When team collaboration software Slack first launched in 2013, its target market was saturated, so it focused on being a solution that streamlined team communication and marketed to its target audience: professionals frustrated by the number of disjointed tools they had to use at work.
Then again, Swedish company Oatly captured the U.S. market without a marketing campaign; instead, their distribution strategy was to win over coffee shop patrons by being available in stores as a dairy alternative.
No two go-to-market strategies are exactly alike, and for good reason, so many factors shape them. Yet, every successful product launch is delivered on the back of a thoughtful, actionable go-to-market strategy. They help you feel confident that you’re marketing the right thing to the right people in the right way at the right time.
But how do you know what go-to-market strategy will work for you?
Today, we’re going to discuss go-to-market strategies—their purposes, how they help companies as a whole and sales and marketing teams, and how to develop and execute them successfully.
Understanding Go-to-Market Strategy
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a product or service will be positioned, priced, promoted, and distributed to a target audience.
It’s informed by in-depth knowledge of your customer’s journey, customer pain points, marketing objectives, market research, business objectives, company brand, and beliefs.
It fuses together a range of business functions, including product, marketing, sales, and customer intel, to form a fully aligned value proposition and action plan for launching and scaling a new product.
Definition and Purpose of a Go-to-Market Strategy
A GTM strategy answers the questions:
Who is your ideal customer? What are their pain points?
What product or service are you selling them, and which unique pain point of theirs are you solving? Is there anything already in the existing market like it?
How will you reach your target customers and create market demand? How will this inform your pricing strategy?
Where will you sell your product? Which markets and sales channels will you pursue? What will the competition and demand be like in each?
When should your product launch? When will your marketing plan make the most sense and reach the most potential customers?
Anytime you launch a product, you’re making a big investment. No matter how cutting-edge it is, its success depends on the strength of your marketing plan and sales strategies.
A strong GTM strategy helps you consider everything and avoid costly mistakes, such as using the wrong marketing strategy for your target audience or choosing the wrong marketing channels.
Benefits of a Go-to-Market Strategy
Whenever you’re developing a new product or service, an effective GTM strategy can help you to accomplish many things.
Increased Revenue
A well-planned GTM plan boosts B2B sales over time. By understanding your target customer and their needs, you can create highly valued products, leverage a great pricing strategy and product positioning, and deliver a better customer experience, resulting in more revenue.
Competitive Advantage
Creating a go-to-market strategy heavily relies on competitor research, allowing you to know exactly how you compare to other brands.
This knowledge gives you a competitive advantage because you can stand out to your target audience by creating a unique value proposition, generating interest, and keeping your sales team well-equipped to answer customers’ comparative questions.
Improved Brand Recognition
An effective go-to-market plan includes marketing tactics to increase brand recognition. Thorough market research helps you to understand how to raise brand awareness and differentiate your brand from competitors, which in turn helps customers quickly identify your product or service while building trust in your brand.
Improved Customer Relationships
A great GTM strategy means that your brand is recognized and quality. This puts you on the radar of potential customers while keeping existing customers loyal.
Combined with good customer service and after-purchase care, customer satisfaction is increased all-round.
Reduced Cost and Increased Efficiency
A go-to-market strategy is a great way to reduce costs associated with a new product launch. By planning and having a clear strategy for success, you can avoid wasting time and money on tactics that don’t work.
Clear Plan and Direction for all Teams
Much like any marketing strategy, a go-to-market strategy helps your marketing and sales team and other departments in your organization stay on the same page.
A clear goal backed by high-quality market research means that your marketing team can work in tandem with your sales team to best reach your existing customer base and effectively tap into a new market if necessary.
Strategic Learning
The nature of a GTM strategy means that there are many valuable insights into the market, competitors, and customers that can inform current and future business decisions.
Resource Optimization
The knowledge gained from creating a GTM strategy helps your organization determine where to use time, personnel, and money most efficiently.
