How does Go-To-Market Pros help clients?
How does Go-To-Market Pros help clients?
My name is Michael Phelan. I'm the principal of Go-to-Market Pros here in Boston. And I have a background in terms of sales and marketing at both large companies and emerging tech companies. And about seven years ago I formed my own company, Go-to-Market Pros, and it was all around helping marketers and sales professionals, executives form a really strong go-to-market strategy, really understanding how to cut through to the clutter, how to kind of bypass and engage with buyers when you're up against competitors who have very large budgets, large inside sales teams, and maybe your brand is not as established as other brands. So I work with both companies that are emerging growth companies in the US and I also work with companies that are coming into the US market from outside.
Generally they have a small sales and marketing team, or maybe it's just one person, and a small budget and they really have a great product. But a lot of these big buyers, especially enterprise buyers, they're not going to meet with them, they're not going to engage with them because they don't know them, and they don't have the firepower, the sales firepower or the marketing firepower. Some cases they've got a much better product than what's out there. So, I use a methodology that I called magnet marketing to help them engage with buyers. So what I do is I reach out to the buyers and I'll conduct the genuine study on best practices. Right now I'm doing one on best practices on co-op and vendor marketing at major retailers. So I'll reach out to the retailers, I'll invite them into the study. I'll pay them for their time and when they come onto the call, the sponsor will be there and it's generally a senior sales and marketing exec at my client.
I will interview the prospect for 15 minutes. "What are you doing now? How are you solving this problem? What are the best practices? What are your challenges? What do you want to do in the future? what's on your roadmap?" Meanwhile, my client's getting incredibly smart about that account and what they're struggling with and their pain points. And then we'll offer some suggestions, some solutions, some best practices, which has a gift card, which they're always going to open up because it's got a cash gift card, and it's got information that they can bring into the office the next day, share with their colleagues. And meanwhile my client will be associated with content that will help solve these buyers' problems.
So it starts with the prospect call and ends with prospects centric marketing. And it's really inbound marketing and reverse and it allows companies with smaller budgets to engage in meaningful conversations with buyers. Sometimes it's early stage sales identification, sometimes it's determining if that particular account is a real prospect for you, sometimes it's understanding what's going from a competitive environment, and sometimes it's really collecting authentic content for content marketing. It combines about four different disciplines. It combines an analyst program with content marketing, with early stage sales identification, and best practices research. So it's a combination of four different disciplines that come together to get meaningful conversations with smaller emerging growth companies and large prospects.