So what are “Fractional GTM Services” anyway? Let’s break that term down.
Fractional is a more nuanced term for “part time”. But “fractional” is slightly more descriptive – more than just being part time, it helps you see a fractional resource as “time-slicing” or virtualizing their services. It implies that a professional is applying their craft to different technologies, further honing their craft. It also fits the gig economy model that more and more companies and individuals are taking advantage of today. In a sense, it’s nothing truly new; consultants have been providing fractional services for a very long time.
Go-To-Market or “GTM” is shorthand for anything that a company does to bring a service or product to market. Sometimes GTM gets equated to Sales, but it’s really much bigger than that; it involves many functions and roles that need to work together to get a product or service into the hand of customers. This includes things like:
- Sales and Business Development
- CTO
- Architect
- Solution Architect, Solution Engineering
- Sales Engineering and Systems Engineering
- Product Management
- Marketing and Technical Marketing
- Customer Success
There are many other places where Fractional Services can be useful – it’s not just a GTM thing. I’ll explore that in future blog posts.
So what types of clients take advantage of Fractional GTM services?
- You might be a startup and not ready to invest in full-time GTM hires
- You’re really good at your tech and you want to test the water and see how the market – or what markets – your solution will fit in
- You could be launching a new product or service and you want to test it first without burdening people on your team who are already busy
- You’re thinking about starting to build your team but you’d like to “try before you buy” and see how people fit in via gig mode before offering full-time employment
There are significant advantages you get from fractional services. By leveraging the gig work trend, it fits the career choices more people are making, giving you access to a broader pool of professionals and expertise. There is very little risk to you as a client, starting out in fractional mode for specific roles in your company. Perhaps most importantly, you get the benefit of the wide variety of experience and knowledge from those fractional resources that are time-slicing with other projects in the market today.
TechSalesCraft benefits from this as well. It lets us draw on people who are practitioners in a wide variety of technologies.This also feeds in to our Advising and Coaching services, giving us exposure to all sorts of personality types in many different tech areas. I personally enjoy the exposure to and ability to learn about lots of new tech and products, not being limited by a single corporate strategy, and connect the dots between products and solutions from different companies. It really enables me to bring real solutions to customers that require and benefit from multiple tools and products from different suppliers.
It would be hard for me to overstate how much I enjoy this; to be direct, it’s very cool and I absolutely love this mode of solution development and delivery. Part of me wishes I made this career choice years ago. For various reasons, I just wasn’t ready – but I am now.
Over the course of my career, I have loved being a part of this broad Internet Tech ecosystem. Technologies, products, and companies and products rise and fall – but the bigger ecosystem does a pretty good job of bringing new solutions to the forefront. We leverage our fractional services model for your advantage.
Please reach out to us via TechSalesCraft to talk about how Fractional Services can work for you.