Identifying the Need for a Go-to-Market Strategy
Hopefully, you’re convinced by now that having a go-to-market strategy is a good idea. Go-to-market strategies aren’t the kind of strategy everyone must always have, though. They are only necessary when you intend to market a product or service.
Who Needs a Go-to-Market Strategy?
The nature of the go-to-market process means that a solid GTM strategy is necessary for anyone:
Launching a new product or service
Entering a new market
Expanding an existing product or service into a new market
All companies need a GTM strategy in these situations. These three situations are tricky because they require you to know your customer base (including potential customers), understand the different types of GTM strategies and see what (if any) changes need to be made to your business model.
Types of Businesses that Require a Go-to-Market Strategy
Whenever a new product launches or a business enters a new market, you must focus on utilizing the right sales tactics and market strategy to reach and convert prospective customers.
As such, startups, B2B businesses, and new ventures, in particular, will require a successful GTM strategy to reach their target audience and drive sustainable business growth effectively.
It’s also important to note that even established companies need a go-to-market strategy because what worked for them in the past may no longer work.
Go-to-market strategies must focus on current competition and market forces because these can change quickly and significantly.
Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy
Alright, it’s time to learn how to create a robust go-to-market strategy so that you can achieve that exciting new product launch or realize your ideas for expanding into a new market.
1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
First, you have to create your ideal customer profile (ICP), which comprehensively describes your perfect customer.
You want the kind of customer who can find massive benefits from your product or service while also being able to give you enough value in return to make your business profitable.
That is, they have specific pain points, are aware of them, and have the money and intent to purchase a solution.
You can find this customer from existing customer segments or do research from scratch to create their persona.
To create an ideal customer profile, you need to consider the following:
Demographic: for B2B models, you’ll need to consider what industry you’re targeting (e.g., legal, tech, business) and for individuals, you’ll need to define specifics such as age and family status.
Location: where does your ideal customer live? You can be as specific as you need to be, whether the answer is the whole of Europe or within a 15-mile radius of a certain street in Beijing, China.
Budget: you have to consider how much your customers can and will spend on your product to shape your pricing strategy. How much your product costs influences your value proposition and how the market perceives you and your product, meaning that lower isn’t always better. Additionally, knowing what you should charge for your offering will help you calculate how much your customer acquisition cost should be in comparison.
Decision-making factors: what other factors influence your customers when purchasing your product? These are often quite specific. Some people rely on referrals from friends or colleagues. Others care about who the CEO or founder of the company is. Others still will want to know what causes and sides of a conflict a company supports financially, whether directly or indirectly.
Customer needs go beyond just their main pain points. What other needs can customers have that can shape their go-to-market strategy and boost their value proposition? You can consider these needs as add-ons to your product and launch rather than key selling points. They aren’t the focal point, but they may well be what helps a sales rep convert a customer trying to decide between you and a competitor.
Preferred distribution channels: which channels will your ICP most likely see you on? It’s important to get the top of the sales funnel right to ensure you’re reaching the eyes of as many prospects as possible. This also aids in keeping the customer experience high-quality from the get-go.
Size: for B2Bs specifically, you have to know the size of your target business, whether startups with less than 20 employees or large multinational businesses with thousands.
2. Identify the Buying Center and Personas
In addition to constructing your ICP, it’s also a good idea to know your buying center and personas.
The buying center is the group of people involved in the buying process.
For example, if a kid wants to buy a new toy, the people involved in making the purchasing decision may be:
the kid, who wants a new toy and influences their parents to make a purchase (they are the initiator and influencer)
the parent(s), who approve the purchase (they are the approver and decider)
the parent(s), who purchase the toy (they are the buyer)
the store, who decides which products they stock and offer (they are the gatekeepers)
Aside from this, there are also buying personas, which are fictional representations of ideal customers. If you offered a dog-walking app, then an example of a buyer persona could be a woman named Tana, who’s 28 and loves walking her dog but is a busy professional who sometimes doesn’t have the time or energy to walk her dog.
