Why is a Go-To-Market Strategy Important?
Here’s a disconcerting fact: between 80% and 90% of new product launches fail according to several studies, including this one by Harvard Business Review.
A lot of these failures are related to product-specific issues (e.g. doesn’t deliver on promises or offer a good experience), or product-market fit (e.g. features fail to meet the target market needs). But, just as important as the product-specific criteria, a critical component to any product launch is the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. And no matter how amazing your product is, “Build it and they will come” is not a Go-To-Market strategy.
This seems obvious, but if you don’t let the right people know what you’re doing, and engage with those people in a systematic way, then your product, or venture, will never get off the ground.
With that in mind, it becomes clear that your GTM strategy is just as important as your product development. And like your product development, your GTM strategy will need thoughtful insight, expertise, relentless prioritization, and a rock-solid process to be successful.
Like product development, part of your GTM strategy should include time to learn and make adjustments.
See my more in-depth post on my ten-step process to develop a killer GTM strategy. But here are the main elements of a good GTM strategy:
Define 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 set 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.
Identify your target market(s) & buyer persona(s) — Identifying your idea target market is as much about removing possible markets from your list as it is about singling them out. Also, 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.
Understand your buyer’s journey — Once you know your primary buyer(s), you need to understand them fully. What problems are they trying to solve? How do they go about learning and buying new solutions? What are the steps and obstacles 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.
Understand your positioning and how you differ from competitors — 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.
Develop 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.
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.
Define your marketing mix — 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.
Create your messaging matrix — 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.
Create sales and marketing content — 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.
Launch your GTM strategy — 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.
Measure results — Use the metrics and goals identified in step 1 to measure how successful 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.)
Learn, Evaluate, Refine — 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.
At the end of the day, your GTM strategy is as critical as your product development strategy to effectively get your product in the hands of your target customers and to achieve growth for your product.