Gartner for Sales

Reinvent Your
Go-to-Market
Strategy
How orchestrated customer engagement
delivers deals with today’s buyers
 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Taking bold action to engage B2B customers

Standardized customer engagement processes are ill-equipped to deliver for Gartner expects that by 2026 …
today’s commercial organizations. Why? Because they don’t fit the reality of the
B2B buying process.
B2B organizations that unify commercial
Today’s buyer teams can include as many as 20 stakeholders, each of whom relies strategies and leverage multithreaded
on different sources of conflicting information along an increasingly self-service 50% commercial engagements will realize
buying journey. This creates massive variation in how any given buyer organization revenue growth that outperforms their
arrives at a deal, and renders standard engagement practices ineffective. competition by 50%.
Commercial leaders instead need to reconfigure their go-to-market approach from
today’s common seller-centric models, or even the less common customer-centric
model, to an orchestrated model designed to flex to the unique dynamics of a given
buying group.

Orchestrated customer engagement depends on three key strategies that

equip commercial leaders to respond to a specific buyer — resulting in superior
revenue results:

Customer situational awareness that caters the commercial approach

to the unique customer perspective

Multithreaded commercial engagement that gears interactions with

buyers to how, when and where each stakeholder chooses

Convergence in the commercial organization between marketing,

sales and service to deliver what the customer needs as they need it,
to expand customer engagement

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

The three key strategies of orchestrated customer engagement

Evolution of Commercial Practices

Future Era
You need to be here
Transitional Era
Progress but not the target
Legacy Practice Era Customer situational awareness
Most organizations are here Every buying situation is unique. Work to understand the customer’s perspective
to outperform competitors.
Customer-centric
Seller-centric
Multithreaded engagement
Coordinate and execute touchpoints to engage stakeholders based on situational
awareness.
Multiexperience
Omnichannel
Commercial convergence
Align the strategies, functions and KPIs of marketing, sales and service to enable
situational awareness and multithreaded engagement.
Coalition
Functional alignment

Source: Gartner

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Customer situational awareness

Understand the customer’s unique situation

The common seller-centric approach delivered through a standardized
engagement process may be efficient, but it ignores reality — namely, that Three Perspectives to Understand Customer Situations
modern buyers don’t make buying decisions according to a prescribed and
consistent set of steps. Yet today’s commercial organizations rarely tailor their
approaches to the unique situation and needs of a buying team. What existing relationships How important is this
and interactions impact this purchase relative to other
To bridge the disconnect between what commercial organizations do and particular purchase? business priorities, and
what the buyer needs requires situational understanding. When you where is the buying team in
its journey?
understand the relationships, readiness and rules dictating the terms of a
particular deal for the buyer, you can respond empathetically with relevant
interactions and information that optimize buyer engagement.

Re
hi s

a
ion

di
ne
lat

ss
Re
Rules

What are the specifics

of the customer's
procurement approach,
including regulations
and approvals?
Source: Gartner

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Customer situational awareness

Help customers make sense of information

B2B customers who feel confident about their
buying decision are 1.5x more likely to complete How Information Helps and Hurts Deals
large, high-priced deals without second-guessing Impact on closing a high-quality, low-regret deal when clients agreed with the statement
the decision.

Commercial organizations can influence that

sense of confidence with high-quality information 26%
that delivers not only proprietary insight, but also
Sense Making tools to help buyers understand the
conflicting sources of information they encounter
along the buying journey. The information we
encountered as part of
Sense Making builds trust that can reduce the this purchase decision
-33%
skepticism buyers feel about the information they was generally of
-54%
receive. Thus empowered, customers are better high quality.
able to take bold and decisive action on a deal. -66% The amount of
trustworthy information
Making informed trade-
For more on the Sense Making approach was overwhelming.
offs between vendors Information from
and their capabilities suppliers appeared
was difficult. trustworthy, but was
contradictory.

n = 1,174 B2B buyers

Source: Gartner
“High-Quality Sale” is defined as the customer: 1. Did not settle for less ambitious solution, or 2. Purchased a premium offering relative to the
base offering. “Regret” is defined as: “The offering we ultimately purchased is failing (or failed) to meet our expectations.”
Note: Customer data controlled for trust in supplier, supplier brand, expected ROI, prior relationship with supplier, prior purchase experience
and price-to-value ratio.

