In our previous article, we looked at where AI is already adding value across go-to-market teams, from content creation and lead qualification to sales call analysis and customer feedback. But buying an AI tool is the easy bit. Making it work is much harder. Across the implementation of AI we have seen in marketing, sales and customer teams, the difference between success and disappointment rarely comes down to the tool alone. More often, it comes down to the use case, the

Artificial intelligence is changing how companies execute their go-to-market strategy and activities. From content creation and localisation to lead qualification, sales preparation and customer insight, AI-enabled tools are helping GTM teams move faster and do more with less.

So you've defined your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – now what? If your ICP is just a slide in your strategy deck, it’s useless. So how do you actually put it to use in your business? And how do you know it’s working? Your Ideal Customer Profile(s) should run through the core of your organisation, guiding every choice and interaction you have with your customers. Done well, it creates consistency across all of your Go To Market activities - marketing, sales, account manageme

How to navigate GTM discussions in private equity board meetings: what to expect, where it goes wrong, and how to make it count.

In 2007, the UK’s staple Pan-Asian restaurant chain, Wagamama, decided to make the big leap across the pond, opening their first US location in Boston, Massachusetts. While their 'tried and true' business model had been a major success in the UK, they quickly learned that conquering the US market wouldn't be as simple as copy and paste. After conducting some much needed market research, Wagamama came to the realisation that the UK and the US are two very different countries w

When assessing an investment opportunity, balancing short-term risk and long-term opportunity is critical. The go-to-market value creation due diligence work we do for our private equity clients typically covers three key areas: 1. Assessing the overall maturity of customer acquisition, retention and growth activities 2. Identifying short- and long-term value creation opportunities 3. Understand and mitigating short-term go-to-market risks This third and final

Having recently joined Coppett Hill, I’ve quickly come to appreciate how central go-to-market (GTM) strategy is to the work we do. When I first started, I had a vague understanding of how this related to customer acquisition, but the specific processes and how to evaluate their effectiveness? Not so much. This became apparent just a couple of months after starting when I was tasked with supporting a due diligence project focused on evaluating the GTM capabilities of a SaaS bu

In the first part of this two-part series, I shared some of the basics of value creation in private equity from the perspective of an individual deal, explaining the basic structure of a private equity deal and the most common value levers. In this second part I want to step back and look at what value creation means from the perspective of a private equity firm and how that impacts management teams of portfolio companies. This post aims to provide you with practical insights

We’ve explained the concept of value creation previously, but in this post we’ll focus specifically at the other end of the private equity cycle. A successful exit is what every private equity investor and management team is looking to achieve, but it requires significant preparation well in advance of the actual sale. In our experience, Marketing & Sales leaders have a critical role to play in supporting an exit. Getting your house in order Preparing for a successful exit

We are still in our relative infancy at Coppett Hill. Dave, our founder, set up Coppett Hill ~14 months ago - we imagine that the way the describe the age of our business will mirror that of the way that someone would describe the age of a small child. Months, up until the 2-year mark, at which point you pivot from months to years. What an occasion for celebration that will be. We've been privileged to work with some really exciting businesses across multiple different sector

"Value Creation" - it's one of the most common terms in private equity today. Increasingly, more private equity firms have in-house value creation teams, and specialist value creation roles. Firms try to differentiate on their ‘value creation playbook’ and capabilities. But what does value creation actually mean in the context of private equity (“PE”)? And what does that look like in practice if you are part of a private equity-backed management team? When I started working

I’ve never been a fan of popularising a management theory or tool unless I’ve been able to use it myself and achieve practical success. Has anyone actually used a SWOT analysis to inform a true strategic decision? Given this, there are two principles from Amazon’s vast collection that I have found incredibly practical when working with private equity-backed Management teams. The first of these that I’d like to share is ‘working backwards’ (the other will follow in a future

Have you sat in a Management or Board Meeting of a company in the Business Services sector and thought: ‘how can we get more customers?’ Have you looked at the Marketing line in the annual budget and asked: ‘what would happen if we spent double or half this amount?’. There is no reason that your business shouldn’t be able to answer these questions just as well as the fastest growth ecommerce or VC-feted SaaS platform. When we work with Business Services clients – in categorie

Your sales team is telling you one thing, your finance team is reporting another, and your cash position doesn’t quite add up. This scenario is incredibly frustrating and concerning as a business leader. As a Board member, I found this situation to be more common than you’d expect, and it was usually a red flag for underlying issues. Often these were symptoms of underlying weaknesses causing revenue leakage—a common yet often overlooked challenge. Revenue leakage – it sounds

Among the many ‘data gathering’ approaches that I learned as a strategy consultant, I always found mystery shopping to be one of the most powerful ways of both understanding the proposition of a business and highlighting an issue with a customer journey or competitive challenge. Ask yourself – when was the last time you mystery shopped your own business, or one you are invested in? If I look at the photo library on my phone from my time at CarTrawler, it is full of screenshot

I once sat in on an expert interview at the start of a market research project, as a silent observer. I had to bite my tongue as the interviewer diligently followed the interview guide and missed several opportunities to dive deeper into a nugget of insight that the expert had touched on. As a junior strategy consultant, leading these expert interviews was a core part of my role so I’ve led hundreds of discussions and probably made every type of mistake along the way. Qualita

Most of us have probably at some point written a list of the pros and cons, or advantages and disadvantages, of a particular decision in our professional lives. Perhaps you’ve even written one for a personal choice – like Charles Darwin, who in 1838 created a list of the pros and cons of marriage, concluding in the end that the pros outweighed such disadvantages as having less money for books or perhaps not being able to live in London. Sometimes however, we need to frame a m

I’m fascinated by nominative determinism – the notion that our names can influence our professions or personalities. Usain Bolt, William...

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' If there was one lecture at university that impacted my professional path more than any other, it was Mark de Rond’s very first ‘Introduction to Strategy’ at the Judge Business School. He posed the question ‘What is Strategy?’ to the assembled students, and received a few volunteered answers, which were all in the right postcode but didn’t quite seem to nail it. He then put a cartoon on the screen, an excerpt fro

Compared to its importance in post-deal value creation and frequency of discussion around the board table, Customer Acquisition rarely receives much explicit due diligence (DD) pre-deal. As a topic, it will, of course, be discussed frequently by Management and potential investors. But the emphasis will typically be to appraise Management’s key assumptions and decide on inputs for the investment case model, rather than a deeper analysis of opportunities and risks. Commercial D