The right GTM for your company's size & audience

Summary

MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Episode: The Right GTM for Your Company's Size & Audience
Release Date: March 19, 2025
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: David Chase, CMO of Workboard

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of the MarTech Podcast ™, host Benjamin Shapiro engages in a compelling conversation with David Chase, the Chief Marketing Officer of Workboard. Workboard specializes in providing an enterprise-standard strategy execution and OKR (Objectives and Key Results) platform enhanced with generative AI, aimed at assisting some of the world's largest and most complex organizations in executing their strategies more predictably and profitably. The focal point of their discussion revolves around determining the optimal Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy tailored to a company's size and target audience.

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Understanding the Target Buyer

David Chase begins by emphasizing the importance of accurately identifying the buyer persona, especially within large enterprises.

• Key Points:

  • Enterprise Complexity: Workboard primarily targets massive organizations like Intel, Ford, and 3M, which often have tens of thousands of employees and multifaceted strategies requiring extensive alignment across various levels.
  • Decision-Makers: The primary buyers are typically P&L owners, such as CEOs or business unit leaders, making access to these executives a significant challenge.
  • Broad Engagement: Besides engaging top executives, Workboard must demonstrate value to VPs, managers, and frontline teams to ensure widespread adoption within the organization.

• Notable Quote:

  "We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing."
  — Benjamin Shapiro [00:25]

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The Value Journey: Transparency, Alignment, and Velocity

David outlines a three-step Value Journey that Workboard employs to help organizations effectively execute their strategies:

1. Transparency:

   • Implementation: Consolidate all existing strategies and goals into a unified platform to provide visibility, especially to senior leadership.

   • Example: At VMware, this approach revealed overlapping initiatives and wasted capacity due to a lack of visibility, enabling the company to reallocate resources more effectively.

   • Notable Quote:

     "They recognized hundreds of teams that were working on the same thing. They had zero idea that was happening."
     — David Chase [08:04]

2. Alignment:

   • Objective: Ensure that all teams across the organization are aligned with the overarching strategy, crucial for maintaining coherence in both in-office and remote work environments.

   • Outcome: VMware successfully redirected teams to work on initiatives directly aligned with their transformation strategy, ensuring strategic coherence.

   • Notable Quote:

     "It's about whatever time frame you're working on, making sure that those scarce resources... are actually being the most effective or as effective as they can be."
     — David Chase [17:20]

3. Velocity:

   • Goal: Increase the speed of testing and iterating strategies to adapt to continuous market changes.

   • Method: Utilize frameworks like OKRs to create a common language for hypothesis testing and strategic alignment, fostering week-over-week improvements.

   • Notable Quote:

     "Organizations, when they don't have a common framework... people both feel like they're sort of out cold a little bit."
     — David Chase [11:32]

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GTM Strategies for Different Organizational Sizes

David contrasts the GTM approaches for large enterprises versus smaller or growing organizations:

1. Large Enterprises:

   • Challenges: Communicating and distributing high-level strategy across vast and complex structures.

   • Strategies:

     • Referrals: Leveraging existing relationships to access high-level executives.
     • Partner Networks: Collaborating with both large consulting firms and specialized partners to penetrate different segments of the organization.
     • In-Person Experiences: Shifting focus from digital advertising to more personalized, content-driven, and referral-based marketing tactics.

   • Notable Quote:

     "Being able to show how we provide value to these organizations and then give them a mechanism to be able to tell somebody else... is something that's been really effective."
     — David Chase [12:14]

2. Smaller Organizations:

   • Focus: Understanding the market deeply to differentiate and capture attention amidst limited resources.

   • Strategies:

     • Flexibility in Frameworks: Adapting OKR cycles (e.g., quarterly instead of annual) to allow for faster learning and iteration.
     • Partner Relationships: Utilizing resale partners to maintain client relationships and generate ongoing revenue while delivering tangible value.