Buying centers and personas help you get a better, more well-rounded and in-depth idea of what you must consider when deciding what’s important before you go to market.
3. Research Your Competitors
After identifying your target audience, you can move on to market research. At this stage, you need to determine the extent of demand and competition.
You can shape your go-to-market model by answering these questions:
Who already offers something similar to your product?
How does your product differ? What can you offer that others can’t or won’t?
Which audiences do your competitors target? How much overlap is there?
Is there enough demand for your product, or is the market oversaturated?
GTM strategies hinge on understanding where your product or service fits in the existing landscape. Finding a product-market fit requires thoroughly knowing the existing market.
A great way to do this is to know your competitors, which is best done via competitive analysis.
You can start small by assessing your competitors’ G2 reviews page and filtering by relevant business segments, but you can do much more research from there, such as learning their marketing strategies, how they position themselves in the market, and more.
You can learn what your competitors do well and do poorly to see if there is inspiration that you can take to inform your approach for your go-to-market strategy.
4. Develop Your Messaging
Effective product messaging for a go-to-market sales strategy boils down to this: communicating the value of your product or service to your ICP in a way that resonates with their pain points.
To do this, you can create a value matrix.
Crafting a Value Matrix to Help Identify Messaging
A value matrix is a breakdown of each buying center persona, their business problems, and how a product is valuable in solving them.This breaks down each persona into easier-to-digest chunks. Here’s an example:
You have a buyer persona. This person is a middle-aged professional who wants to go on vacation. They make good money and are more interested in making great memories than saving. You are a company providing all-inclusive vacations.
Here’s what a value matrix could look like for them:
Pain points: it’s difficult to know what high-quality experiences are when booking online. Plus, it’s sometimes hard to get money back if plans change.
Product value: a flexible and generous booking policy that allows them to cancel with a full refund if plans change as well as a quality app with plenty of real reviews and photos from customers.
Key message: you can book quality experiences without any worries.
While the specific way in which you develop your messaging will depend on who your ICP is, you also have to consider your company’s brand, principles, beliefs, culture, goals, and more.
You need to listen to market feedback that competitors or even you have received in the past and decide what to change and what to keep the same.
And finally, your messaging should be consistent no matter which marketing channels you use, whether in your content marketing or coming from a sales representative.
This helps ensure that everyone in your organization is on the same page and that customers and prospects alike receive the same message about who you are and what you have to offer.
5. Choose Your Tactics
You’re spoilt for choice when creating your go-to-market strategy.
To reach your ICP, you can combine various product strategies, such as inbound and outbound marketing, sales enablement, and customer success.
To convert them, you can choose from common sales strategies or even take the road less traveled as Oatly did.
This can be a blessing or a curse. With so much choice, how do you know what to pick?
It all comes down to who your audience is, your unique goals, and your unique value proposition. When you know these things intimately, choosing the right tactics for your GTM strategy will seem more intuitive.
6. Provide Feedback and Iterate
Your GTM strategy can’t exist in a vacuum.
Ensure that your teams look out for, collect, pass on, and act on valuable consumer feedback. This feedback should come from various sources, such as comments left on content marketing, responses from surveys and questionnaires, sales data, and so on.
Establishing a feedback loop between marketing, sales, and product development will ensure you take key learnings from your GTM motions and can incorporate real data to create even better future iterations.
Crafting a Winning Go-to-Market Plan
You’ve now got a really good idea about what it takes to create a plan to go to market. However, a couple more things can take you from an average GTM strategy to a winning one.
Test Your Messaging
Like getting feedback for future iterations, you should test messaging on marketing platforms using messages created for various audience members.
Think long and hard about where your audience is. Are they more likely to visit LinkedIn? Is Instagram more their speed?
Message testing can clarify your marketing decisions for maximum positive business impact.
Optimize Your Ads and Sales Strategy
Optimize ads by targeting specific audience segments and testing different messaging.
Your ads need to have the right eyes on them, and that’s done by carefully picking when, where, and how they’re seen.
