What is Go-to-network

Go-to-Network (GTN) is a strategic business strategy where a business activates their networks including , investors, communities, partners, customers, and employees, to drive growth. While traditional GTM strategies focus on direct channels and a linear funnel, GTN focuses on network creation and pulling the market into your sphere of influence. You can almost think of GTN as "Go-with-Market" rather than "Go-to-Market"

Just like GTM, GTN isn't a single strategy or channel. GTN can include partnerships, co-selling, community, customer advocacy, referral programs, social selling and influencer marketing.

Regardless of which combination of channels your team is leveraging, executing on Go-to-Network requires investing in two halves - network creation and network activation.

Network creation are activities that bring the market into your sphere of influence. Co-marketing partnerships, community, social selling, are all actions that help bring the market to you.

Network activation is turning that network into business value. Co-selling partnerships, referral programs, warm intros, help you find customers and revenue in the network you’ve created.

Your Network Addressable Market

When looking at the marketing and building account lists, many focus on two key groups: Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM).

There’s a third to consider though - your Network Addressable Market (NAM). NAM is the subset of your SAM that's already connected to you through first- and second-degree relationships. It can also include the portion of your market that is already aware you exist. When you consider that most B2B buying processes start with a shortlist of 2-3 vendors preselected, you realize that getting accounts into your network long before you sell to them is critical.

While your NAM is likely significantly smaller, it represents your most accessible opportunities for new business.

Marketing’s role is to grow the NAM (network creation).

Sale’s role is to turn the NAM into customers (network activation).

While this is a gross oversimplification, it can be a helpful place to start when considering your network.

It Starts with Mindset Shifts

A successful Go-to-Network strategy is as much about execution and strategy as it is about mindset shifts. These are a list of shifts and principles you need to make to fully adopt GTN thinking.

Growth at All Costs → Profitable, Efficient Growth

For over a decade growth at all costs, blitzscaling, and other concepts were popular because it was always possible to raise another round of funding based on pure growth.

Profitability was a secondary goal. It was something that could come later.

Now companies are striving to reign in spending and find profitability. Enter the era of profitable, efficient growth. Making $1 isn’t attractive anymore if it costs you $3 to make.

This means you need to find ways to grow revenue that are actually cost effective. Customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, and retention rate are the metrics that reign supreme.

Siloed Sales and Marketing → Collaborative Revenue

Is it a sales thing? Or marketing? Or maybe customer success?

Just as Go-to-Market isn’t something that should be owned by a single team, Go-to-Network needs to be a collaborative effort. The best sellers are thinking more like marketers, the best marketers and CSMs are thinking more like sellers.

Network creation and activation becomes everyones shared responsibility. It’s not something a sales team should sit back and wait for marketing to solve for them.

Account-First → People-First

At the end of the day, no matter how big the company is, you’re marketing to, selling to, and supporting people. Instead of acting like a big faceless brand selling to other faceless brands, you need to embrace this and put people at the core of how you think.

This means focusing on on creating authentic relationships, driving real trust, and putting people first. It doesn’t mean throwing out your Account-Based Marketing strategy, it means evolving it to embrace the people behind those accounts.

Quantity of Outbound → Quality of Outbound

The days of having a decent product, buying a list of leads, sending a template message to 10,000 and calling that sales are behind us. Sure, you might close a few deals from that, but focusing on quantity not an efficient way to grow. No one cares that you sent 3 million emails last month.

Instead, you should be focusing on the quality of your outbound. This means leveraging signals (both first and third-party) to help identify buyers, doing deep research instead of surface level personalization, and building micro campaigns.

Short-Term → Long-Term

Sure, if you fail at the short-term, the long-term won’t matter, but pure short-term thinking prevents you from ever having a chance at becoming a long-term business.You need to invest time and money into balancing the short and the long-term alongside each other.

This includes activities like community, content, social selling and partnerships. These initiatives can continue to grow even if you pause or stop driving input into them. They might take a bit longer to pay off compared to ads and calls but they’ll build upon themselves and become more powerful over time.

There’s a reason why almost every F100 B2B company has some form of partnerships, community, and content strategy at their core.

Process-First → Customer-First

84% of B2B buyers start a buying process with 2-3 options pre-selected. They don’t care about your sales process, or what fields you need to fill out in a CRM to qualify them. They care about solving their problems.

Your robust sales process and strict qualification rules are like building a gate along a path but forgetting to build the fence. People are just going to go around it.

Instead you need to adopt a customer/buyer-first mentality and recognize that the way buyers buy has changed drastically in the last few years.

Single Champion → Multi-Threading

82% of B2B buying decisions are made by a buying group (SOURCE). Win rates go from 7% to 31% when multithreading. On top of that, ACV is 57% higher!

This is especially true, as buyers are less and less likely to impulse purchase anything, especially with budgets slashed left and right.

When embracing GTN, you need to be looking to build connections with all the relevant stakeholders in your target accounts. Your goal is to pull the entire buying committee into your network, not just one internal champion.

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