Ooof - Rough Start To 2025

Let's get this mf'er on track tho...

Author

Tim Kilroy
10 Jan • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

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Storming Out Of The Gates This Week

Lots of Crazy Changes This Week

OK - quick updates: LA is on fire, progressive Canadian moms are losing their hunky boyfriend (just when he seemed to be getting over that whole Sophie thing), Felonius Trump is ready to light it up for Canada, Greenland and Amanaplanacanalpanama, the billionaire tech bros (regardless of age) are unveiling their true Dr Evil countenances, Hoda Kotbe had her last glass of early morning pinot (in public anyways), Jimmy Carter got an appropriate sendoff (extraordinary guy), and at the time of this very writing, the US Supreme Court is hearing arguments that will decide the fate of TikTok. If that wasn’t enough, I was sick with the flu ALL WEEK, so my content plan that I laid out in It’s 2025…WTF Happens Next? (Agency Inner Circle #36) is already horribly off track.

Let’s Get Back On Track With GTM 2.0

Anyhow - let’s talk about GTM 2.0. For a long time, GTM (Go To Market) was a really simple game:

  1. You identify your ideal client profile by thinking about your TAM (total addressable market)

  2. Then narrow it down via firmographics (target client size, market, etc).

  3. And you’d start slinging some cold email (here is a dated, but I think still pretty good guide that I wrote - free).

GTM In 2025 Is Different

With the rise of marketing automation and cold outreach tools like Apollo & Clay it has just gotten easier and easier to send cold email. Cold email is still effective, but only if you use it strategically and well. But the tools have made it so easy to send SO MANY EMAILS, that recipients just start to think of all outreach as noise.

So GTM in 2025 doesn’t start with outreach. Outreach is a later stage - you have to start a much deeper level. Instead of “serving IT consultants between $25-$50mm in the US, Canada and Australia” as your market, you have to get really deep and start with the problems you solve.

Things like ROAS or SERP positions aren’t problems. They are symptoms of problems you solve. They are proxies for the problems that you solve.

You might create better ads, or have better targeting and data insights that juices ROAS. You might have a content and backlink process that creates a higher percentage of qualified traffic.

No one hires you for that. They hire you because you have helped them understand that in order to fix their pain point (low margins or poor leads), you MUST fix something (page content or ad structure) to change the outcome.

To be hired, you must understand their pain point, identify a problem that is causal to the pain, and you have to show, credibly, the connection between your skills, the identified problem and improving the outcomes that matter to them.

Moreover, you have to be able to articulate that stuff in terms that are meaningful to your potential clients in terms that are meaningful and relevant to them. (If you want to dig a little deeper, check out The 4Ws & Return on Understanding on my YouTube Channel.)

GTM in 2025 starts with identifying the problem that you solve in a way that resonates with your audience. Once you identify the problem, know how to articulate its impact effectively, and deeply understand the benefit of the solution, you are ready to Go To Market.

Wait…How The F&<#! Do We Do All That?

This is where the strategy part comes in. Before you go all willy nilly into spam everybody mode, you have to start testing your hypothesis. Think about your current clients…in fact, talk to them and understand what benefits they get from working with you. (I can 99.78% guarantee that it isn’t precisely the same as what you think.) This is your 1st glimpse into the real value of your agency.

Grab all that info about the problems your clients tell you that you solve and start creating content around it. It should resonate. Reach out to people who are similar to your clients and ask them if you are thinking about the problems in the right way - heck maybe even sell to one of those folks.

Land 5, 10, even 20 clients in this way…where the connection between you and client is based around your solution and the meaningful resolution of the clients issues, and not some kind of special magic to avoid spam filters, and you are going to have a solid, specific set of value propositions around which to build content, find effective distribution, generate relevant and meaningful cold outreach, perhaps buy some ads to shine more light on the pervasiveness of the problem. This is the flywheel of GTM - deep understanding of impact of problem and benefit of solution gives you more market authority which helps you land more business. More business lets you see the problems more clearly and deeply, and can continue to refine and expand your solutions to generate another few bazillion flywheel revolutions.

Your Experience & Insight IS The Strategy

A buddy of mine, Matthew Hunt from Demandii used to say to me all the time, “Tim, the list is the strategy.” I always laughed along and shook my head, but I didn’t really get what he was saying. It has taken me years, but I do finally understand…

Your outreach list isn’t a filtered list of your total addressable market. It’s a curation - or better yet, a distillation of an ocean-sized market into a small touch tank where the fish trust you to feed them and you trust them to not bite your hand off. It is an environment where most of the variables have been removed - you know that you can help your target clients and they understand the benefit of your help.

Your initial Go To Market strategy is to understand the market, the problem, the impact, the solution and the benefit well enough that getting the most problem-qualified clients is easy. (It may not be a huge market, it may not be super-profitable, but under the right circumstances, you know that your GTM strategy is right, the clients who need you the most are easy to land.

We’ll Talk More About This…But Let Me Leave You With This Question:

How Well Do You Understand Your Client's Problems?

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News & Notes

Bravado from the Folks at Xitter? No Way!?! At CES this week, Linda Yaccarino - the X CEO said that Xitter’s ad tech folks have unlocked a “holy grail”. TBH, this is really the only thing that I think of when I hear Holy Grail and Elon in the same paragraph

Nvidia Drops Some New Hardware: So, Nvidia’s announcement of a mini-sized supercomputer for data scientists and developers was pretty slick, it isn’t really an ad thing…except, CEO Jason Huang said that they didn’t have a good name for it yet - and are currently calling it “Project Digits”. (le siiiiigh) He then went on to say, “If you have a good name for it, reach out to us…” Y’all are creative - fire up Apollo or Clay or Instantly - or whatever your mass spam tool of doom is and get in on all that unreal Nvdia opportunity.

New Year, New Agency Growth - That’s a real saying, right? Anyhow, getting a few growth reps in is good for your agency body and mind. If you want to dip your toes in and see what meaningful business and executive skill growth feels like, Agency Kickoff is a great place to start. Or if you’d like to be a beta client in my “as yet to be named” done with you GTM program (I think it’s going to be Agency Breakout, but TBD), let’s chat and see if we’d be a good fit.

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