The Dojo case study: Why go-to-market strategy should be cross-functional and collaborative

Over the decades, I’ve seen companies commit the same three mistakes when it comes to go-to-market: 

1. Treating it as a “last mile”

2. Focusing majority of the plans and resources on the launch alone and,

3. Thinking Product and Commercial channels are solely responsible for it (or worse yet - just marketing’s!)

In reality, it should be the entire organisation’s responsibility. Operational, technical and regulatory readiness should be given equal importance when creating a go-to-market strategy, like I cover in this blog post. At the same time, channels and distribution need to be brought in a lot earlier into the process to avoid a disjointed sales, marketing and partnerships scramble.

Storytime!  

Let me demonstrate this by telling you about my personal experience at Dojo.

Dojo's distinctive white and teal devices are everywhere in the UK

Dojo has become the UK’s fastest growing payment provider in the last few years. Through their previous experience as Paymentsense, an independent sales organisation for other acquirers, they took customer feedback very seriously and applied first principles thinking in creating a groundbreaking acquiring platform and payments product. Some of the innovations they brought to the market were next-day settlement, flexible contracts, integrated payments to over 600 ePOS partners, modern software and equally sleek hardware. They were one of the first to release the now ubiquitous white PAX devices in the UK.

Another Dojo (not-so) secret sauce is the impressive network of independent sales agents, or Payment Consultants (PCs), that they amassed through the years as Paymentsense. By the time the Dojo product was released, they already had hundreds of PCs across the country. 

Dojo also had a very clear ICP in mind: “experience economy” merchants, aka those small-to-medium sized businesses on our local high streets, bringing in that personalised service to the end consumer. Overindexing on food & beverage but also strong in retail (convenience stores) and services (salons and barber shops, pharmacies, dentists, auto repair shops, etc), these merchants may have one to a maximum of a handful of outlets and have small decision-making teams: the owner is also the operator. Everything in the company was built for this kind of merchant in mind: the product, onboarding experience, service levels, reporting and messaging, among others. And like I’ve said in my previous articles, having a narrow view of your ICP can really help you achieve the nirvana of Product-Market Fit, especially in the early days.

Thus the magic formula: Strong product + strong distribution + PMF = rocketship for growth!

The 4Ps

The Dojo product and proposition were so compelling that growth organically spilled over into larger merchants, as exemplified by chains such as Youngs Pubs, with over 200 outlets across the UK.  

Cass Coulton, Insights Manager and I interviewing Shakeel Khan, Head of IT, Young's Pubs

This is where my story with Dojo starts. Back then my dear friend and ex-colleague Yasmin Sharp recently joined as VP of Partnerships and referred me into the business as Head of Commercial Partnerships. Like she says in our podcast, “Dojo was built by exceptional people” and after meeting a number of them I was excited by the prospect of playing a small part in its growth. 

A few weeks before I was set to join, I met the former Chief Commercial Officer and accepted a role pivot: to help him build an Enterprise sales team to acquire more customers like Youngs, as their previous attempts were unsuccessful. Like with any new role, I spent the first few weeks meeting everyone I could across the business to get more context - from Product to Engineering, Operations to Commercial, including PCs.

After the third week, it became clear that the challenges were the following:

1. “Enterprise” was being defined as a channel when, in fact, it is a market segment;

2. Save for the Enterprise Sales and Account Management teams, everyone else in the business focused on creating products and serving SMB merchants;

3. The product, while strong, was created with an SMB merchant in mind, meaning there were basic features and functionality for multi-site merchants that were missing from the product that were being offered as manual workarounds, such as consolidated billing and reporting. This was costing the company tens of thousands of pounds worth of man hours across multiple teams including Account Management, Data and Finance, as well as repeated manual errors; and

4. Existing onboarding processes, including credit risk and KYC, were optimised for owner-operated businesses but not for complicated ownership structures which a lot of larger merchants have.

Clearly, the Enterprise mission was more than just setting up a new channel: it was getting the entire company to understand this new type of customer and overhaul their current jobs-to-be-done to accommodate them. Not a small feat, considering everyone’s already up to their eyeballs with other priorities. 

My hypothesis was that the imaginatively named four Ps needed to be tackled: Product, Process, Proposition and People

Yes, there was A LOT to do if we were to really scale into a new market segment. For this to work, I needed to do be strategic:

1. I purposely didn’t want a team or a squad under me, choosing to be an individual contributor acting like a conductor with the rest of the organisation as the orchestra.

2. For people to actually agree to this, the mandate needed to come from senior management.

3. To get their buy-in, I needed to convince them that this was the next S-curve, armed with a business case, with data-backed market and opportunity sizing and compelling unit economics.

Without getting into the nitty gritty (this might be a future blog post on its own!) , let’s just say that the organisation bought into and executed against the game plan and it worked. Dojo not only grew transactions and market share exponentially, they acquired some of the most renowned brands and chains in the industry. 

I decided to write about my experience to demonstrate a principle of the New Market GTM framework that I am passionate about: go-to-market isn’t a job title, nor is it one person’s responsibility, nor is it about marketing, and it definitely isn’t a one-and-done. It truly should be a coordinated, strategic and ongoing process that cuts across every part of the business for it to be successful.

I will be tackling the subject of organisational and cultural change in relation to GTM in more detail on the next All About GTM Podcast. Stay tuned!