You may have payday sales, loyalty programs, discount codes, and affiliate programs.
However, every ad and sales strategy part of your GTM strategy should be chosen carefully because they say something about your brand and how well you know your customers.
Understand Your Buyer’s Journey
Building on what we’ve already discussed, you can also consider mapping the buyer’s journey. This is the process that a potential customer goes through, from awareness to purchase.
When mapping your buyer’s journey, you and your marketing team should consider maximizing customer relationships. Your focus changes depending on which part of the marketing funnel or sales cycle the customer is in.
Let’s consider the marketing funnel.
Top of funnel: customers have a problem. They research to solve it. Whether they know you or not, your goal is to grab their attention and consideration.
Middle of funnel: customers are deciding between you and your competitors. Your goal is to convince them that you are the best option.
Bottom of funnel: customers decide to purchase your produt or not. Here your goal is to convince them to commit.
No matter which marketing channels you’re using, whether you’re using the marketing funnel or the sales cycle (or both) as a frame of reference, each stage has a different focus. You have to consider this when deciding which tactics to use to maximize your product launch and lower customer acquisition costs.
This will help you create a robust, well-rounded go-to-market strategy and allow you to analyze and shorten your sales cycle.
Building a Go-to-Market Team
No go-to-market strategy can be executed well without the right team in place. The success of any marketing strategy relies on a team that can be trusted to know what they’re doing and what they’re aiming to achieve.
This is achieved through alignment, trust, communication, and collaboration.
If this feels overwhelming, start small. Choose a small group of core players who know the process’s intricacies and are very clear about their roles, responsibilities, and timelines.
From there, you can slowly expand the active team when needed. Of course, you must always keep stakeholders and key players in the loop.
With that said, it’s often assumed that only the marketing team is responsible for making a go-to-market strategy succeed. This couldn’t be further from the truth!
The Role of the Sales Team in Go-to-Market Strategy
The sales team plays a crucial role in executing the GTM strategy. They are responsible for converting leads into customers.
Your go-to-market strategy should include representatives from the sales department (such as your sales manager) so that they are informed about the marketing strategy, decisions made along the way, and any outcomes decided on during discussions.
They can also offer valuable insight into real-life interactions with customers, such as what works and what doesn’t, how customers might react to certain aspects of the marketing strategy, and more.
This helps you to catch things you may have missed before you go to market, potentially avoiding expensive, large-scale mistakes.
What’s more is that everyone in your sales team, from managers to customer service advisors, will be well-informed and therefore well-equipped to deliver high-quality service to existing and potential customers when you do go to market.
The Importance of Aligning Marketing Strategy and Marketing Efforts
Aligning marketing strategy and efforts is essential to ensure that all teams work towards the same goals and objectives.
Your marketing department must be aware of exactly what they need to do and how any marketing strategies they may use fit into the bigger picture of the GTM strategy.
When marketing strategies and efforts are aligned, customer satisfaction increases because everybody in your organization is on the same page, working in tandem to achieve common goals.
Executing and Optimizing Your Go-to-Market Strategy
Whether you’re looking to continue tweaking plans for a product launch that’s right around the corner or just in the idea stages, there are a few factors to consider that may help you finetune your plans.
These factors are some that tend to be overlooked, which is a mistake as they work well in tandem with the other factors covered previously in this article.
Measuring Success and Optimizing
Metrics are fundamental in improving your go-to-market strategy and refining your sales process; implementing a suitable system will improve your sales team’s performance.
Selecting KPIs and metrics will depend on your goals, brand, and consumers. Once you’ve selected them, you can set realistic targets and plan for different results.
This will help you quantify your strategy and what, if anything, to change.
Strategizing and Writing Content
Whether it’s within the product marketing department itself or in marketing, you need to create a bank of content to help you deliver your GTM master plan.
Content marketing is a tried-and-true strategy that helps customers connect with your brand. They can learn more about your brand, the backstory behind your organization and your products, the ingredients that you may use, your sources, your ethos, get novel ideas for your products or services, and more.
