something is high commitment. Again, if you're not clear on what's your likelihood of converting that and winning that and what's that going to mean for the business. So a few of our clients, for example, may have a win rate of 33% overall on some of those huge kind of enterprise deals, which is low because there's a high chance that all of that investment is going to be for nothing, especially if you have bid on a certain business before. And so that kind of institutional knowledge of where it hasn't worked and kind of what you've then invested is often quite fresh, even if it was six, seven years before. So there's a hesitancy there, even though you know there's things you can do in the short term. The reality is that doesn't match up with actually what the business needs, which is typically the opposite, which is holding firm, trusting what you've decided. So the markets, the sectors, the segments that you've prioritised for a particular reason, trusting your ICP, kind of the ideal customers, and why they could fit, why can you add the greatest value there rather than letting that kind of stretch and expand just because there is that need and desperation to show value and to show impact within the business in a quicker timeline?

SPEAKER_01 5:34

It's interesting actually. I was with a consultant CGC yesterday and they had a 25% win rate on inquiries. And actually, when we looked under the bonnet of it, what was evident is you know that number could be improved, but not necessarily by winning more of those clients, but instead by being more disciplined about the opportunities that they pursued. You know, when you looked at the ones that they lost, you go, well, there probably wasn't one for them, right? Do you see that a lot? Do you see actually when you call it a fundamental and it is, but actually, is it a fundamental that people often miss of just that ICP clarification and discipline?

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Yeah, definitely. And if it is there, then it often falls down where you get into an opportunity creeping in or being shown, and that's where kind of the logo or the size paralysis comes in. And actually, it's very easy to get distracted by that and to get pulled into just kind of what may be the biggest over actually what is the best fit. And being able to stay really strict on that is really difficult, especially if you're getting pressure from more senior team members to kind of pursue that, where actually the data is showing that that isn't going to work and it hasn't worked historically. So being able to have that decision, um, stick to it and kind of be able to defend it is really tricky and really difficult, especially where you've got commercial teams that are incentivized to pursue. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

And you mentioned it there, but you've got a 10-day commercial growth diagnostic. Can you walk me through what day one looks like and what day 10 ultimately looks like at the end of that? What is the focus of that 10 day experience?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Yeah, so the 10 days is intentional. We we have done kind of large cross-functional, so going into marketing sales, the whole commercial really. So customer successes in their rev-ups that are very in-depth, take a lot longer. But the 10 days is intended to get to value very quickly, to get to those quick wins, to be able to prioritize the actions and the impact that is gonna be felt first by the business and is gonna have that kind of biggest impact for the business too. Day one is really getting into those one-on-one conversations. So all anonymized, all kind of really digging into all areas of the business. So whether it was a marketing diagnostic or going more commercial across the entire function, you end up having to speak to all parts of the business anyway. So product, generally the full C-suite, sales, et cetera, to really understand how those functions are interacting, where are the handoffs, where are the breaks happening, where are the strengths that exist? And what we're trying to get to after the 10 days is clarity on the things that are holding the business back and the opportunities that are being left on the table is very rarely one thing or another. So there's never a binary, it's X, Y, or Z. It's always going to be the combination. And what's really key is what comes next. So what to prioritize and why. And actually, then how confident are the team to be able to add all of those new areas to what they already have on their plate in terms of BAU? So what drops off because it is lower value, what comes in because we know that in the short and long term it's gonna have a higher impact. So stakeholder analysis, a lot of insight into what they have documented, what's been codified, what's understood, what are those kind of key documents or strategic inputs that people always go to? What are the ones that no one uses, for example? So quickly getting into all of that and just listening out for where do the patterns that exist within the business, so where is their consistency, where is there that divergence? Is that by different functions, by different levels? Because that starts to almost define where we kind of probe and push for next.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

It's interesting what you say there about actually through that diagnostic process, you identify a list of things that could be fixed, could be improved, actually a list of things that are great and have been codified and adopted. For those things that could be improved, how often do you see it that consultancies or businesses successfully identify the things that could be improved, but in fact are just working on the wrong thing?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Often the team understands where the challenges are. We're working very capable individuals, right? So they understand where the issues are, typically are feeling the symptoms, and more it's that actually the things around them have shifted. So, like I said earlier, it could be the market, the foundations haven't kept up, execution has had to keep going because of the kind of structural need. But things like the proposition, the positioning, the solution mapping, for example, just has been treated more as a kind of set it and forget it rather than something that is staying live and is adapting as the business needs to. So typically the teams do know where the focus needs to be, but there's many reasons why they haven't been able to get to that. And it could be capability, of course, but often it is capacity of actually the senior team are able to identify, but the people around them just have too many other priorities to be able to push something out and be able to justify why, because that's often the hardest thing. Kind of why are we not doing this X thing over here to prioritize why, which is essentially something that is newer?

