Unlocking GTM and Growth Success: Thoughts from Connor Clancy from Workday

Connor Clancy, Director of GTM Strategy & Growth Initiatives at Workday, shares his journey as a GTM leader. He discusses Workday’s approach to strategic partnerships, unique GTM opportunities in the SMB segment, customer success, CX, and the importance of cross-functional collaboration in driving successful go-to-market strategies.

Connor, it’s great having you on this interview series. Please tell us about yourself and your GTM leadership journey.

It’s an honor to be part of this!

While I started doing GTM professionally at Workday 5 five years ago, I consulted before that at PwC and have always been entrepreneurial at school and in my personal life. In consulting and my personal ventures, I was always doing the fundamental activities associated with GTM strategy: identifying an important growth opportunity, sizing its impact, evaluating how best to make it happen, and then mobilizing many groups to achieve the mission at hand.

My biggest advice for anyone who wants to do GTM strategy but isn’t doing it yet today is to do strategy projects in your personal life or as a side hustle in your day job. You’ll learn a lot by simply doing.

What key criteria do you use to evaluate potential inbound partnerships, and how do you ensure these partnerships align with your GTM strategy?

At Workday, our partners are critical to helping us build a vibrant Workday ecosystem. We look at two primary factors to evaluate potential partnerships: the proximity of a solution to our core products and the degree of customer preference for buying together (shoutout to Drew Foster for developing this framework!). For each partnership, we must have a clear understanding of how it will support the Workday product, segment, geography, or industry strategy.

For example, our customers often want to buy Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Workday Financial Management, and Workday Payroll together, especially in key segments, industries, and geos. With varying laws, regulations, customs, and industries, a one-size-fits-all solution does not work when it comes to payroll. This is why partnerships with local providers that integrate into our core product were the chosen strategy. We started those relationships as independent software vendors (ISVs) and have progressed them over time into GTM relationships in the form of co-selling and reselling.

What are the biggest challenges and opportunities that you see for the partner GTM strategy in the SMB segment?

Workday is unique in that we sold our solutions to the biggest companies in the world right from the start. It is a huge testament to our co-founders Dave and Aneel to have built a technology that could scale to 100,000+ employees so quickly.

We started with a GTM engine that worked incredibly well for companies with 20,000+ employees, which included a heavy outbound demand motion, a high touch direct selling model, and an ecosystem of partners who implemented in bespoke ways that fit customized needs.

Now, we’re delivering a GTM strategy that works for organizations of all sizes.

To help our strategy continue to evolve, we are leveraging partners to gain access and customer acquisition cost (CAC) efficiencies, increasing our locally focused marketing efforts, and delivering simpler packaging and pricing approaches to better meet a wide variety of buyers with different willingness to pay. We’re driving continued GTM innovation by delivering offerings tailored for SMBs – like Accelerate with Workday, so customers can see quicker time-to-value and reduced deployment costs and coupling that with GTM motions that focus on fast expansion after the initial land sale. No piece of our business model is left unexamined–even seemingly small things, like streamlining our NDA process, is helping us meet companies the way they want to buy enterprise software.

The opportunity for us in the SMB segment is massive and clear–we have a sticky product and an expansive product portfolio, so getting a high-growth company early means we can capture even more customer lifetime value (LTV).

How do you integrate feedback from the “voice of the field” into your strategic GTM planning?

I’m a firm believer that nearly all GTM innovation comes from the bottom up. The AEs, CSMs, and Field Marketers are the folks being challenged by prospects and customers on a daily basis. They will always be the first ones to spot a trend. Because of this, the voice of the field isn’t just a bonus when it comes to defining our GTM strategy – it’s a critical component.

At Workday, field leaders are formally part of every GTM initiative. We do this structurally by having field representation on project teams and decision-making committees. Outside of the formalities, my standard practice is always to ping a Sales or CS leader to get their opinion or to sense-check one of my ideas or hypotheses. Having spent four years in the field myself, the relationships I have are invaluable to the quality of strategy design.

Tell us about how the customer incentive demand gen program has helped sales, marketing, CX, and product teams leverage more opportunities for delivering value and customer retention in the short and long term.

We are certainly early days with customer incentives at Workday, and we’re beginning to see early signs of success.

This program was created as a result of a few observations about our buyers:

• In some segments, our customers can be considered late majority or laggard buyers who tend to be more price sensitive.
• Tech purchases will happen with a fundamentally different interest rate environment in the next decade than in the previous decade, requiring new demand tactics.
• Workday products are sticky with a very high net retention rate (NRR). Depending on the case, capturing less margin up front could be worth the top line revenue increases in the long term.
• We’re seeing an increase in Gen Z buyers as decision-makers of software purchases, many of whom (~70%) are cost-conscious and “looking for a deal.”

Because of these dynamics, we know that some buyers will engage with Workday naturally, some will engage because of good sales and marketing, and others need an extra nudge to engage. It’s this last group that we aim to influence with customer incentives.

For our sales teams, customer incentives may bring buyers to them, or at least give them a “workday-backed” offer that can be a way to excite customers who haven’t been engaged recently. For our CX teams, it allows them to solve more problems and reward adoption–especially when we make investments at scale. And for our marketing team, it’s helping to drive more attendance to events in a world where it’s hard to stand out amongst the thousands of webinars and events.

‘You don’t have to have the perfect strategy, but you should have a strategy that everyone is aligned with and executing in lockstep with each other.’

How do you structure and follow through on your go-to-market enablement programs to ensure that the revenue teams are equipped for a successful rollout of the GTM programs?

Enablement really is only one piece. A rep taking training doesn’t often create behavioral change. What we’ve found works best is either prompting customer action that requires a response from our field teams, or equipping our field teams with the proper integrated demand campaigns to get something launched and off the ground.

What is the most challenging and rewarding part of your GTM and growth leader roles?

What is most challenging and most rewarding is the same–solving the puzzle.

Every initiative our team tackles doesn’t have a right answer or an easy answer. In fact, it’s often something we’ve never done before, so there’s no pre-existing answer either. Simply put, we get the toughest assignments.

For me, that’s incredibly motivating and fun to dive into all the different parts of the problem at hand. Having said that, it also means I spend a lot of time in a state of uncertainty. Over time, I’ve learned to be comfortable with not knowing, as long as I have the next step toward figuring it out.

GTM strategies require buy-in across various departments. How do you ensure effective cross-functional collaboration and alignment?

It’s easy to overthink this one. You can come up with a million different permutations of an org structure. Or incentive plans. Or processes.

But when it comes down to it, cross-functional collaboration and alignment can be achieved by:

• Finding an option that works best for the customer and for the company.
• Fighting against processes and incentives that don’t produce collaboration–because there will always be plenty.
• Avoiding being territorial about roles and responsibilities.
• Spotting disagreement or friction early and working judiciously to resolve it.
• Finding ways to win together, even if that means you don’t get all the credit.

I often use an American football analogy to think about cross-functional collaboration:

• If 11 offensive players all run the wrong play together really well, it’s likely the team will get 3-4 yards, and in 10-15 plays, they will score a touchdown (a positive outcome for those not familiar with the game!).
• Alternatively, if 10 offensive players are running one play and 1 player is running another, that will result in a negative yardage play.

You don’t have to have the perfect strategy, but you should have a strategy that everyone is aligned with and executing in lockstep with each other.