   • Notable Quote:

     "We're a couple hundred person organization, we're market leaders, we're innovating all the time, we're moving at 1,000 miles an hour..."
     — David Chase [14:20]

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Executing and Communicating Strategy

Both Shapiro and Chase highlight the critical nature of not just formulating a strategy but ensuring its effective execution and communication across the organization.

• Execution Challenges:

  • Alignment: Ensuring every team member understands and contributes to the strategy.
  • Visibility: Making certain that the strategic initiatives are transparent and that there's no duplication of efforts.
  • Adaptability: Being prepared to iterate and evolve strategies in response to fast-paced market changes.

• Tools and Frameworks:
  Platforms like Workboard serve as essential tools in managing OKRs, fostering alignment, and enhancing the velocity of strategic execution.

• Notable Quote:

  "It's about leveraging or giving everybody a common language and a way to be able to translate that strategy, understand what they're working on and making sure it is connected back to the strategy."
  — David Chase [17:20]

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Conclusion

This episode of the MarTech Podcast ™ offers a deep dive into the complexities of crafting and executing effective GTM strategies tailored to an organization's size and audience. David Chase of Workboard elucidates the necessity of transparency, alignment, and velocity in strategic execution, emphasizing the importance of customizable frameworks like OKRs to cater to both large enterprises and smaller organizations. The discussion underscores that regardless of size, the core principles of understanding the target audience, aligning teams with strategic goals, and maintaining adaptability are paramount for sustained business growth.

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Key Takeaways

• Buyer Identification: Clearly define and understand the target buyer, especially in large enterprises where decision-makers are few and highly influential.

• Value Journey Framework: Implement transparency, alignment, and velocity to streamline strategic execution and ensure organizational coherence.

• GTM Adaptability: Tailor GTM strategies to fit the organizational size and market dynamics, leveraging referrals and partner networks for larger organizations while maintaining flexibility for smaller ones.

• Strategic Communication: Utilize common frameworks and platforms to ensure every team member is aligned with the company's strategic direction and objectives.

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Additional Resources

• Workboard Website: workboard.com
• David Chase's LinkedIn Profile: LinkedIn
• MarTech Podcast Summaries and Show Notes: martechpod.com

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Stay Tuned:
Join us in the next episode where Benjamin and David continue their exploration of effective leadership in marketing organizations. Subscribe to the MarTech Podcast ™ for daily insights into marketing and technology.

Transcript

[Ben Shapiro]

The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.

[Ben Shapiro]

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that used to technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss some marketing strategy and leadership. Joining us is David Chase who is the CMO of Workboard, which provides an enterprise standard strategy execution and OKR platform with generative AI embedded throughout, helping the world's largest and most complex organizations execute their strategy more predictably and profitably. And today David and I are going to discuss how to figure out the right GTM for your company's size and audience. All right, here's the first part of my conversation with David Chase, the CMO of Workboard. David, welcome to the Martech Podcast.

[David Chase]

Hi Ben, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Excited to have you on the podcast. Excited to talk to another San Francisco native. We're both here in the Bay Area and seem like we're living similar lives. I was near the water as you are today with young children. I understand where you're coming from on the personal side. Let's talk a little bit about the work side. Your company does GTM using artificial intelligence, so helping people understand what they're trying to accomplish. Tell me a little bit about mastering that. When you're thinking about matching the go to market to your company size and also who you're trying to reach. How do you match your goals with objectives and target markets?