SPEAKER_01 10:09

I'd love to speak to you a little bit about alignment, especially between say marketing and sales. I mean, most consultancy leaders will have sat in a room where sales and marketing are nominally aligned, functionally operating as separate units entirely. What does misalignment cost a business in terms of revenue in your mind? And how do you make that visible to the leadership and how do you move towards alignment of those two functions?

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Yeah, I mean, we have lots of data around this. It's never going to be a topic that isn't discussed and doesn't come up. What I found that is landing better and is more useful is to show the business the impact and the positive uplift of doing things differently. So rather than to say misalignment is costing X or teams being in silo is gonna cost X or leave X opportunity on the table. It's more around identifying those individuals who do believe there's a better way. And those could be people that have been there for 10 years and are kind of institutionalized and actually just still have the right mindset and openness to change, are willing to try doing things differently, especially with an external, if they're working with us, kind of have the openness to be able to run a proof of concept, proof of value, a sprint, whatever it may be, to show the upside and to do it on a small scale so that you're not having to prove value in a kind of conceptual way. You're actually showing what that looks like as an impact and what that is then felt within the business to be able to then justify scaling that out more widespread. It's worked very well within a logistics client, for example. So they bid three or four times in a major well-known UK department store. So there's start to be this mindset of they're just kind of being bought in for procurement, kind of a pricing exercise. When that came up again, the business was tempted to not proceed and to not go forward with that kind of RFI. However, because we were engaged in this proof of concept, there was a kind of enterprise sales process. We knew that this time was differently. So the signals from that account were things had shifted. They were at risk of having one consolidated logistics partner because of MA. So they were going to market to look to de-risk that as a potential area of their business. There was a new head of risk within the business, for example. So a lot of things were lining up as to why this was different. That was a different way of working for the client. It was a very lucky timeline because they have actually converted that as a new opportunity. So it's a huge enterprise deal for them. The right time, the right place, but also the right group of people doing things differently and challenging the business on how they were approaching it. So typically works better than kind of focusing on the negative.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

How did you learn that? Is that just through conversations with clients? Was that a an initial effort to say it in the negative, talk about the cost, and then actually the response wasn't as great as expected, and thought, you know, we need to articulate this slightly differently?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

I think it's just hard, isn't it, to imagine the intangible? Like telling someone that opportunity exists, but you're not capturing it isn't the same as working on an opportunity live, whether that was a sector or a segment or a set of strategic accounts and actually showing what doing things differently could achieve, landing one of those must-win accounts that then becomes a story internally that everyone is discussing. There's energy, there's excitement there. That is an easier sell-in to the board than talking about things that could or should be happening.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

What a great little tactical switch in order to better land some of the ideas that you know those listening are trying to get buy-in from. You've described GoToMarket not as a campaign or a one-time strategy, but as a living operating system that needs to be continuously adapted. You know, your GTM confidence index really showed growth ambition rising while confidence in execution was not keeping pace. What's the most uncomfortable finding that came out of those conversations?

SPEAKER_00 13:37

The top line finding was only 9% of commercial leaders were confident in hitting their targets, which is an uncomfortable one, not necessarily surprising. And the main reason there was misaligned budget where investment wasn't keeping pace with the growth ambitions. So a big chunk of that data was all P back businesses. So had high growth targets and expectations as well. With that, I would say that the geographic differences were interesting. So much higher confidence coming out of the US generally as a region. But really, the key finding was that the pace of change in the market in terms of customer behavior is moving so fast, especially the large kind of enterprise organizations that were in there as well. The ability to keep pace with that was what was driving a lot of that kind of lack of confidence from the leaders that came back. And typically, there, to your point around why it needs to be a living operating system, is that to keep up with those shifts, to be able to know when's the right time to engage a particular segment or sector or group of accounts or an individual account, you need to stay on top of those kind of signals and not treat them passively, often within the business, but it could be in a CRM or in a one-to-one conversation or in one silo teams, but you have another team that's actually actively pursuing something. So it's not filtering through to the strategy, but then also the activation of that at the right moment. And doing that all in the right time is obviously a very tricky thing to get right. So that's why it can't be static, but it needs to be that living system, giving teams the right insight to act on and how to act. So it's actually giving them the so-what as well. That makes a ton of sense.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

And your GTM round table surfaced strategy fatigue, you know, misaligned platforms, constant pivot and shifting of ICPs, you know, those are symptoms. But what is the diagnosis underneath all of them?

