Direct football GTM worked for a long time. Boot the ball upfield, get it into the (in)box, eventually break through with a 1v1 move, a deflection, or a defensive mistake.
Today you’ve got to play a tiki-taka style GTM -- pass, move, keep passing, keep moving…a pass (or in our case, a post) eventually unlocks the defense and creates the chance.
I can't tell you which pass is going to create a goal…just like I can’t tell you which post is going to create the prospect.
But I can tell you that Spain completed 763 passes to win a World Cup final 1-0.
Thanks for reading!
~Eric
Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss
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Boot it up to the big lad!
Direct football hinges on the idea that if you launch enough balls forward, one eventually finds its way into the net. It’s easy to love because it’s fast, exciting, and it always looks like it's going to work -- the ball is always getting into the box, we just need to get lucky!
(Remind you of any GTM motions of the past several years…say maybe cold email?)
Turns out it is much harder to get lucky – defenders got bigger and faster, defenses got more organized, and teams figured out that possession is the best defense. Similarly, after seeing long ball cold email after long ball cold email, your prospects figured out how to deal with it…by ignoring it or hitting the “this is spam” button.
Tiki-taka rose to prominence as a way to control teams and beat increasingly organized defenses. It works because it controls possession, which forces defenses to work hard, which can create opportunities through quick, clever passing.
It’s a big departure from a more direct approach in large part because it looks like nothing is happening until it does. You pass the ball 36, 37, 38 times…and then the 39th pass finds an opening with the defense, splits the backline for a chance, and you realize it was working the entire time.
Tiki-taka GTM takes courage because much of the market still wants the simplicity of direct football -- "send 100 emails, get 1 lead". It's easy to understand and "comfortable" because the ball is visibly in the box…even though it won't work against most modern defenses.
(You already know this if you’re a marketing leader reporting to a CEO or paired with a VP Sales that thinks the solution to a weak pipeline is more activity and more leads.)
Meanwhile, the LI post that got 16 likes, the intro DM that didn't result in a meeting right away, the newsletter that didn't generate a meeting this month…that's tiki-taka. It's building trust with an audience that eventually becomes your buyer.
RevBoss was a direct football agency for 10+ years.
Today we’re all in on tiki-taka. You should be too.
Spain’s stud midfielder Rodri won the World Cup Golden Ball — the MVP trophy.
He completed 756 passes out of 811 attempted (93.2% accuracy) and 204 passes out of 222 attempted in the final third, basically “chance creating passes” — both all-time World Cup records.
He didn’t score a single goal the entire tournament.
Modern marketing is a compounding mechanism.
Every completed pass sets up the next one by moving the defense and creating the angle. The pass that created the goal only worked because of all of the passes before it.
Every post, every reply, every newsletter send is a pass that sets up the pass that sets up the chance.
So what’s the tactical set up?
For us, it’s a person-led content narrative published via LinkedIn and newsletter that sets up a “posts to pipeline” process.
Some key parts of our playbook:
Write for people first and foremost.
The content has to be honest, sound like you, have a perspective, and actually be good. Hooks and takes are important, engagement-baiting is overrated, and "Here is what my vacation taught me about B2B sales..." can actually work if you play it right.
Don’t worry too much about the numbers. We generate a 50k+ impression / 100+ engagement post for a client or two just about every week nowadays. And to be honest we don't know how or why it happens...which is tough for a recovering "boot it up to the big lad!" true believer like me. A pretty good post will get 150+ interactions and an excellent post the next week will get 8. That’s fine – just keep going.
And take the extra few minutes to repurpose your LinkedIn content into a 2X per month newsletter similar to this one you’re reading.
Write to the algorithm secondarily.
The LinkedIn algo needs to understand who you are and what you are for so that it knows where to slot your content. 2 or 3 posts per week on a fairly consistent topic is all it takes, though it is easier said than done. The trick is to figure out how to say the same thing over and over in a way that is interesting for a very well-defined audience.
“AI adoption for marketers” is too broad – “AI decision making for consumer insights titles inside of 500+ employee B2C brands” is much better.
Content matters a lot, but what you do with the engagement matters more.
You can possess the ball all day long, but eventually someone needs to be in a position to take a shot…and they have to make it. And the cleaner the chance, the more likely it’ll convert.
The big unlock for us — and our clients — has been an engagement harvesting process that turns LinkedIn likes and comments into warm outreach.
Plays like:
“Hi Joe – thanks for the like on my post about XYZ. I write a newsletter about XYZ – can I add you to the list?”
“Hi Jerry – loved your comment about 123. Can I send you a research report we built around 123?”
“Hi Jane – good to see you popping up on my post last week. It’s been a while since we’ve chatted – set up a 20 min call for next week?”
“Hi Joan – (you get the idea)
…get much, much higher reply rates than cold emails.
You just have to complete a lot of passes to create chances that are this good.
My 3 kiddos start school next week.
I found this hoodie by the playground at their school and imagined that this is how someone’s first day of school fit (and countenance) looked on the last day of school.
Best wishes to all of ya’ll for a fun, successful school year. Everything will be okay. :)