Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy
A go-to-market strategy is the plan a startup takes to get new customers for a new product. In other words, all the marketing that takes place before reaching product-market fit.
Finding your first loyal customers is difficult because they need:
A high dissatisfaction with their current solution to make the switch.
A high expected value in your solution.
A high trust in you and your team, which often is lacking as a new startup.
Once you reach product-market fit, customer acquisition becomes a lot easier. Customers use your product longer. They refer customers to your product. And they will gladly pay a premium.
Until you hit product-market fit, you need to be lean and agile.
Include in a Go-To-Market Strategy?
Interview potential customers to understand the problems they have and the solutions they need.
Validated your business, ideally by pre-selling your product.
Receive feedback from customers. This includes understanding the messaging and their willingness to pay for your product.
Map pricing strategy.
Create a customer persona for who you believe has the highest pain and highest willingness to pay for your solution.
Detailed information on who competitors are and where your growth opportunities are.
A position strategy to become the leader and dominate your market.
When you’re unveiling a new product, the last thing you want is to launch it without a proper go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
Without proper planning, it’s impossible to know if you’re chasing the wrong audience, are too early or too late to a given market, or targeting a market that’s too saturated with similar solutions — and you don’t want to run the risk of wasting time and resources on launching an unprofitable product.
To avoid those potentially disastrous hitches and hangups, you need to craft a thoughtful, actionable, effective go-to-market plan. But more often than not, that process anything but easy to navigate.
To help you get there, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know to build a killer GTM strategy in this article. This guide can be used for startups, B2B businesses, and virtually any new venture you plan on launching.
Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a step-by-step plan created to successfully launch a product to market. A good GTM strategy generally identifies a target audience, includes a marketing plan, and outlines a sales strategy. While each product and market will be different, a GTM strategy should identify a market problem and position the product as a solution.
In simpler terms, a GTM strategy is the way in which a company brings a product to market. It’s a handy roadmap that measures the viability of a solution’s success and predicts its performance based on market research, prior examples, and competitive data.
It’s also worth noting that go-to-market strategies aren’t exclusive to physical products. You can create a GTM plan for a new service, a new branch of your company, or even an entirely new business.
Why do you need a go-to-market strategy?
Even the brightest ideas can fail when they’re not executed effectively — it’s a well-known fact that 90% of startups burn out, often within their first year.
Creating a go-to-market plan can prevent many of the mistakes and oversights that can tank new product launches. Poor product-market fit and oversaturation can dampen a launch — even if the product is well-designed and innovative.
While a go-to-market strategy isn’t guaranteed to prevent failure, it can help you manage expectations and work out any kinks before you invest in bringing a product to market.
The 4 Components of a GTM Strategy
Before we share my go-to-market strategy framework, we thought we would go over four key points of a GTM plan.
All of these points are integrated into the step-by-step guide we share below, so you don’t need to answer these questions now. Still, they’re useful for keeping in mind — especially if you’re creating a never-before-seen product.
Here are the four critical parts of a go-to-market strategy:
Product-market fit: What problem(s) does your product solve?
Target audience: Who is experiencing the problem that your product solves? How much are they willing to pay for a solution? What are the pain points and frustrations that you can alleviate?
Competition and demand: Who already offers what you’re launching? Is there demand for the product, or is the market oversaturated?
Distribution: Through what mediums will you sell the product or service? A website, an app, or a third-party distributor?
Now, let’s get started. Below is my step-by-step guide to building your own GTM strategy using the tactics I’ve implemented to build multiple companies throughout the years.
How to Build a Go-to-Market Strategy
- Identify the buying center and personas.
- Craft a value matrix to help identify messaging.
- Test your messaging.
- Optimize your ads based on the results of your tests before implementing them on a wide scale.
- Understand your buyer’s journey.
- Choose one (or more) of the four most common sales strategies.
- Build brand awareness and demand generation with inbound and/or outbound methods.
- Create content to get inbound leads.
- Find ways to optimize your pipeline and increase conversion rates.
- Analyze and shorten the sales cycle.
- Reduce customer acquisition cost.
- Strategize ways to tap into your existing customer base.
As cliché as it might seem, the first thing to do when preparing your product for market is to consider your customer.
The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers. These people make up what is called the “buying center.”
Each of those buyers typically fills one of the following roles (though it’s important to note some job titles might occupy more than one role):
- Initiator: Starts the buying process or shows initial interest
- User: Uses your product regularly
- Influencer: Convinces others the product is needed
- Decision maker: Gives final approval for the purchase
- Buyer: Owns the budget
- Approver: Final approver who pushes the initiative on a larger scale (typically someone in the C-suite)
- Gatekeeper: Blocker in getting a product implemented or approved
