The importance of a thorough Go-to-Market strategy for growth

Successfully growing your product is based on executing on three strategic pillars.?

Product Strategy - This describes what the product does for whom and how it adds value for them. (See my article on Product Strategy )

Go-to-Market Strategy - This describes how to reach and persuade the right customers who will benefit from your product. (the topic of this article)

Revenue Strategy - This defines the processes and tools needed for commercialising a product (subject of a future article).?

In this article I cover the importance of Go-to-Market strategy and provide some further resources to support you on your journey.?

What is a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy?

An effective go-to-market (GTM) strategy identifies a target audience, includes a marketing plan, and outlines a sales strategy. It identifies a market problem and positions the product as a solution. Every product and market will differ, but GTM strategies are the same. A clear go-to-market (GTM) strategy is crucial for launching new products.?

Essentially, a GTM strategy is a strategy for bringing products to market. It identifies the viability of solutions and predicts their performance based on market research, precedents, and competitive information.

Why do you need a go-to-market strategy?

The only way to determine if you are targeting the right audience, entering a market too soon or too late, or targeting a market already flooded with similar solutions is through proper planning — and you don't want to waste time and resources launching an unprofitable product. A poorly-planned go-to-market strategy can ruin your efforts, time and money when developing a new product or service.

A go-to-market plan will help you avoid mistakes and oversights that can kill product launches. For example, poor product-market fit and oversaturation can ruin a launch, even if it's a great product. 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.

Unless you believe in luck and magic, gathering deep knowledge across the market, customer and competitive landscape and using that knowledge to make the most effective decisions is the best way to reduce risk and maximise ROI.?

Let's take a look at how this works.?

Let’s take two fictional companies that have identical software products. We’ll call them ACME and Momcorp! ACME opens for business first without a go-to-market strategy. It gets lucky on early sales, but soon new customers dry up. It does not know where to get new customers. Indeed without an unambiguous definition of who the customers are, figuring out who to talk to or where to find them becomes a game of blind darts. They try to cover all bases but find their marketing budget is too thin, so their advertising messages do not stand out. The competition quickly drowns them out, and they lose the customers they did get because of the lack of support.?

On the other hand, before Momcorp has taken a penny in sales, they’ve developed an elaborate go-to-market strategy. A specific group of customers are targeted by their advertising, which is focused on a few industries and geographies that they believe are most profitable for them. Additionally, Momcorp has made sure to build a purchasing process that is not only easy to follow, but that incentivises new users to use the product more often. In addition, they can predict with authority how they will grow by tracking some key user and financial metrics and how much extra funding they will require to achieve this growth.

It is the value of a go-to-market strategy that drives Momcorp to success every time.?

The go-to-market strategy, however, is only one of the three strategies required to achieve growth; the other two strategies are product strategy and revenue delivery strategy.?

There should be a clear description of the challenges that the product aims to overcome, who benefits, and how those benefits are realised (i.e. reducing costs, saving time, improving performance, or increasing security). In addition to comparing the product's capabilities to those of similar solutions, the product strategy should also explain why the product is superior and where it falls short. See my article here on product strategy

As a product grows, revenue delivery strategies explain how the operational elements will be arranged to ensure its success. Keeping on top of financial and legal regulations is one of the most important aspects of revenue delivery strategy, which covers how orders and customer records are maintained, how users are onboarded, supported, billed, and upsold to. I’ll cover more on revenue strategy in future article.?

How do you develop a Go-to-Market Strategy?

There are a lot of fantastic resources and templates for GTM - here are 3 free templates and playbooks you could leverage to make your product a success (I’m not affiliated with any of these guys btw)