3 unmissable steps in your go-to-market process

Getting your product or service to market is tough. Nearly 30,000 new products are introduced annually, and 95% of them fail, according to Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. This article outlines three unmissable steps in your go-to-market (GTM) process - so you can stay in that 5%.

Note: when we say go-to-market, we don't mean a one and done process only undertaken when your offering was first launched. This is a process that also evolves and is revisited as your product/service, customer, competitors and market grow and change.

#1 Know your audience

Many of our clients say, “We already know who our audience is - what do you think we’ve been doing this whole time?” Funny that.?

This is a drum we keep on banging: If you haven’t done your personas or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), then no, you actually don’t. You have a guestimate of who you’re targeting, but not intelligence based on market research and real data.?

What do these bring to the table??

Your ICP defines the firmographic, environmental and behavioural attributes of accounts that are expected to become a company's most valuable customers. For instance, if you’re an ESG platform focused on medium to enterprise businesses (500+ employees) in the US market, your Total Addressable Market (TAM) would be over 45,000 businesses. That’s a lot of companies, much less people, to get in front of.?

Now if you look at your customer base, and you see that it covers roughly seven industries, but two of them are consistently problematic because your solution isn’t quite right for them - you remove them. Your analysis also shows that your customers are most satisfied with your product when they tend to be in companies with less than 5,000 employees, already have an ESG leader and at least one sustainability report under their belt. Suddenly that TAM goes down to around 1,100 companies.?

This is a much better starting point for targeting.?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market data and intelligence about your existing customers. It brings together consumer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals.?

Perhaps you know that sustainability managers and boards are your key targets. But what individual role do they play in your buying journey? What are their drivers? Where do they get their professional news on a daily basis? These factors will allow you to hone your messaging and advertising channels.?

All of us sudden, instead of the scatter gun approach to?45,000+ companies that may or may not have an interest/need for ESG software, you’re looking at 1,100 companies who probably do - with roughly 3-5 individuals a part of the ESG buying committee, who spend much of their time looking at peer reviews and thought leadership on LinkedIn.?

You’re starting to bring people into your funnel that have a higher chance of converting and are less likely to churn if they become a customer.?

#2 Know yourself

Ok, we know this point sounds a bit kum-ba-yah. It isn’t - stay with us. If you don’t know your customers, and don’t do the work outlined above, you aren’t going to understand what it is your customers really need and value. Without this, your positioning and messaging won’t resonate and even the best ICP in the world won’t save you.?

Positioning articulates your product or service’s benefits to the end customer; how you change their world for the better. It is not a list of features. It is not necessarily what the founder had in mind when they started the company either.

This requires in-depth customer research, hearing about what’s important about your product or service from the people who use it every day. It also means understanding the space in which you want to dominate. A thorough understanding of what you’re selling and the competitor landscape is needed.

Remember, this will also periodically change. This isn’t a rigid, one-off exercise. Your business, market and product will grow and shift - and your positioning should mirror that. Don’t be afraid to test and tweak as necessary.

The positioning work will then feed into your messaging, or the external way you talk about your product/service and compels customers to take action. This underpins marketing and sales messaging. Which, by the way, must be the same. Everyone needs to be singing from the same hymnbook.?

This alignment engenders trust. Understanding your customers’ values in relation to your offering fosters resonance, increasing lead gen and sales.?

#3 Audits

Tech

Firstly, do you have the right technology to support your GTM? You're going to need a CRM that can hold the valuable information of your customer and prospect data, not to mention the marketing/sales collateral and outreach that you will need to build, store and execute.

You also may be drowning in tech, and not getting ultimate ROI for any of it. Around 44% of businesses’ SaaS licences are underutilised or wasted completely. Why? One reason is that you aren't aligning your tech stack to your go-to-market strategy. 'Bright shiny things' complex can take over, leading your teams to think they need things they don't.

You should be working cross-functionally to determine the following:

• Do we really need this?
• Why do we really need this?
• What is this used for?
• Do any of these apps overlap in capabilities (so we can consolidate)?
• Who’s using a licence/platform?
• How often are they using it?
• Are they utilising it to its full potential?
• Are they seeing ROI?
• Can/should other departments be capitalising on access?
• When do all of our licences expire?
• Who’s responsible for negotiating renewal (with better terms)? Is this built into their schedule?
• What are the annual cost and payment terms?
• Is there a notice period for termination? What is it?

Once you have your answers, see where you can streamline based on your true needs. Keep this information in a central database, designate ownership, ensure teams are updating and that there are regular reviews. Or - invest in another piece of software like?Cledara?that will keep track for you.

Content

Content is key for your marketing and sales efforts to succeed and content mapping should be a part of your GTM strategy. You can download this data from your CRM as a first step so you can see title, date published, author, asset type (e.g. blog, eBook, etc.), post URL and tags.?

You then need to build in additional insights: What stage of the buyer’s journey is it targeting? What persona? Is it gated? What are the keywords? How is it performing? What are the recommendations for the marketing team - optimise, update, replace entirely??

Building a centralised content bank not only helps marketing to repurpose but gives sales an easily accessible toolbox at their fingertips; this enables them to know what is and isn’t available (and what’s needed), and send the right content to prospects and leads.?Sales enablement is another crucial piece of the GTM puzzle - check out the link for everything you need to know about this element.

Data

Let’s talk data. You need to clean and consolidate your damn data.?

Sometimes marketing contacts the wrong people or can’t target the right ones because the data has been cleaned, well, never. Usually rarely at best. There is no use bragging about your 40,000 person database if only 10,000 of them are relevant and only 4,000 are interested in engaging with you. Sales, marketing and customer success must work together to clean this and a rigorous process put in place for inputting the right data (another audit - what data do you actually need?) and regularly maintain it moving forward.?

Consolidate your data. For all of you out there using two or more (yes, more, god help us) CRMs - you must stop. Having multiple sources of information for prospect and customer data increases the likelihood of mistakes. This negatively impacts conversion and churn rate.?

Finally...

There's more work to do in your GTM strategy, but the steps outlined here are a massive start. Get to grips with a comprehensive plan, and grab us for a chat if you'd like some help.