Adapting GTM practice to the New Normal

We have had to adapt quickly to deal with the changes bought on by the pandemic

Pranesh Nagarajan
Pranesh Nagarajan
Director - GTM | UX 22 Jan 2021

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Adapting GTM practice to the New Normal

We have had to adapt quickly to deal with the changes bought on by the pandemic

When the pandemic struck, it was evident that it would cause a tectonic change in the Go-to-Market (GTM) world. With so much turbulence, we decided to focus our GTM efforts in managing our Instructional Design practice, to weather the storm. As the skies cleared, it became immediately apparent that we had to zoom into our GTM practice.

We have officially and audaciously split our GTM work into three key areas:

Community Management

Starting with my experience around the Maggi crisis, I saw first-hand, a failure of the broadcast approach to marketing and the emergence of a concept where a brand was being defined by multiple stakeholders. While at some level this has always been true, brand owners were more in control in the past. This has been driven by increased mobile penetration and rapid advancements in user interface design that have made it significantly easier to enrol new users.

Having said that, the changes became far more explosive due to the pandemic. With forced lockdowns and fears of the unknown, people clamoured for the comfort of others and found it in the digital world. Physical distances no longer mattered and interest-based communities bloomed; ones that might not have survived in the past.

In fact, as early as Jun 2020 before the full impact of the crisis, nearly 40% of online communities indicated that their growth had accelerated, 25% of those indicating a massive increase.

We see this as a key change for how brands are built – by the community, for the community and in many cases, by the community. Massive democratization of the entire brand value creation process is in play and we seek to build capacity to align ourselves, our customers and the broader community to these changes. Which brings me to:

Funnel Management

In close alignment with democratization of brands, there is a need for organizations to redefine what was earlier known as the #ordertocash cycle. While tools existed in the past to get into granular metrics of the sales funnel, they lacked the scale to provide meaningful and statistically significant results for many organizations. As consumers were forced to adopt more digital means to order and pay for their everyday needs, digital tools got the scale they hitherto lacked.

The cost of measuring leads and lags has come down significantly and measurement quality has increased dramatically. These metrics are now available real-time and are more definitive indicators of behaviour over intent-based data. For the agile organisation, this can unlock tremendous value and we hope to be a part of that journey.

User Experience

Digitalisation has colossally impacted everyone in the value creation cycle – sales, marketing, operations, IT, supply chain, finance, human resources – all parts of a business. While we think of this very often from a customer interface point of view, it is cold reality that employees ought to make significant changes in the way they deliver value to customers. This becomes dramatically complicated when we think of the changes that may be required to make workplaces more accessible and intuitive.

Should organizations create interfaces similar to actual physical experiences or should they make them unique to stay distinct? Should interfaces be simple and easy to navigate or should they replace humans who would essay a certain role? There are many such questions but no easy answers. We seek to partner and learn with organisations who want to solve these puzzles and make the workplace future-ready.

Since you’ve read till here, we have a small favour to ask you. While we are investing strengthen our capabilities, we know we cannot do it alone. Please help us to connect with other professionals and organisations in your network who have built solutions for these spaces. We’re excited by what these synergies could bring for our clients and indeed to the entire ecosystem.

In addition, we are seeking to engage with: