The Magic of the Marketing Offsite

Mike Gospe is a GTM strategist & professional facilitator. Here I am in action.

CMOs, are your sales reps giving your marketing team high-fives in the hallway? Are your demand gen efforts performing at their best? It’s been a tough year, and to really have an impact, your team probably needs to rethink their go-to-market (GTM) strategy and realign it with your sales and product teams. This won’t happen (easily) with people working remotely or in silos. An intensive, in-person GTM strategy offsite can work wonders. There is magic in the marketing offsite. Here’s why they are critically important for your team’s performance. At the end of the article, I will also share two awesome “a ha!” moments that resulted from the most recent offsite I facilitated.

Symptoms of a struggling marketing team

As a GTM strategist with a long history of working with marketing teams, the most common symptoms I see are these. Any look familiar to you?

• The team produces too much “marketing popcorn” = random acts of marketing that do not align with a strategic marketing objective. (A busy marketer is not necessarily a productive marketer.)
• Sales leaders suffer from “shiny object syndrome”, dictating a new marketing tactic every week. Marketers don’t know how to say “no”, or “not yet”. Whiplash is the result.
• The marketing team has trouble aligning their Campaigns (capital C, not small c) with the product roadmap because the timing of product releases, and their strategic impact, is not known until they launch. As a result, the marketing team is forced to be reactive. There is neither a “launch boss” nor a proper “campaign manager” to drive strategic operations.
• There is no “Positioning & Messaging Guide” that clarifies the GTM plan to align the company (not just the marketing team). When asked to recite the company vision, ideal customer profile (ICP), and key messaging, each employee (sales, marketing, customer success) gives a either a blank stare or a different answer. (If this is not documented AND signed off on by the CEO, CMO, and VP of Sales, then it does not exist.)
• The marketing department, and each team member, does not have clarity of their OKRs (objectives and key results) and KPIs (key performance indicators). As a result, they do the best they can. But silo’d thinking is pervasive.
• The GTM budget does not map to achieving the business objective. The old adage persists: “I know half of my marketing budget is misspent, but I don’t know which half!” The problem may be insufficient funds; but it may also be an unclear or undirected GTM strategy. If you define a clear strategy that the leadership team agrees to, budget will follow.

Self-assessment exercise

Your team is probably more self-aware of these issues than you may realize. To find out for sure, you may want to invite them to perform a self-assessment exercise. In this exercise, you ask your team (and your key agencies!) to evaluate their function with regards to the following:

• What is working very well today that we should keep doing?
• What processes need a bit of tuning?
• What processes, plans, or engagement strategies are flat-out broken?
• What are we not doing that we know we should be doing?

This self-assessment exercise is valuable for two reasons:

1. You are inviting your team to step beyond their day jobs to offer insight and guidance that will improve team performance. They will welcome this opportunity.
2. What you discover will shape the agenda for your team offsite.

The objectives or your marketing offsite

The objective for your offsite will be unique to your business and your team’s needs. However, in general, I can share a few thoughts to start your own creative process. Start by rallying your team around three big ideas.

1. Credibility drives lead gen

For your business to be successful next year, what is your primary, overriding GTM objective? (Hint: It is probably more strategic than “generate 10,000 leads”.) Don’t get stuck in the weeds of marketing tactics. Think big!

When working with start-ups and mid-sized companies, I’ve discovered that the root of their marketing growth challenge is often in establishing credibility in the market. The business output is more demand growth. But without credibility, who wants to entertain a conversation with you?

Credibility is built over time, not just with a single announcement or a clever social media campaign. Credibility is built on the following elements. And, the marketing GTM strategy must be able to bring these to life.

• Your CEO shares his/her vision with the industry, analysts, and media. This vision is mapped to solving a problem your target audience(s) care about. This sets the tone for the year.
• You are dedicated to a strategic “announcement strategy” (with pre-planned announcement dates) where you show the world how, when, and where you are actively bringing your vision to life.
• Your announcements are not random. Each will fall into one of three buckets:
  • New business-strategy and/or product announcements
  • Customer momentum (e.g., announcement of new customers, or winning 3 customers in a segment = an opportunity to claim market victory)
  • Ecosystem (e.g., announcement of new partnerships, industry collaborations)

So, it is possible that you may have one Master Campaign: to build market credibility. And the more credible you are viewed in the market, the easier it will be to accelerate lead gen.

2. Lightning Strike and Rolling Thunder

I learned this trick many years ago when I worked at Sun as a market strategist. To turn your GTM strategy into a superpower, you should embrace a “Lightning Strike and Rolling Thunder” approach.  I share this story in my book, Marketing Campaign Development.

In short, every year you should have a “vision” announcement that reminds the market of the value your company brings and why you are in business. You might also couple this with a product introduction surrounded with analyst and editorial briefings. You also foreshadow where you will be making further investments. That is your Lightning Strike moment.

Then, on a pre-planned cadence, you echo your vision in Rolling Thunder moments. “Remember the vision we shared earlier, here our latest proof point . . . .”

Each proof point moment will have meaningful GTM execution. Nothing will be random.

Each time you do this, you show the market that you are delivering on your business promises. This is how you build credibility. Lead gen becomes a whole lot easier!

3. Have fun!

With so many marketing teams working virtually now, it’s hard to build real team comradery. Acknowledge successes.  Make the offsite a safe environment to express new ideas, and challenge the sacred cows. Make sure you include time for bonding. Whether it’s bowling, mini-golf, or throwing axes, a little team spirit goes a very long way.  And take pictures!

Elements for your offsite agenda

• Share your vision for the marketing department and your objective(s) for the next year.
• Reflect on the self-assessment exercise and, as a team, agree upon 3 operational priorities.
• Invite a few guests to talk with your team:
  1. VP of Sales to share their priorities
  2. CFO to talk about what marketers need to know about finance
  3. One of your best sales reps to share how she won her latest win
• Build your product announcement strategy. (Invite a product leader to attend.) Use this timeline to build a 6-month campaign roadmap that is tied to announcements.
• Take over a wall to draft “marketing blueprints” – literally flow charts of activities and offers that align to the buyer’s journey (and your content map). While there is an infinite number of marketing tactics you can choose from, there are only 7 types of integrated Campaigns: Awareness & Thought Leadership, Competitive Replacement, Cross-sell/Up-Sell, Migration, New Customer Acquisition, Nurturing, Renewal. Each of these have specific repeatable “judo moves” that will make your GTM more effective. (See Marketing Campaign Development).
• Build a master timeline and then have a reality check: can your team execute all of these? Confirm the priorities, and align with your budget.
• Close with each team member sharing one action item they will take to keep the momentum of this offsite going when they return to the office.

Two “A ha!” moments

At the beginning of my latest GTM offsite, the team was convinced they needed to embrace three Master Campaigns. Doing so would stretch the team beyond their resources. However, when we reached day 3, an innocent comment from one of the attendees revealed that we only actually needed one Master Campaign (with a very clever message) that had three sub-campaigns. This completely changed the approach, as it clarified how and when the audiences and messages of these three sub-campaigns would be intertwined. What was once overwhelming was now doable!

The second “A ha!” moment came when I asked the team to tell me what announcements they were planning. It turned out that several marketers had one piece of the puzzle. When we plotted these on the timeline, the team realized they collectively knew more than they thought. For the first time ever, they left with a 6-month window of product/customer/ecosystem announcement opportunities that would drive their Rolling Thunder strategy. (Of course, this would be shared and finalized with the product team.)

Take time to think strategically

Marketing budgets are tight. And it is difficult to take the marketing team offline for several days. However, the rewards are well worth it. Giving your team a chance to think strategically, away from the daily fires, unleashes advances in GTM and rejuvenates the team.

About the Author

Mike Gospe is a GTM and Customer Advisory Board (CAB) strategist and professional facilitator. He has worked with leadership teams for more than 20 years to bring marketers and executives closer to their best customers. If you are planning your next marketing offsite, contact Mike to learn about his latest best practices.