SPEAKER_00 15:17

I mean, AI came up a lot, but really the symptoms were of one thing that things have shifted, and fundamentally the business hasn't been able to keep up with that. So there were a lot of transformation programs within the individuals in the room that they're undergoing to try and rectify that and get ahead of it. As well, it's worth saying that it wasn't a capability challenge. So it isn't that the people there aren't aware of where the gaps are. They're very aware of that and they understand what needs to change. It's more so getting the business behind that, getting the buy-in, getting the investment that's needed as well to move as quickly as they've needed to. When then AI came in, it was things around governance of that that were a real challenge. So moving from how do we have sprints and kind of sandboxes, proof of concepts to actually how are we embedding this more within everything and kind of having the governance around that. So a real shift in actually how people are applying these things and just what the expectations are around that as well.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Yes. It seems to be a shift within consultancy around governance. You know, as a firm, what are we going to do? What are our rules and regulations going to be with our internal team so that they're not sharing client data with ChatGPT? So it does seem to be a bit of a growing up within consultancy as when it regards to AI. Is that something you're seeing a lot of across the board?

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Yeah, definitely. And we work on the larger enterprise end and you kind of get two camps there, one that are actively engaging in kind of building their own, and others that are very strict in terms of what can and can't be used. So often the kind of co-pilot approach of that's the only investment we're going to make, and everything else is closed off. And then you end up with the risks that actually people are just doing it themselves. So for us to be able to solve particular challenges, so it's creating that space for large enterprises where that innovation can't happen internally because it is more of a closed ecosystem that operating within. We don't have that challenge on our side. And so it creates an opportunity as well.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

And you wrote in Forbes that, you know, as pressure builds, qualification loosens, new priorities get layered in before old ones are embedded and ownership blurs. You know, for consultancy leaders trying to grow the firm right now, what is the thing they're most likely doing that is making things worse?

SPEAKER_00 17:20

It's a risky question, isn't it? Because I wouldn't want to assume. But yeah, I mean, the core thought of the article was decision discipline and needing to stick to that over time and not kind of letting it become loose in terms of actually the things that you've defined. So who are your ideal customers? What is your ICP? What's your qualification criteria? Where are you focusing in terms of sectors and segments? How have you mapped that market opportunity in terms of how that's going to change and where you're prioritizing? Those things were in place for a reason, and over time they can quietly shift or get ignored, or you just drift from it because there's revenue everywhere. And actually, the discipline is knowing why you've prioritized certain areas and why you've deprioritized others and sticking to that and being very firm with it because look, I get it for our own business as well. But it doesn't help to keep expanding that and to kind of drift away from it. And that's where the lack of clarity and the kind of chaos can come in. So it's making sure that the right people know the reasoning behind those decisions so that when an opportunity does come up, the answer isn't why aren't we going for that? But almost we've made a strategic call based on X and we understand the data and the logic behind that as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

That makes a ton of sense. So a common thing that happens in professional services is that actually firms tend to compete when it comes to their messaging on things like their credentials, their delivery quality, their sector experience, the years and industry. But actually, I would have thought that you'd see that slightly differently. That's not the way to compete. In fact, there's a real risk of sounding just like everybody else when you take that approach. But I was wondering your what your thoughts were on that. And what is the upside on a different type of messaging? What is the downside of choosing to really position your firm like that and ultimately sounding like everyone else?

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Yeah, and this isn't just professional services, most businesses across every sector that we work in. And so we do a lot of competitor landscape analysis around messaging in all of our client sectors and all of the sectors that they're going after. And it generally is very functional in terms of where people are focusing. So we often talk about the benefit ladder. Anyone that's worked with me will have seen it. At the bottom is very functional, features, kind of product areas, things like cost, time, for example. At the top is more transformational benefits where you get into kind of what are the emotional, the organizational, the kind of societal impacts. And that is how does it impact me in my role and me within the wider business? What are those kind of outcomes that you're driving as well that are higher level? Even just being able to shift to that kind of level instantly puts you above most competitors that we see. And being able to get that right, you're already kind of two or three steps ahead. So it seems really obvious that it's very easy to get very inward or very kind of low level in terms of the benefits that are being driven. What that looks like is clarity, I'd say. So everything slots into place. It's much easier to talk to solutions, to stories, to even just the focus on pipeline. So for us, it took us a couple of years of tweaking, refining to land on our current positioning of where to play, how to win. And once that slotted in, it kind of became our operating system and everything else was easier to speak to clients about. And also naturally you get that feedback back that actually it's easier for them to remember, to understand, to kind of understand the niche that you're operating in and the value that they're driving as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Yeah, absolutely. And uh think about the consultancy leaders that are listening to this, that are maybe say 15, 20 people stage of the consultancy. You know, typically at that stage it's time to develop a more organized GTM approach, but typically they don't have extra resource in order to organize that or move in that direction. There's very rarely extra people on the team that could lead the charge on something like that. Where would you suggest that they start in developing their go-to-market strategy?

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah, and probably the areas that we'd advise our clients not to move forward with anything unless they have them in place. So that deep understanding of the market, the opportunity that exists, where growth is currently coming from and where that's going to shift over time. What are those trigger moments as well in the near term that are going to drive that opportunity? So deep understanding of kind of the market opportunity and mapping that, then getting into how does that fit in terms of customer fit. So that ICP build, what is our best fit, kind of nice to have bad fit across a number of attributes. So behaviors, mindset, ambition, strategic fit, the value, all of those things, and starting to name accounts that you've experienced that fit into those buckets as well, because we all know them. And then being able to replicate that will just make it easier and higher impact in terms of those relationships. And then finally getting into mapping and understanding of those complex buying units, who's in there, who do we need to influence and why, with what kind of message and what questions are they going to be able to ask us and are they expecting from us at different moments as well. So, really, those kind of three strategic foundations is what we've applied to our own business, is what we do for clients as well, and allows you to just keep reverting back. To that over time.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

And have you seen firsthand in your own consultancy the benefit, the upside of that approach?

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Yeah, it's the is the clarity and why you're focusing in certain areas. Everything that then comes from that across the team goes back to those strategic foundations as well. So the consistency goes up because you're not having to start from scratch every time, but also individuals are working from the same kind of foundations. So to onboard new team members or to bring someone else into an internal project around growth is easier because that already exists and you're not having to redo it every time. And that typically sits in the heads of a few people otherwise. And so it's tricky to have those pinch points. So it allows, again, more people in the team to access that knowledge, knowing that that is the kind of the direction that the business is happy with.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Absolutely. So talking to a consultancy leader of say, let's say the company is somewhere between 8 to 12 million a year in revenue, you know, typically a decent pipeline for the next six months at least, but keeps losing deals that they think they or feel they should be winning. Where would you tell them to look first if they feel like they're losing out on opportunities that feel purpose-built for the work they do?

SPEAKER_00 23:00

It's really hard to give other people advice here because I'm thinking about whether I follow my own advice. From the work that we do with clients around this, so typically the strategic account growth that we're doing is kind of the largest enterprise sales, so the must-win accounts. So they are kind of the tens, hundreds of millions. So it is a different scale. However, applying some of the same logic and principles would be start with qualification. So how are you performing against the deals you're pursuing? Are you ready to go after these? And what are the reasons why or why not? Doing win-loss analysis and getting really into that. So why you're losing is the fastest route to the answer there. For example, we've applied an AI tool to our clients that does that at scale to be able to automate some of that process and kick in things like MPS and customer engagement. So all of those things are connected. And then ultimately, what we would do with our clients is get a real deep understanding of that target. So the prospect you're going after, it could be a net new or an existing that you're looking to expand. What is your long-term objective with them? So where are you looking as a combined two businesses to get to? That could be 12, 18 months. What's the short-term objective, which could be three months? That's more of the sprint. So that's actually what you're trying to do in this period. What then is the key message that's going to get you there? What are the key next actions? And they could be high risk, high gain, kind of land and expand, more operational actions, spending an hour doing that when going through that process and really reflecting on it is often enough. So we've distilled our kind of four-week process into an hour session that marketing sales, commercial, bid teams can apply when they really just need that quick moment ahead of a call or ahead of a next meeting to just take that time to go through those steps of understanding the objective, the message, the actions is typically enough to kind of get that back on track where it may have drifted.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Yeah, yeah, that's great. We've covered a ton of ground, actually. And you've given some real clarity on where to start, on the consequences of not sticking to certain things or certain fundamentals and foundations and actually the benefit of what can be achieved for a consultancy when they do get these things right. But I would love just to finish on the future of your consultancy. What's the direction that you're looking to go as a firm? What's the things that you're excited about? What is the future like for you and the team?

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Well, hopefully growth. Our kind of core focus is client experience. So our MPS is what drives everything. So making sure that that is always as strong as it's going to be. So really focusing on how do we continue adding value to their business so that that partnership continues. Of course, we are having to innovate and to stay ahead of shifts in the market, as everyone I'm sure is, and the pace of that change feels like it's just exponentially getting quicker. So needing to stay core to our kind of where-to pay how-to-win framework, and that's guiding everything. But looking at where we can innovate ourselves, where we can add value this year that probably last year we weren't even considering is a constant challenge. But also to really bed into where we see growth working. So for us, that's kind of upper large enterprises and PE is where we've had the most value and continue to so doubling down there and kind of aligning with what they need to achieve within their businesses as well.