Ten Steps to Create a GTM Strategy
Here is my ten-step process to create a killer GTM strategy:
Step 1: Define Your Goals & GTM Success
If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you know whether you’ve successfully reached your destination? Though, I believe a successful GTM is never a final destination, it’s important to have milestones and goals. So set some goals. Choose one or a few business, product or launch metrics you want to track. This might be Try-to-Buy conversion rate, or it might be Customer Acquisition Cost, or a whole host of other metrics. Then, make sure you have a plan for gathering data through the initial GTM process and beyond.
Step 2: Define and Understand Your Target Markets & Personas
Clarifying your ideal customer is crucial to an effective GTM strategy.
Consider demographics, psychographics, ethnographics, geography, drivers of need, and buyer personas.
It’s not profitable to be everything to every one. So you need to determine how you can effectively differentiate your product to attract the most profitable customers who resonate with your offering. (See my post on Positioning)
Force yourself to prioritize and focus on what matters most.
One tactic is to brainstorm a list of all your possible target markets. Then, evaluate each market opportunity. You can use metrics like market size, growth trends, ability to compete, barriers to entry, the economics of each market to determine the best opportunities.
Next, evaluate each market for size, accessibility, alignment, and overall opportunity.
Gather data and feedback from current and prospective customers as well as employees on the front line. You can even try using customer surveys and external focus groups.
Finally, prioritize your market opportunities and refine them on an ongoing basis.
Ultimately, the best opportunities will also attract your competitors, so you will still need to differentiate and position your product. But at least now you will have the confidence that you’re in the stadium where the game is being played.
Define Your Target Personas
It’s not enough to just identify the market you want to target, you also need to narrow down the specific type of person(s) most likely to be the buyer within that market. This may include several personas that make up the buying process in the case of complex, big-ticket sales.
First you need to know the problem that your product solves. Then, you want to become a master at knowing who the people are that are most affected by that problem.
The key to this step is developing customer intelligence. Generate actionable consumer insights through surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews, user experience testing and more.
Your goal is to understand who your customers are, how they behave, what they care about, and why the care about what they care about. The better you understand your target customer, the easier it will be to execute a successful GTM strategy.
Map your buyer’s journey
Once you know your primary buyer(s), and understand what problems are they trying to solve, how do they go about learning and buying new solutions, and what the steps and obstacles are in their buying process, map out a typical journey from discovery of a problem to implementing a solution so you can make sure you know how and where to communicate at each milestone to address their needs.
Step 3: Define Your Competitive and Market Positioning
Positioning is the process of communicating the unique values of your product or brand to the people who care. Make sure you know what makes your product unique in the market.
Create a competitor matrix to compare all aspects of your offering against the competitors’, and create a positioning statement to align your sales and messaging efforts.
To do this, you really have to understand your product’s key features and benefits.
Here are some questions to clarify your thinking:
What needs or issues do your target customers need solved?
Which features in your product best address these needs?
How will customers use it?
What are the most important attributes or benefits of your product?
To help determine the product’s unique value proposition, put yourself in your target customer’s perspective when you think about presenting your company’s offering. Consider:
What do you want your customers to think?
What do you want them to feel?
What do you want them to believe?
What do you want them to remember?
The better insights you have about your customers, the more effective you can be at defining what makes you unique in the market and compared to your competition.
Check out my blog post on Positioning here.
Step 4: Define Your Pricing Strategy
How you price your product might be a critical element of your positioning (for example, if you position yourself as the low-cost option). But even if you’re not using price as a key lever for positioning your product, it is critical to the success of your product, now and in the future.
To develop your pricing model, consider:
What is the value your offering to your target customers?
Are there existing price expectations?
How do you price your product relative to your competitors?
Is there a way to create a competitive advantage with your pricing model?
Be sure to consider your channel when looking at pricing. For example, most airlines, like JetBlue, charge a $25 booking fee when you book a flight over the phone but don’t charge fees for online booking. There’s little variable cost for web transactions, but call center representatives are expensive.
