Build a Successful Go-to-Market Strategy

Imagine that you’re part of a rowing crew that is competing in an upcoming race. In preparation for the big day, your team works together to align strokes, rows daily, and ensures everyone has the right equipment such as oars and life jackets. When teamwork, practice, and the right tools come together, your team has a strong chance at winning the first-place medal in the competition. Building a successful Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is just like preparing for a rowing competition. It takes time, effort, and resources to achieve success.

Planning and implementing an effective GTM strategy also separates the organizations that will thrive from those that may sink. The right GTM strategy will align marketing, product, sales, and customer success teams. It will also enable decision-making based on deep buyer understanding, prioritize executing tests to validate assumptions, and lead to sustainable business growth. On the other hand, an ineffective GTM strategy will result in misalignment across teams, lower conversion rates, and sluggish customer adoption. Eventually, a suboptimal GTM strategy can result in the loss of investor and stakeholder support for new product feature launches.

Optimizing your GTM strategy could result in a 50% greater chance of Build to Launch success. Organizations experience several benefits by building an effective GTM strategy including higher product development ROI, stronger stakeholder support, and increased sales effectiveness. To unlock the benefits of having an optimized GTM strategy, keep reading to discover our step-by-step GTM methodology.

The Step-by-Step GTM Methodology 

Phase One: Build Baseline Market, Buyer, and Competitive Insights

The goal of the first phase is to equip your team with an in-depth understanding of the size of your opportunity. Using the information you gather, your team can set realistic targets to determine the success of your launch campaign. In addition, Phase One will guide you through the process of gaining deep buyer insights and identifying your competitive differentiation. Having data-driven knowledge in these two areas will provide direction to your marketing team. For example, understanding the challenges and needs of your buyer personas influences content messaging, personalization, which routes to market to prioritize, and more.  

The outcomes of Phase One include:

• Determining the size of your market opportunity and a unique value proposition.
• Gaining insights into your buyer personas and buyer journeys.
• Completing a competitive strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis.
• Evaluating your tech stack requirements.
• Drafting an initial business case.

Phase Two: Design Initial Product and Business Case

During the second phase of the methodology, your team will validate the positioning and messaging against brand guidelines. Using data from Phase One, you will develop packaging and competitive pricing plans tailored around the optimal price point for your target audience. Lastly, your team will collaborate to plan an effective digital approach for your launch campaign. This will include an overview of the budget needed to support launch campaign initiatives.  

The outcomes of Phase Two include:

• Finalizing the value proposition and product-market fit.
• Aligning with teams on the business case.
• Designing initial launch plans including budgets across marketing channels.

Phase Three: Align Stakeholder Plans to Prepare for Build

During the last phase of the GTM methodology, your team will focus on rationalizing the product release and concept to the sales team. You will also further develop the metrics plan and launch campaign initiatives with the customer success, PR, AR, and other teams involved in your GTM program.

The outcomes of Phase Three include:

• Aligning with key stakeholders and teams.
• Gaining executive sign-off to move to the GTM build phases.

Final Insights

Having an optimized GTM strategy is a critical capability for any B2B software company, regardless of size or industry. Marketing leaders can consider turning the GTM Steering Committee into a strategic council, such as a Product and Pricing Council (PPC) to encourage cross-functional collaboration, establish long-term operational strength, and facilitate the process of securing the right MarTech software solutions. During preliminary stages of implementing a GTM strategy, marketing teams can expect to execute the GTM strategy across all disciplines at least once to establish consistent processes, make key foundational decisions, and assess strengths and weaknesses. Over time, this process will gain greater speed and agility. For instance, planning the launch of a new product or feature release in the future will not require re-working of foundational decisions. Instead, your marketing team can learn from past GTM launch campaigns and optimize existing processes. While it may take time to get your GTM strategy “right,” optimizing your plan will help you double your chance of Build and Launch success.

Take the first step to build an effective GTM strategy and accelerate business growth. Download our detailed, step-by-step GTM methodology. >>

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