You have a product and need to find a way to get it in front of the right people. Basically, a Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive action plan that details how. A GTM strategy is a business tool and a critical component of the organization’s business plans. More specifically, a GTM strategy is the plan of an organization, to deliver their unique value proposition to customers. Managers, product marketing specialists, and other decision-makers use the GTM strategy to coordinate their efforts and ensure a smooth launch of a new product, entry into an unfamiliar market, or the re-launch of a former brand/company. A regular marketing strategy is intended to be a long term set of rules, principles, and goals set in place to guide all of your messaging through the 5Ps of the marketing mix: Product/Price/Promotion/Place/People. A GTM strategy is a (relatively) short term, step-by-step map that focuses on launching one specific product. While each product has a different strategy, the end-goal is the same – to achieve a competitive advantage by optimizing the choices inherent in delivering the value proposition to. If your product is Point A and your customer is Point B, then a GTM strategy can be described as everything that happens along the path between the two. There may be lots of different paths, but a good GTM strategy is the plan for targeting the right pain point with the right sales and marketing processes, so you can grow your business at the optimum pace.
The components of a GTM strategy include figuring out marketing segmentation and messaging, a sales method, your ideal customer base, attractive pricing, and the unique problem your product solves or improves. This may involve engaging with a new market, or, may simply be presenting a new idea to your existing client base. The pricing strategy and the distribution plan aspects will certainly impact the results, but it is easy to bias these with company constraints if you start there. Today, however, businesses need to start with the customer before building pricing and distribution strategies. Your Target Market should provide a clear definition of your target audience. This definition involves the demographic, psychographic, geographical, and other variables that can help you narrow down your focus. While statistical data can provide some perspectives here, you’ll also need to create buyer personas to pin-point the ideal profiles that you want to target. Not all segments of the total market will be equally attractive. Market can be segmented in a variety of ways; but comparing the segments in terms of the business value vs implementation complexity can help focus on particular segment (e.g. between easy wins from those segments with high business value and low implementation complexity). All markets have their unique aspects, but broad categories such as Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C) or platforms supporting Consumer to Consumer (C2C) transactions can be helpful because target markets in these categories tend to have similar scale and regulatory issues. For example, B2B transactions are different to consumer transactions with an average of seven people involved in every business buying decision e.g.:
- The initiator (who identifies your product/service as relevant)
- The End User
- The Buyer (funding the purchase)
- The Decision maker (approving the purchase)
- The final approver (depending on the organizations schedule of authorizations)
- The Influencer (convincing decision makers of the purchase need)
- The gatekeeper (who can kill the purchase decision for other reasons e.g. compliance with corporate security policies)
The Value Proposition and Product Messaging (the problems it solves, etc.) are two other key components of your GTM strategy. These help you position your brand and provide clarity to your potential customers. The value proposition can be thought of as a compelling story that helps customers understand why they need the product or service to address a particular pain point. Developing buyer personas around these pain points can help clarify the value proposition and product messaging around that pain point. In the B2B context, additional personas for the other people involved in business buying decisions can be helpful. For example, an end user pain point might be the time taken on a particular operational task. The value proposition can then be derived around the time saved and appropriate messaging developed to emphasize saving time on this task. The pain point for an influence might be considerably different (e.g. the quality of data obtained from the operation) hence requiring different value proposition and messaging.
For those of us who are attempting to build a new business, an incorrect or suboptimal GTM strategy can cost years in going the wrong direction with product development and marketing. Having a GTM strategy helps you keep a realistic, practical perspective, and lets you identify and pay appropriate attention to the less-exciting bits that are still fundamental to your success, if it is developed with quantifiable data rather than “gut feel”. Crucially, a solid and comprehensive GTM strategy will also give you a framework for measuring your progress along the way, and help you detect and diagnose any issues that are hampering your success before they have the chance to run your venture into the ground. Identifying appropriate metrics and benchmarks can help you evaluate the performance of implementation efforts, as well as validate the GTM strategy itself. Some interesting metrics include: pipeline coverage (ratio of prospects earlier in the pipeline to forecasted sales), Sales team performance (% above vs below forecasted quota); lead conversion rates, marketing /sales budgets as % of revenue.
Commercializing technology research obviously requires a GTM strategy when planning for commercial success. Any particular GTM strategy would depend on the specific circumstances of product/service characteristics, targeted markets, company resources etc. Even with a customized GTM strategy in hand, research commercialization efforts can experience difficulty gaining attention/traction in their target markets for a variety of reasons; but failing to develop an adequate GTM strategy significantly reduces the chances of success. An often overlooked aspect of the GTM strategy for startups is the role of public relations in establishing an online presence, building a brand and messaging the key value propositions. If you would like assistance developing your GTM strategy you can contact me.