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Multithreaded engagement

Succeed in a multistakeholder buying environment

Multithreaded engagement addresses the needs
of each of the multiple stakeholders on a buying Multithreaded Engagements That Allow for Intelligent Coordination
team with resources and interactions to help Primary Engagement
them understand the deal and come to consensus Buying Organization Secondary Engagement
about it. Iterative/Repeated Engagement
+8 Additional
Finance Individual Starting Point
Individuals (Average)
Done well, the approach enables commercial Intelligent Coordination

organizations to intelligently coordinate and

Interaction Paths Between Buyers and Supplier
support multiple individuals in the buying
group — each following a different path — with Marketing Digital Sales
Journey Website Chatbots Seller
Campaign Room
a flexible mix of human and digital resources.
Problem
For more on multithreaded engagement Identification
Solution
Exploration
Requirements
Building
Supplier
Selection

Validation

Consensus
Creation

Source: Gartner
Supplier Selected

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Multithreaded engagement

Optimize key components of multithreaded engagement

Effective multithreaded engagement includes three components that define
the commercial organization’s strategic response to a customer signal.

Key component of Strategic response from

Signal from the customer
multithreaded engagement the commercial team

Commercial organization observes Relevance Provide content and

customer needs, behaviors, What is the customer trying to recommendations personalized
sentiment and feedback. accomplish? to the customer's needs.

Customer interacts with commercial Concurrence Develop a buying team profile with
organization across media and How can marketing, sales and service personas, to frame and bolster
channels. engage with the customer in a concurrent connections with each
consistent way? stakeholder.

Customer hits important inflection Cooperation and transparency Create a culture that resolves
points, such as when the buying How can the commercial organization struggles through cooperation and
process stalls. help overcome conflicts between transparency (e.g., direct customers
buyer stakeholders? to third-party resources, adopt
pricing and contract transparency).

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Commercial convergence

Create a frictionless customer experience

Buyers don’t want to be exposed to the inner workings of your organization
when making a purchase. They expect a frictionless experience.

To deliver it, commercial leaders across the marketing, sales and service
functions must work together to align their strategies, streamline execution
and drive collaboration through commercial convergence.

For more on commercial convergence

Benefits of Commercial Coordination on Account Expansion

Marketing Activities Selling Activities Service Activities

p86% p48% p84%

Improvement in win rates when Increase in likelihood to grow an account Greater probability to increase wallet
account-based marketing strategies when sellers focus on improving the share when customers experience
align with sales activities customer’s business value enhancement

n = 745 B2B customers (2016); 611 B2B customers (2020)

Source: 2019 TOPO Account-Based Benchmark; 2016 Gartner Sales Customer Panel; 2020 Gartner Loyalty Through Customer Service and Support Survey

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Commercial convergence

Take three steps to foster organizational alignment

Commercial convergence challenges deep-seated beliefs about the roles and
responsibilities thought to be the domain of specific departments or personnel,
and instead encourages cross-functional teams to situationally support the buyer.
3
Reaching practical commercial convergence requires:
A culture of customer empathy. Promote
situational awareness for all buyer interactions —
whether human or technologically mediated.
2 Focus on transparency, data sharing and
innovation across commercial teams.
Continuous and seamless engagement.
Design workflows for continuous, event-based,
integrated engagement, and include capabilities
1 to extract actionable, timely insights about new
revenue opportunities throughout the life cycle.
Interdepartmental collaboration. Form a cross-
functional working group to understand buyer
processes and streamline supplier execution.
Encourage a collaborative, growth mindset and
leverage cross-team key performance indicators
and incentives.

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Conclusion
Orchestrated engagement designed to meet and exceed customer expectations requires
bold action, as well as time to develop and execute on the strategy, and investment in
cross-functional capabilities and technologies.

Commercial leaders can start with the following steps:

• Discontinue seller-centric strategies and embrace customer situational awareness.

• Initiate multithreaded engagements that individually serve all of the stakeholders on

the buying team.

• Reenvision the functional silos of marketing, sales and service as a single go-to-market
stakeholder group aligned around a common set of priorities and data.

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 Reinvent Your Go-to-Market Strategy

How Gartner helps sales leaders adapt and stay ahead

Sales is changing rapidly, and revenue leaders
Diagnostics and Guides and
face a variety of new challenges. From maximizing benchmarks toolkits
Expert inquiry Expert research Live events
growth during disruption, to improving sales
motion and productivity, chief sales officers Webinars and
Case studies and Document
Peer connections online learning
are rewriting the book on sales strategy and best practices
events
reviews
execution. This can feel daunting, but you
don’t need to do it alone.

How Gartner supports you as a client

Diagnose current state Develop your plan Execute and drive change

Assess your functional maturity Develop a GTM strategy to succeed in the Evaluate your current sales
with diagnostic tools that identify coming decade with The Future of Sales technologies to address gaps and
strengths and weaknesses and 2025: A Gartner Trend Insight Report. accelerate your journey toward the
guide strategic priorities. ultimate revenue-driving sales tech
stack with the Gartner Sales Tech
Auditing Tool.

Review your existing GTM strategy with Leverage the Gartner one-page strategic Align your sales and GTM strategy
a Gartner expert to identify areas of planning template to define program with today’s buying realities with the
optimization and improvement. objectives that will lead to success. guidance in the Strategic Roadmap
for Accelerating Revenue Growth.

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