[David Chase]

Just to start with a little bit of framing around who our buyer is I think is super important. So workboard, we're a 10ish year old organization, still very much a startup at heart and VC backed. What's interesting About Workboard and the problem that we solve is that it's really the biggest and most complex organizations that we sell to. So if you think about the Intels, The Fords, the 3 Ms. Of the world, there are many tens of thousands of employees, many, many different strategies, and many, many different levels of alignment. That has to happen when we're most impactful going into those organizations. It's when we have a P and L owner, typically the CEO or a business unit leader, as the executive sponsor and ultimately the buyer. That's challenging. As you can imagine, getting hold of those folks and really having an effective go to market strategy that engages the very, very few people that can make a decision for those types of organizations is hard. So we have to think through very carefully about how we go to market, where we spend our dollars, and the types of initiatives that we engage in. I think the second important point about that is while the CEO or the P and L owner is our buyer, it's really every person inside of those organizations that uses Workboard. So the sort of second difficult part of our job, if you like, is being able to actually engage and show the value for the VPs in those organizations, the managers in those organizations, and the frontline teams that are getting the work done. We have to tell that story and really engage folks across a really broad set of teams and audience.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Okay, so it starts with the executive leadership. And for you, it's this Gigantic Enterprise Company, 3M. Every piece of tape that's ever been created has come through that organization. Not literally, obviously, someone that's in very high demand and you're going and saying, all right, we're going to help you figure out an OKR platform to communicate what your goals are as an executive leader down. And then you have to engage with the entire workforce, mostly VP level and down. I kind of get it. When you're sitting down, whether it's you or somebody else in the organization with the CEO of one of these mega conglomerates and you say, all right, we're going to figure out how to match what your objectives are for a company this size and also your audiences, because there's going to be multiple different audiences. Walk me through the process. How do you help them communicate their okrs down not only to you, but through the organization.

[David Chase]

People on the Martech podcast have said this a bunch of times. It's a marketing kind of 101, if you like, which is you focus on the problem, engage the buyer, and then ultimately show them the solution through what you do. And it really does Start there. These business unit leaders or these CEOs of organizations, they really care about one thing and that is getting their strategy, which they've invested even millions of dollars and or many, many, many hours of their precious leadership's time to actually get it done. Every CEO, every business unit leader believes they have the right strategy.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I was going to guess you were going to say quarterly earnings, but go on.

[David Chase]

Well, it all comes back to that in the bonus.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Yeah, for sure.

[David Chase]

Yeah, they all think they've got the right strategy. But I'm going to share an example from one of our customers. I won't name names, but a large software company, about 15,000 people in the Bay Area, they were sort of flat for five years. Their engagement score, and this is really common with organizations that we work with. Before Workboard, their engagement score was in the 40s or 50s for the question, do you know the strategy? So that's 50 to 60% of their organization that is working on stuff that is not aligned to that strategy the CEO or the business unit leader thinks is going to put them to the next level. So what's really important is going into these conversations and saying, okay, what would a 50% capacity increase do for your business? How important would it be to be able to get all of those people aligned and actually working towards the one thing that you know is going to turn the corner for your organization or help you grow? And typically these things like the engagement score or the fact that they're going for a really big transformation is common. Like every CEO and every business unit leader that we speak to is doing one of those things. They're either a little bit stagnant, they need to grow, they need to transform. Particularly in the world we're living in right now, they think they've got it nailed in terms of what they need to do. But it really is like, okay, how are we actually going to go and execute that? How are we going to be different in this world of continuous change than we were 10 years ago when we could kind of be slow, we could test things every year, we could create a five year plan, we could just see what happens and we'll all be okay to. No, we actually have to change and iterate and the world's changing every month and every quarter and we have to make sure that the entire organization is coming along on that journey, not 10, 50, 60% of it.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

So what I'm hearing from you is when you're trying to match the right go to market with your company's size, your audience, your Objectives. The first thing to do is assuming that the CEO has some sense of, here's the direction we're going is you're measuring whether the people in the organization understand the strategy. Do you do any coaching or mentorship or OKR evaluation to figure out if the strategy is actually the right one. Like, sure, we have a strategy. Do the people know it and can they execute it seems like one problem. And then the second one is we've got a strategy. Is it effective? Is that a problem that you see people have?

