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Your trade shows and marketing events may be generating enough pipeline to keep your sales team busy on the phone. But instead of "When can we get a contract?" you're hearing, "I still need to convince Gary your product really is not that complex, it's just not his wheelhouse."
Your price point may be mathematically and undeniably in range of the other options your best prospects are considering. But you're still hearing "budgetary questions" and "ROI concerns" and "This is exciting, but I'll have to check with finance" slow roll your deals.
How many conversations go well until the very end, when you and your colleagues hang up, look at each other and ask, "Did you see how so and so shifted in their seat instead of answering? That was weird."
How many times have you been blindsided when, after months of progress, someone you've never met showed up to the call to tell you your champion quit, the deal is dead, and no one ever really got your product in the first place.
Yes, deals are still closing. Slowly.
Yes, contracts get signed. But not for as much as you know they could.
Yes, stakeholders and users seem to be engaged. But they're not saying, "Shut up and take my money."
The hardest part about selling a new innovation to a buying committee is that "selling to stakeholders" is only a half-accurate description.
"Negotiating a multinational diplomatic trade deal where only one of your allies is even partially forthcoming about their interests, three stakeholders refuse to come to the table without certain economic conditions pre-agreed to, and two stakeholders decided to just ski the whole time," is probably more accurate.
"Trying to figure out which teenager knows who stole the mascot when one teenager is secretly jealous that another teenager got the lead and would now do anything to destroy them," is probably more accurate.
Except.
Working with you could make each of those diplomats very happy, maybe even very wealthy. If only you knew what they were saying about you whilst dipping their toasted bread in melted cheese by the warmth of the apres ski fire.
Working with you could put every teenager in the principal's office at the top of the casting list. If only you knew what they were saying about themselves when they practiced in the mirror.
Point is: sell to a group of people and you sell to a political group of individuals, each with their unique wants and needs.
With shifting alliances.
With hopes and dreams clearly known to themselves but hidden from each other and from you.
Goals that you can help them achieve. Wants and needs your product can address.
But not if you never learn what's going on in their worlds.
Or what they say about you when you're not in the room.
So what is to be done?
Maybe you set up a call, ask them questions, try to poke around and see if they'll share what their colleagues are saying about your product when you're not in the room.
Many teams probably should do this. You will walk away with valuable new insight.
And yet, can you count on your champion not to sugarcoat what their colleagues say about you? Can you count on your team to ask questions in a way that gets you detailed answers about what Gary really means by "complex" or "simple" or "overbuilt"? Can you count on anyone to push back and see if Gary really is the best person to interview after all?
Can you learn the difference between 20 minutes of "you guys were great, the hard thing was that I needed to get Jan on board" and "Look, my buddy Joe is always bringing shiny objects back from trade shows, I never know which ones to take seriously" when the balance of a months-long relationship is on the line?
Well if you can't learn everything you need to learn, maybe you can just do more of what you're already doing. If it's a numbers game anyway, talk to more people, ship more features, publish more content and eventually you'll get to where you want to go, right?
True, maybe. There isn't a team on the planet that doesn't have at least a few good ideas they're sitting on. Ship some, you'll get something that feels like progress.
And yet: compounding your success rate without knowing what makes you successful also means compounding your failure rate — and all the expenses that go into booking that pipeline — without knowing what your buying committee is saying about you behind your back.
You know what they say: "Sell, build, and market smarter not harder."
It's hard to argue against this option. It might be in your best interest to hire a market research firm to evaluate your TAM and build a GTM positioning strategy. Hire user researchers or product researchers and you will absolutely learn valuable insights about how, when, and why your best prospects turn to your tool.
But what happens when that market research firm discovers something ambiguous about your ICP, but doesn't know it's the missing piece your product team has been hunting for?
What happens when your product team learns something that they don't know your sales team can use, so they never mention it?
What happens when your pricing strategy firm gives you great numbers — but your best prospects' CFOs are still wavering?
Most market research focuses on the size of the market or the global trends — that kind of research is important, but it's not the same as our work.
Most user research focuses on studying a cross section of single users with a similar profile across multiple companies (i.e. a few designers, a few developers, a few sales folks) — also highly important, but not the same as our work.
Hourglass GTM Strategy is based on Buying Committee Timeline Research. We look at the individuals within a single org involved with a sale to understand exactly how each person pushes for your deal to close or fail.
Like an hourglass, your strategy starts wide with a large group of stakeholders.
After I interview folks across your buying committee (including the person from compliance and that stakeholder who got added at the last minute), we filter our learnings through a tight lens at the center.
That tight lens is the series of events that made your stakeholders go from actively opposing your product or wavering on the fence to signing off and moving to the next deal stage.
Then, we push that understanding out to every department. Your marketers learn what assets they need to build to bring someone in from compliance earlier in the process. Your product people learn the calculations to add to the admin dashboard so you can show your shoppers' CFO what ROI looks like before they even ask. Your sales leaders learn exactly what battles your champions are fighting when they pitch your product to their teammates.
Every person on your team will have a much deeper and more detailed understanding of the POV each stakeholder brings to the decision table — and the series of events that led them to choose your product over anything else.
Get a way to:
This is how it works.
Few innovations are immediately and obviously awesome to the people who use them. That's why we'll start by looking at who buys and uses your innovation today — and the gap between what they believe about your product and what you know they ought to believe.