Your goal might be to develop a revenue model based on anticipated market penetration, average transaction size, number of transactions, and so on.
Step 5: Define Your Distribution Channels
Your channels are the way you deliver your product to your customers. Channels might include a web store, a customer service call center, direct sales people, resellers, or strategic partnerships. But there is likely an optimal channel mix that offers the best growth potential for your product, so finding that is critical.
Some primary channel examples are:
Amazon.com: website.
Walmart: retail chain.
BWM: dealerships.
LL Bean: catalogs, call center, and website.
AT&T: authorized dealers (partners), independent retail stores, and website.
The goal is to identify your channels and make sure that each channel is seamlessly integrated with the others.
Customers should be have a consistent experience no matter what channel they choose to interact with you.
The key questions in your channel analysis are:
Where do you reach your target customers?
Where do your target customers buy?
Where will you promote your products?
What is the right distribution model?
Does the channel fit your offering?
How does your offering fit with your target markets and channels?
What level of interaction do your target customers require?
Can you create a competitive advantage?
You want to make sure your offering fits your channel. For example, it is difficult to sell complex services or certain high-priced products over the web.
Step 6: Define Your Marketing Mix & Budget
Now it’s time to put all of the pieces of this massive puzzle together. You’re going to want to develop a unique marketing strategy for each target market you’ve identified in step 2.
Your marketing mix will be determined by your strategy in each market. Starting with your brand positioning, your goal is to create competitive advantages for your product offering.
Just as there are different distribution channels to deliver your product, there are also different Marketing channels to REACH your target buyers. These might include social media, email, tradeshows, direct sales, SEO, paid search, advertising. Define the touch points and mix of marketing tactics you’ll use through the buyer’s journey stages.
To develop your marketing tactics, consider:
How do you reach the economic buyers and influencers of your target markets?
What messages will motivate them to consideration and purchase?
Once you’ve defined your mix, you’re ready to build a budget. Here you estimate all your costs associated with your GTM strategy.
Consider:
Based on your market definitions (step 2), what are your primary goals for market share penetration?
What are your estimated margins over the next one-, two-, and three-year horizon, factoring in startup and ongoing expenses?
What are the human resources requirements for the first year of execution?
To help mitigate risk, it is advisable to identify the economic, competitive, and internal risks associated with executing this strategy. Outline the biggest risks that may affect your ability to reach your goals and develop strategies to address how to overcome them.
Keep in mind that your marketing objectives and strategy might change throughout the product lifecycle so be ready to adapt.
Step 7: Create Messaging and Content
List out each of your target personas vertically, and your buyers' journey horizontally. Now, for each stage in the journey, for each persona, note the primary message and the type of content for that message.
Use the messaging matrix to identify the content you’ll create which should be tailored to your buyer persona(s) for every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Creating content will be an ongoing tactic, but the matrix will help define who you’re contacting, in what stage of the funnel, using which channel, and which messages.
Step 8: Launch Your GTM Strategy
3-2-1 Launch! When you’re ready, and your product is ready - 3-2-1 Launch! It goes without saying, but make sure you’ve planned your GTM logistics prior to launch!
Step 9: Measure Results
Use the metrics and goals identified in step 1 to measure how effective your overall strategy is, as well as how well tactics at each stage of the funnel are performing (ie: ACV, LTV, Sales Cycle Length, Conversion Rate, Retention Rate, etc.)
Step 10: Learn, Evaluate, Refine
Be sure to measure and track your key performance metrics on a weekly and monthly basis so you can make adjustments to your strategies, investments, and human resources.
You’ll want to create a systematic process for incorporating feedback and learnings about your GTM strategy so you can refine and optimize it over time. This will require using both quantitative metrics as well as qualitative data, including feedback from customers. Ultimately, you want to get a repeatable and scalable growth. model to acquire and retain customers.