[David Chase]

It is for sure. And this is really important. We take people on this. We call it the value journey. It's really a three step process when we engage with organizations. And I'll share an example from VMware as I tell this story a little bit. So the first stage in this journey is what we call transparency. So take everything that you have today, Take all of the strategies you have, whether they're three five year plans. Take any goals that you have, whether they be OKRs or some other framework, doesn't really matter. Take those and put them in a platform that gives people transparency. Importantly, gives the senior leadership transparency. VMware did this. And the transformation leader at the time he was leading the efforts and was working with the senior leadership team there and they recognized hundreds of teams that were working on the same thing. They had zero idea that that was happening. And yet across the organization there was tons of capacity going to waste because people just didn't have visibility, they didn't have transparency into what other people are doing. That's a big scary moment for organizations when they suddenly realize that, oh crap.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It just seems like a lot of people are about to get laid off.

[David Chase]

Yeah, yeah. And that's not the intention and that's not what happens. What happens is the leadership team can say, okay, now we know, we sort of knew, but now we really know. And now we can really focus on the stage two of the process, which is let's get everybody aligned. And the alignment piece is really hard. The bigger and the more complex the organization gets. And today in the world where even organizations where people have gone back to the office, it's still employees around the world, still people working from home, et cetera. So how do we then focus on alignment? And this is where, as an example, the VMware team managed to actually really redirect those teams to working on things that were directly aligned to the strategy and actually aligned to each other. They could leverage the platform to ultimately connect the dots between their 40,000 people and make sure that Their work was actually aligned to the company's transformation strategy, which was a big one. And then the third stage that we really take people on is it's about velocity. So raising the speed in which they test and iterate. And the actual interesting thing to me about any framework like okrs or being more structured about the operating rhythm that you use as a leader is being able to test and iterate in a way that everybody understands. OKRs give you a framework to be able to say okay at the start of the cycle, whether that's year, quarter, whatever it might be, you can say okay, these are hypotheses we have, these are the tests we want to run. These are the things that are going to impact the long range strategy. And then I can actually start talking about them every single week and actually running tests and improving week over week towards those strategic priorities. And that's what's really difficult. Organizations, when they don't have a common framework or they don't have a platform or a structure in place, is you get different pockets of the organizations doing work. Sometimes it's connected to the strategy, more often than not it isn't. And the people both feel like they're sort of out cold a little bit. They don't really know how that work connects. And the leadership team are super frustrated because their strategy isn't getting executed. Everyone seems to be hitting their goals, but they're actually not moving the needle from a company's perspective. So what we really help people do through that value journey is connect those dots and then really turn it into a machine that can operate month over month and quarter over quarter.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I understand how that's an incredible challenge for an organization like 3M or VMware with thousands, if not tens of thousands of employees communicating the objectives, the goals, the measurement, making sure that there isn't overlap between what various teams are doing. On the flip side, if you're going after organizations that are smaller, that don't have tens of thousands of people, KPIs OKRs, some sort of evaluation platform to make sure that you have a strategy that it's being implemented is still incredibly important. What is the difference between figuring out a go to market and that strategy? If your company size is smaller than.

[David Chase]