You can also establish yourself as an authority in your industry/market and even differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Overcoming Common Go-to-Market Challenges
No definitive GTM guide would be complete without discussing the dreaded challenges of going to market.
However, with a GTM strategy that’s well-planned, detailed, and supported by research and data, you will have more than enough to ensure that the chances of you getting something wrong with your plan will be incredibly slim.
What are common challenges when going to market?
Generally speaking, the challenges you may face when going to market include:
Understanding your market
Successfully differentiating what you offer
Aligning your organization
choosing the right channels
Measuring results
Optimizing results
Adapting to market changes
Scaling
At this point, you can probably see that these challenges are very similar to those you need to research when putting your plan together.
It’s also probably quite clear why we stated that a well-researched plan created based on data will alleviate any worries you might have.
However, two challenges require a bit more focus.
Adapting to Changing Market Conditions
Building a successful company requires continuous improvement and iteration.
Our best advice is to take time to revisit and refine your plan, focusing on what’s working and what’s not.
Make good use of your KPIs and customer feedback. They can tell you if something in your plan is going awry due to changing market conditions.
In most cases, you can pivot and successfully adapt to the updated market conditions as long as you’ve got your eye on the ball and are responsive in a way that makes sense for your brand, product, and customers.
Scaling Your Go-to-Market Strategy
A scale-up business is just one step up from a start-up because you can treat your business like you’re still in the beginning stages of your organization.
Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions among enterprise businesses—and a big pain point for PMMs—is that they believe that because their organization is so well established, they no longer need to make the effort to continue improving and refining their product marketing strategies.
This is, of course, not true! Remember the instances when a GTM plan is necessary. When the moment comes, it’s necessary for any business of any size.
The challenge with scaling is that, much like changing market conditions, there may be new factors and ideas to consider. Some examples include new team members, new markets, new competitors, and more.
Yet, if you follow the principle of creating a solid GTM plan, then even scaling and its related problems can’t stand between you and success.
Case Studies
Hopefully, any fears that you may have had are now assuaged. At this point, we’ve talked a lot about many different aspects of and things related to going to market, so now would be a great time to take a look at a couple of case studies that can help us further conceptualize going to market before we wrap this guide up.
Fitbit Smart Coach and Upscope
Fitbit’s GTM strategy started with simple, attainable objectives, including launching the “Get More With FitBit” campaign, which used paid and owned channels to reach the target audience.
They made their objectives simple and attainable, namely:
build brand awareness
increase revenue from subscriptions
improve subscription attach rates
They used push notifications, social media accounts, retargeting display ads, and newsletters to reach their target audience and, as a result – earned $192 million in revenue.
Moving on to another company, Upscope is an interactive screen-sharing platform focused on a universal pain point—the annoyance of setting up screen-sharing.
Their GTM plan focused on leveraging the market trend of live chat. They targeted those they thought needed most, such as technical support, customer service advisors, and onboarding specialists.
They found success as well.
The lesson here is that they knew what they needed to do because they listened to what was happening in their markets and made data-driven decisions.
Conclusion – Having a GTM Plan is all about Optimizing for Growth and Expansion
Bringing a product to market is always exciting and stressful. It’s a huge investment, and it can make you feel like you’re waiting with bated breath.
Hopefully, this guide has given you enough information to take the reins with the confidence that you know what to do to succeed—because you do.
You can set up your next launch for success with a solid framework.
Importance of a Well-Executed Go-to-Market Strategy
A strong GTM strategy helps businesses launch a new product or service quickly, efficiently, and successfully into the right markets.
It helps define target customers, develop an effective marketing plan, and create a scalable sales and distribution model.
It even benefits those within an organization by helping everyone stay on the same page and focus on the same goals.
Recap of Key Takeaways
A well-executed GTM strategy drives growth and success in any business.
By understanding your target customer, developing effective messaging, and choosing the right tactics, you can create a GTM strategy that sets your business up for success.
