Align Your Recently Acquired Portfolio Companies: Why Private Equity Firms Should Hire a Strategic GTM Development Advisor
Private equity (PE) firms have one primary objective: maximize returns on their investments. When they acquire portfolio companies, especially in rapid succession, they face the challenge of aligning multiple businesses with different cultures, products, and go-to-market strategies. Achieving alignment across these portfolio companies is critical to driving operational efficiency, scaling growth, and ultimately delivering value to stakeholders. This is where hiring a strategic GTM development advisor can be a game-changer.
What is a Strategic GTM development Advisor?
A strategic GTM development advisor focuses on the intersection between product, marketing, and business strategy to ensure that products are positioned and communicated effectively in the market. They help companies bridge the gap between what the product does, what the market needs, and how to deliver that value through clear messaging, competitive positioning, and scalable go-to-market strategies.
In the context of PE firms, a GTM development advisor can serve as the catalyst for aligning portfolio companies, ensuring they’re moving in the same direction, maximizing synergies, and preparing them for growth. Stepping in to analyze a new acquisition’s current market position, competitive landscape, ideal customer profile (ICP), positioning and messaging structure, and how it all aligns with the proposed revenue (pipeline) growth strategy, and expectations of the firm. A development advisor can act as a supportive consultant to guide the new PortCo through their transition—often collecting insights that the PE partners and analysts can’t.
Why is Alignment Crucial for PE Success?
When a PE firm acquires multiple companies in the same or adjacent sectors, there’s often significant opportunity for growth by aligning these companies. However, without strategic alignment, there can be operational inefficiencies, conflicting market positioning and/or messaging, and missed opportunities.
Consider the following challenges PE firms face with newly acquired companies:
Diverse product portfolios: Each company has its own products or services that may overlap or compete with each other, making it challenging to integrate and scale.
Inconsistent messaging: Different companies often have different value propositions, which can confuse customers and sales teams.
Siloed go-to-market strategies: Lack of coordination across portfolio companies leads to duplicated efforts and disjointed market approaches.
Varied target markets: Even if companies operate in the same industry, their target customers, segments, or geographic markets may differ.
Addressing these challenges is key to unlocking growth potential. A development advisor can tackle these issues head-on by driving clarity, consistency, and cohesion across the portfolio.
How a Strategic GTM Development Advisor Aligns Portfolio Companies
1. Developing a Unified Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
A development advisor can craft a unified GTM strategy that aligns the vision of the PE firm with the operational realities of each portfolio company. By identifying synergies across companies, the advisor can:
Standardize messaging: Create consistent value propositions across the portfolio to avoid customer confusion.
Leverage cross-selling opportunities: Identify complementary products that can be bundled or sold together, increasing average deal sizes.
Establish scalable sales enablement: Develop tools and resources that can be used across the portfolio, helping sales teams understand how to position each product and engage with customers effectively.
2. Optimizing Product Positioning and Market Differentiation
In highly competitive markets, differentiation is crucial for success. A strategic GTM development advisor can analyze the competitive landscape, identify where each company fits within that ecosystem, and refine product positioning to maximize market opportunities. This ensures that each portfolio company can carve out a clear niche while avoiding unnecessary overlap with sister companies.
3. Enhancing Operational Efficiency
When portfolio companies have similar functions—such as marketing, sales, or product development—a development advisor can identify ways to integrate these teams and processes. By standardizing marketing operations and aligning product roadmaps, the advisor can:
Reduce redundancies: Avoid duplicative efforts in marketing spend, technology investments, and product development.
Streamline communication: Ensure marketing teams across the portfolio are sharing insights and best practices.
Drive economies of scale: Suggest consolidation efforts for technology platforms, tools, and vendors to save costs and increase efficiency.
4. Creating a Roadmap for Growth
PE firms seek to accelerate growth in their portfolio companies, often with the goal of exiting via a sale or IPO. An GTM development advisor can build a comprehensive growth roadmap by:
Identifying new market opportunities: Conduct market research to identify untapped customer segments or geographies.
Expanding product offerings: Work with product teams to create new features or products that address gaps in the market.
Scaling marketing efforts: Develop a scalable marketing strategy that can grow with the business, ensuring that new customer acquisition efforts keep pace with the PE firm’s growth targets.
5. Ensuring Data-Driven Decision Making
A strategic product marketer is skilled at leveraging data and analytics to inform decisions. By analyzing market trends, customer data, and product performance, they can help PE firms and their portfolio companies make informed choices about where to allocate resources and how to prioritize growth initiatives. This data-driven approach helps reduce risk and ensures that every strategic decision is backed by solid insights.
The Bottom Line
For private equity firms looking to optimize their portfolio companies, a strategic GTM development advisor offers immense value. By driving alignment across products, positioning and messaging, and go-to-market strategies, they can help turn a collection of disparate companies into a cohesive, scalable business unit that’s primed for growth and/or a selling event. Whether it’s by creating operational efficiencies, improving product positioning, or developing a unified GTM strategy, a strategic development advisor is essential for unlocking the full potential of a PE firm’s investment.
In a competitive PE landscape, where time-to-value is crucial, bringing in a strategic GTM development advisor early in the process can make the difference between a fragmented portfolio and one that thrives as an integrated, high-performing entity.
The result? Stronger companies, accelerated growth, and higher returns on investment—exactly what every PE firm strives for.
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