We'll map what happens before the sale. What does your team's sequence of conversations look like today from first touch to closed/won? What does a really good deal look like to your sales team?
Then we'll map what happens after your deal closes. What does a really successful team look like to your product or customer success team? When your most successful teams describe how successful they are with your product, what do they say?
During this phase, I'll interview your current team members and review your KPIs.
We'll know we're ready to move on when we have:
Phase 1 Timeline: 1–2 weeks depending on your team's availability.
During this phase, I'll interview the decision-makers involved in the deal or deals we identified in Phase 1. I show up as a researcher, ask questions that folks don't like to answer honestly when they're talking with someone they know they'll have to speak with again, and uncover the exact words people use to describe how they feel about your product before they buy.
I ask your buying committee questions about how they talk amongst themselves about your product so you can learn the language they use to describe how they feel about you. I also ask them questions about their roles and goals, so you can know exactly where you fit into the journey they're on — and learn more ways you can carve out a bigger spot.
By the end of this phase, we'll have:
Phase 2 Timeline: 2–4 weeks depending on your clients' availability to be interviewed.
We'll turn those transcripts into a strategy to close more deals and make more customers successful. Document the decision sequence, motivations, and objections by role. Identify where your positioning is landing and where it's missing.
In this phase, I'll transform all that raw data into insights and strategy.
By the time we've completed this phase, we'll have:
Phase 3 Timeline: 1–4 weeks depending on your clients' availability to be interviewed.
Optional Upgrade: Turn your VOC into an interactive training. This project might be hard to visualize now, but as you start to see the VOC roll in you may feel called to have your team hear and absorb what you learn.
We'll take what we've learned and start turning VOC data and your Hourglass strategy into closed business and successful customers. I'll provide Fractional Leadership guidance and Principal-level IC contributions calibrated to support your team through your next stage of growth.
We'll set our appetite for the assets we want to build. I'm an experienced polymath who can support your team's web copy, marketing content, UX, and product strategy efforts — or I can coach your team.
We may also use this stage to pursue new GTM & R&D questions:
Phase 4 Timeline: Indefinite.
A CEO hired me when their users & team members didn't understand when, how, or why to use their product.
The category wasn't brand new, but it was certainly new-ish to many users. And because it was so new, the team hadn't yet nailed down a way of describing who it was for, when someone should reach for it, and how it benefited users.
And yet — that wasn't the case for everyone.
Even though PLG upgrades were below where we wanted them to be...
Even though enterprise deals still took longer to close than they should have...
The people who signed up, started using it, and upgraded — this group Got. It.
They saw the founder's vision without anyone explaining it to them. They incorporated the tool into their working lives. And they won over the skeptics inside their own orgs.
So our strategy question became: how do we sell and message our product so that everyone sees it through our champions' eyes? How do we build it so that everyone on the buying committee gets it, even if their first impression is that it's "just one more tool?"
To answer this question, I ran the exercise you've read about on this page with one of our most successful teams.
We investigated what brought each person from skeptic to champion and mapped the path our product marched across the organization.
We learned folks were thinking things like:
"This product means I can do [x], which means I can spend more time in my home country."
"[Champion] brings back tools from every event they go to, it's my job to figure out if and how to integrate them."
"I didn't want to try one more shiny object, but when [event] happened, yours was the one I reached for."
Our new strategic briefs and ICP docs exploded in rich detail that turned our abstract assumptions about what accelerated or stopped our momentum into specific, concrete, addressable forces we could use to add fuel or reduce friction.
My favorite success metric from this project came from a single email I wrote to new users. The messaging hierarchy we developed from the research 4x-ed the conversion rate on that upgrade email.
But that email is hardly what made the biggest impact.
The bigger impact was that across the org — across sales, marketing, product, UX — now we all "got it." We saw the vision. We saw the future through the founder's eyes, through the champion's eyes. We turned that understanding into a strategy that dwarfed the 4x email.
Additional outcomes this process has generated for other teams include:
And as great as numbers are, the outcomes I'm most excited about are how this work helps your team.
Here's what some of my most successful folks have said about the impact:
"Before, I had heard the term Jobs to Be Done mentioned by Product Teams but not much more than that. Now I understand how to use VOC to drive our go-to-market strategy."
— TJ McGinnity, VP Customer Operations, Libra Solutions
"We were able to reduce stress, to deliver something that supports the business and move faster than we've ever moved in the past. We're able to really cut to the bottom of arguments and have much more productive discussions where the foundation of the decision is not based on the personalities or titles of the people making those decisions. We're able to design experiences that delight the customer, enabling us to get the actual numbers that we want."
— Jordan Skole, VP Product, Autobooks
"Seeing someone do the thing they're really good at is mesmerizing. Watching Alli Blum do a Jobs To Be Done interview live was like watching a magician do a magic show. I thought I knew how to do it until I saw her do it."
— Ramli John, Founder, Product Leaders Lab, Delight Paths
"Alli is one of those rare people who adds value to a project just by being involved. She has a natural ability to listen, synthesize competing priorities, and figure out what actually matters most. Beyond her skills, Alli is just a great person to work with. She's collaborative, curious, low-ego, and the kind of teammate who makes everyone around her better."
— Kristina Bierwagen, Director of Strategic Accounts, Autobooks
Book a call with me to talk about how we can build you a rumor-busting GTM strategy.