How to balance immediate and long-term value with your go-to-market team

Imagine stepping into a leadership role at a founder-led, middle-market business that has just been acquired by its first institutional investor.

You’ve been brought in to help professionalize the company and accelerate growth, and you have the unique opportunity to partner with a founder who built the business, legacy team members who know how it operates and a new private equity sponsor with a clear value creation thesis.

One of the biggest opportunities is in its commercial organization.

The investor’s thesis is straightforward (your goal is to build a more sophisticated, scalable sales and marketing engine), but the path there is less obvious.

The most aggressive approach can create immediate value, but it may also be disruptive and risk alienating legacy employees. A more measured approach may preserve stability, but it can take longer to produce results.

Finding the middle ground will position the business for the strongest long-term outcome, although striking that balance won’t be easy. So, where should you go from here?

As a leader helping drive a new go-to-market strategy, your first move must weigh the need for immediate wins against the work required to build a long-term value engine. These steps can help you find the right mix:

The assessment phase: what do we need to do, and what will it cost?

Your best bet at finding out what needs to be done to grow the commercial organization is to ask the people currently running it.

The team will know where there are gaps and where the most opportunity lies. They’ll also have a laundry list of projects they’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t, either due to budget, leadership buy-in, skill level or time.

Bringing a fresh perspective in the form of a true go-to-market hire will also help keep these opportunities balanced. Agreeing on the next steps as a group will create a productive work environment and help narrow down the most advantageous projects.

Projects could include adding new sales/marketing software, shifting focus from direct marketing to sales enablement, implementing AI into the team’s workflow—or anything in between.

No matter what your group decides on, you’ll want to align the team around the project and nail down the price with your finance team, moving forward with both a creative and budget-focused mindset.

The transformation phase: getting the new CRM, hiring third-party support, etc.

If you’ve put the right team in place and they have a plan to follow through with a transformative project (or several), your job as a leader is to give them the support and trust they need to implement it.

Regardless of the project specifics, this is where the team will encounter hiccups and roadblocks, both from existing team members and across the organization.

They’ll have to remind everyone of the broader plan when questions arise about where the budget is going and why. They’ll have to stay focused on the end goal even when things get complicated.

Consider this time to be when your team is most “in the weeds,” dealing with the logistical challenge of building new infrastructure or designing a new process. During this period, it’s important to check in with your commercial organization, remove any tricky roadblocks and communicate the progress clearly to the founder, your fellow executives, the sponsor and the board.

This period will be busy, and you’ll be met with problems you didn’t know were possible. But getting over the hump will be clocked as a huge success.

Finding the value ramp: helping your team adopt new processes

If your team successfully built the infrastructure for your new go-to-market process, congrats! The grunt work is over, but now there’s a more strategic challenge: getting team members to buy into it.

The cultural component of making a major change should not be understated, even among team members who were aware of, or even involved in, the transformation process.

This is where you need your new go-to-market lead to step in and flex their EQ.

We call the best commercial leaders “extroverted analysts.” They have superior quantitative skills and steadfast sales and marketing acumen, but they’re also in tune with the culture of those around them. They can get buy-in and ease hard transitions by working closely with their sales and marketing teams as a partner, not as an outsider.

Tailoring their approach to the team’s specific needs is a proven rapport-builder. Different people and departments will have different growing pains, but catering instruction and support shows that leadership cares about their opinions and is willing to address niche concerns about the new strategy.

This is a “slow down to speed up” moment. It will feel slower to address concerns one by one, but once everyone is working toward a common goal, you’re on the value ramp of the new system you built, and the company will be poised for tremendous growth if you stay attentive and light on your feet.

The result: short-term wins that lead to long-term growth

Commercial value creation is a continuous practice, not something you can achieve and be done with.

Just like exercising, you do it consistently to get better results. There will be big wins and plateaus where growth feels stalled. If you and your operators continuously check in and find room for improvement, sales will grow.

Maybe one day the team will feel the need to increase the marketing team’s focus on sales enablement. Or perhaps the sales engine is performing nearly perfectly, and the next biggest opportunity is pricing.

The most successful companies have teams that are determined to capture every cent of revenue available, and it all starts with finding the right balance of immediate and long-term thinking.