Developing a Winning Go-To-Market Strategy

Executive Summary

A global provider with substantial technical service capabilities wanted to leverage its market presence and customer access to quickly gain market credibility and establish a leadership position in key target sectors. It engaged Everest Group to create a go-to-market plan to support its objective of establishing a clear leadership position, including tripling its IT services revenue over the next five years. Everest Group defined a persuasive value proposition for this provider’s IT services portfolio, along with a unique a market approach that leveraged industry-wide market experts to enable a fast start. 

The Client’s Challenge

This firm’s goal was to dramatically grow services revenue streams to support overall improvements in margins and cash flow. While the company had an established book of services business, it sought a high-profile breakthrough opportunity to deliver unique IT services to a wide variety of customers. The company had already made initial investments, through technology acquisitions, in high-margin services delivery capabilities. The major challenge was in developing the service vision, creating the future services model, and defining the requirements to successfully launch and deliver services. 

Insight to Action

Everest Group realized that successfully launching this provider’s new, breakthrough services would require a radical approach to gaining both market and internal traction. Through understanding and analysis of emerging technological and market dynamics, Everest Group began by developing the vision for the services delivery model. Testing this vision with industry thought leaders yielded feedback and generated market interest. That helped Everest Group identify a primary fulcrum for market success, which was creation of an “ecosystem” of market leaders with symbiotic potential. This ecosystem would include influencers (e.g., management consultants with distinctive presence serving target segments), integrators (e.g., large systems integrators), opinion drivers (e.g., providers of research on topics closely related to the new offerings, industry forums and publishers relevant for the target customer segments), and leading product suppliers for hardware, important software tools, select service providers for areas required for a complete solution, and network service providers. After defining the ecosystem and the role of each of the players in the future model, Everest Group detailed the process and resource requirements to form the relationships with the preferred “lynchpin” players and the efforts necessary to drive the service offerings in the market. 

Impact

With the new services expected to triple revenue growth over five years, the client needed to set a new benchmark in creating market awareness, leading to actual sales. Everest Group aided the client in assembling its ecosystem of industry leaders to influence the service launch. With these ecosystem partners, the provider gained instant credibility in the marketplace, which led to immediate sales. The launch also created internal awareness of the new services, designed efforts to recruit and educate other ecosystem stakeholders, and demonstrated the importance of these services to the client’s bottom line.