Go-to-market as a built-environment startup: How do you eat a woolly mammoth?
Go-to-market as a built-environment startup: How do you eat a woolly mammoth?
Posted on February 13, 2020
Desmond Tutu once said, “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” Not sure who is eating elephants, but I get the point. When you face an enormous task, it’s helpful to take just a little bit at a time. If you try to eat the elephant in one bite, you’re going to feel overwhelmed and incapable. And you’re going to fail.
Yesterday I was talking to several of our incubator startups about their go-to-market efforts and obstacles. I learned that some are struggling to reduce the friction to acquire customers because they are trying to attack large segments with very few resources, and their pricing strategies may not align with the industry. When you’re going to market as a built-environment tech startup, it can feel a bit like trying to eat an elephant. Or maybe a woolly mammoth; our industry can be a little stodgy, after all. (In previous articles, I identified some core issues in our industry that keep us from innovating. Read about R&D for real estate owners and developers and the cap-ex/op-ex conundrum.)
My first real startup went from two guys to over a thousand people in three years. We grew organically and through acquisitions. My partner and I were engineers and had never scaled a sales organization. One of our early acquisitions was a company with a stellar sales team. I remember the CEO of that company teaching me that the first thing about sales was to understand the organizational chart. I didn’t appreciate his wisdom until much later. But yesterday I was reminded of him, and reminded that step one of eating the go-to-market elephant (or the woolly mammoth, as the case may be) is to understand the organizational chart of the industry. So here’s that chart: not for every construction-industry company, but for AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) firms specifically.
The C-suite
Who they are: The C-suite is composed of the top executives in the company. This can include a CEO (chief executive officer), COO (chief operating officer), CFO (chief financial officer), and more.