The enterprise, a couple of things spring to mind. So the first is being very specific about the go to market that we shifted to two years ago when I took over the marketing team. It really went away from digital focused or really high paid advertising spend and much more towards in person experiences and focus on content and inbound and referrals. The reason why I say that, reason why I bring that up, I think it's important is because I think regardless of the organization size that we're talking to, the buyer is still the CEO or the most senior person in the organization. And those folks are hard to get in front of. And one of the things that works really well for us is referral. So being able to show how we provide value to these organizations and then give them a mechanism to be able to tell somebody else, be able to come to an event that we're hosting and actually get them to learn from each other, problem solve together is something that's been really effective for us. The other thing that's really important for us as we think about sort of slightly smaller organizations is our partner network. So we have a really interesting set of partners, both from a consulting firm perspective, the Baines McKinsey of the world who are in those large organizations doing transformations, but then also a lot of smaller sort of consulting partners who are specializing in specific segments or specific types of organizations or specific types of teams as an example, like product teams inside of a type of organization. We have partners there. And what we've seen be successful for those smaller organizations is particularly those partner relationships where one of our resale partners has a foot in the door. Maybe they're doing a transformation for a smaller organization. They've done their consulting work and what's interesting is, okay, great, now what? Sort of leaving workboard behind as the platform gives both the partner a way to continue to build that relationship and ultimately generate revenue going forward. But it also allows the customer to sort of get tangible value from the relationship and from the consulting work that's happened with those partners.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It seems like the challenge to me at the enterprise is about communication and distribution of the high level strategy. The CEO from his iron throne at the top of the mountain says we're going north and you got to make sure that everybody is rowing the same direction. And there's a lot of oars in the water. When you're working at something like an early stage, a growth stage, a startup company, it is not necessarily okay, we're heading north. It is, are we in a boat? Do we have oars? Do we have enough people to get the boat to move? So when I'm thinking about setting the okrs and the strategy, to me it is more about understanding the market and differentiation. And that's why when we're talking about matching your GTM with your size and your audience, it seems like at the smaller level it is, do we have the resources to understand our customers at a very discreet level so we can figure out some sort of point of differentiation and get attention as opposed to at the enterprise level. It's like it's assumed you're known now. How do you take advantage of that? How does that manifest itself in the goals and the communication of those goals?

[David Chase]

I think as it relates to a smaller organization, a couple of things are really important. When it relates to work board and how we think about the services and the products that we provide. The biggest thing is translating the strategy and making sure that everybody is aligned. That is still true whether it's a large organization or a small organization. The big difference is often the speed in which that changes. So what's important is not to be prescriptive about, okay, everyone must do annual okrs or everyone must do quarterly okrs. We're a really good example of this as an organization. We're a couple hundred person organization, we're market leaders, we're innovating all the time, we're moving at 1,000 miles an hour and we have a cadence which is effectively it's quarterly. And what that allows us to do is to really learn and iterate at a much faster pace than may happen at a much larger organization that's going through a three year plan and then having annual OKRs. And they're taking an enterprise's pace, although that's shifting, that is speeding up a lot. So I think that's one of the big differences is not being too dogmatic, not being too religious about the time frame or the framework or the structure or whatever it might be. It's really about leveraging or giving everybody a common language and a way to be able to translate that strategy, understand what they're working on and making sure it is connected back to the strategy. Whether that is okay, we need to get some oars this month because if not, we're going to be like just sat still in the water. That can change quickly, but the same rules apply. It's about whatever time frame you're working on, making sure that those scarce resources, which are even more scarce in smaller organizations are actually being the most effective or as effective as they can be.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

When I think about things like okrs, KPIs just fundamentally we'll bucket them into methodologies for communicating your strategy. It goes back into the fundamentals of marketing, the fundamentals of running a business. Understanding your customers, understanding the competitive environment, understanding the pluses and minuses for your products and being able to communicate them and deliver them effectively. Now, sure, OKRs are the strategy communication tool of today. Used to be KPIs before, I'm sure it was called some other TLA. It doesn't matter what mechanism you're using. There are products like Workboard, which I'm sure are incredibly effective for communicating OKRs to large organizations. What matters the most, whether you're at a large organization or small, is that you have your finger on the pulse of what's happening internally in your organization and externally in the market, and that you're able to pick a direction, communicate it to your team, and evaluate whether you are all rowing the boat in the same direction. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with David Chase, the CMO of Workboard. Join us again tomorrow when David and I continue our conversation talking about effective leadership in marketing organizations. If you can't wait till our next episode and you'd like to learn more about David, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our Show Notes. Or if you're interested in learning more about how to manage your okrs, you can go to workboard.com Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or you can even apply to be the next guest speaker on the Martech podcast. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is martechpod. M A R T E C H P O D on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or you can contact me directly on LinkedIn. My handle is Benjschapp. B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year, so hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

[David Chase]

Foreign.

[Ben Shapiro]

Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.