Running a successful B2B SaaS GTM workshop

Welcome to the 16th edition of the SaaS Growth Guide newsletter. For the next three editions, we'll be covering how to run a successful go-to-market (GTM) workshop.

A GTM workshop is the most important exercise you can take on to define your GTM strategy. It's responsible for the success of your business growth, and it's a powerful way to align your product, sales, marketing, and leadership teams.

Here at Kalungi, we run a series of exercises with our clients during the GTM workshop. These exercises are meant to accelerate time-to-market and focus on how to set your company, mainly your revenue teams, up for success. The typical GTM workshop takes about 8 hours, but sometimes, depending on the maturity of the company, we might take a bit less or much longer. The outcome of the workshop must clarify the following:

• Growth priorities
• Defining target audience (ICP and personas)
• Positioning and messaging
• Defining the buyer's journey
• Branding
• Sales, marketing, and product roles

In this edition of the SaaS growth guide, we’ll be walking through a few of the essential components and exercises you’ll need to cover with your team in conducting a thorough, successful GTM workshop.

When do you need to complete a GTM workshop?

Typically, GTM workshops are completed on a yearly basis or anytime you’re planning to enter a new market. Even if you have not significantly pivoted your product or audience, it’s important to regularly revisit your GTM approach and priorities as market shifts may have changed your position compared to competitors and industry expectations.

1. Growth priorities

The Ansoff Matrix is a?strategic planning framework?that helps identify and evaluate growth opportunities. It is a two-by-two matrix that categorizes growth opportunities into four types: market penetration, market development, product development, and diversification.

The outcome of this exercise must answer the following questions:?

• What problem are we solving?
• Who cares?
• Where are you in your growth journey? (MVP, PMF, T2D3, Profit)
• What marketing channel will support your growth goals? These channels can be sorted into six categories:

1. ABM
2. Organic
3. Paid
4. Partnership
5. In-person events
6. Other

2. Branding

A strong B2B SaaS brand is built on storytelling, customer experience, and thought leadership. By focusing on these areas, you can create a brand that will help you stand out from the competition and attract new customers.?

3. Sales, marketing, and product roles

How to align marketing, sales, and product to make sure that each team not only communicates with each other but executes with the same priorities in mind. It’s common to see sales complaining about the quality of leads, product about the impossible expectation set by the sales teams, and marketing blaming the product team for not solving real problems for customers with enough potential customers to solve those problems. It starts during the GTM workshop with five exercises:

• Walk through the full marketing and sales funnel
• Identify the handoff points between all teams
• Define the role of each team at all stages of your funnel
• Get all teams excited and work together on a common goal
• Sign an SLA to set the role in stone and allow all teams to perform and adjust when needed

For more on defining your sales-marketing funnel, see our full article on the topic and get your copy of our funnel stage template using the link below!

Get our free sales and marketing funnel stage template

4. Defining target audience (ICP and personas)

• ICP:?Your ICP, or your ideal customer profile, is the perfect client that would benefit from your products and services. It’s the minimum viable market you could service where you can establish a beachhead.?Also be sure to see?our article here?on how to?nail your ICP and how most companies get their ICP wrong.?
• Personas:?Once you’ve found your ICP, the set of companies that represent your minimum viable market, now you need to work on your personas. The types of contacts within those companies that you can reach out to. At Kalungi we break it down to 3 personas: users, decision-makers, and executives. Now depending on the size of the company, all of these profiles could be the same person, or there could be several levels between each. The idea, at the end of the day, is to make sure that you know the different profiles that you have to interact with within your ICP, what their?jobs to be done?are, what their pains are, and how your solution solves their specific pains better than anyone else. Here is a great example of a persona template you could use.

5. Positioning and messaging

Positioning and messaging is where too many companies lose the opportunity to be different. There is a sea of solution providers for all sorts of solutions. At Kalungi we run an exercise called Best, Better, Only (BBO). It helps SaaS companies identify their value proposition pillar.?

Positioning against competitors is the next step. Where do you win all the time? What id the combo of VP that makes you stand out? These are the questions we answer with our positioning matrix exercise. Part of this exercise includes pricing strategy as well.

6. Buyers journey: what content should you be publishing?

One of the biggest mistakes that B2B SaaS companies make when it comes to content is focusing on one part of the funnel. If you go to any B2B SaaS company’s website right now, I bet you 90% of them are very top-of-funnel, high-level content. Content that’s not really actionable and doesn’t drive conversions.

The key to a good B2B SaaS content strategy is to have content that covers the whole buyer’s journey. You need content that covers the top of the funnel and the middle of the funnel as well as more conversion-optimized content at the bottom of the funnel. Your content needs to answer three essential questions:?Why should I change? Why with you? Why now?

To start building out your new library of content, use our?free content funnel planning template. Walk through the process of coming up with the right content topics and ideas to support your demand gen and sales enablement efforts and match deliver relevant content to your audience at every stage of their journey. Request your copy with the link below.

Get the funnel content planning template

Best,

Yusuf and Antoine

Fractional CMOs at Kalungi

Connect with Yusuf | Connect with Antoine

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