How to Develop a Successful go-to-market (GTM) strategy?
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So, what is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy? In simpler terms, a GTM strategy is how a company brings a product to market. It’s a handy roadmap that measures the viability of a solution’s success and predicts its performance based on market research, prior examples, and competitive data.

It’s also worth noting that go-to-market strategies aren’t exclusive to physical products. You can create a GTM plan for a new service, a new branch of your company, or even an entirely new business.

A go-to-market strategy is a tactical plan that outlines how a company will bring a product to market. It outlines the steps that a company needs to take to succeed with a new customer and in a new market and outlines the target audience, sales strategy and marketing plan that will be used.

The go-to-market strategy ensures that you know exactly why you’re launching a product, who your target market is and how you’re going to get people to purchase the product. By identifying these key pieces of information, you have the guidance you need to develop your marketing and sales strategies.

A go-to-market strategy also forces you to consider any issues that your customers may experience with the product, helping you to build trust and create the best possible user experience. So, how to build a successful go-to-market strategy…

Identify your buyer persona

Before launching your product, you will first need to identify who your customer is and, specifically, who the people are who make up the buying center. There are often multiple decision-makers who are involved in the decision to purchase a product or service. The higher the cost of the product, the more people who are generally involved.

The people who make up this group of decision-makers are referred to as the buying center. For example, the initiator shows initial interest in the product, the influencer may convince others on the team that the product is beneficial and the decision-maker makes the final approval. The user may be someone else entirely and is another buyer persona you should consider.

Brainstorm with your team to identify all of the possible personas who could make up the buying circle and research each to determine what their pain points and motivations are. This information will be invaluable later as you are creating your marketing strategy.

Identify your value proposition

For each of the buyer personas, identify how your product can solve the problem the person is facing. You could even create a value matrix for each buyer persona, where you write down their pain points, the value that your product provides to solve that problem and the message that you want to include in your marketing to address that pain point.

Define your market strategy

In this stage, you will use the information you uncovered and messaging you developing in the previous two steps. At this stage, you will finalize messaging, identify the support materials that you need to sell the product, identify the number of stages your buyers will need to go through in the buying journey and establish exactly how your customers will use your product. The sections you will want complete for your market strategy are:

  • Value propositioning: Identifying what makes you different
  • Positioning: Identifying where your product fits in the market
  • Messaging: Choosing three pain points that you solve
  • Sales and support materials: Identifying the materials you need to support and sell the product
  • Customer journey: Identifying the behaviours buyers take before and after purchasing
  • Personas: Knowing who uses your product and what their specific behaviours and characteristics are
  • Use case: Knowing how people use your product

Choose a pricing strategy
You need to think carefully about your pricing strategy, as it can indicate to customers the value that you provide. It also will influence the marketing and sales strategies that you choose to implement. Some things to consider are whether you are a premium product where you will have fewer, high-end sales or whether you are undercutting the competition.

Create your external marketing plan

This section of your go-to-market plan includes the strategies you’ll be using to market your product to the public. Some things you’ll want to consider are:

  1. Branding: If you have a well-established brand, you’ll want to ensure that the new product fits in with your branding. If you’re relatively unknown, you’ll need to identify the language you want to use and how you want to represent yourself visually.
  2. Lead generation: You’ll need to identify how you plan to generate leads for your product.
  3. Content: This refers to the types of content that you’ll be creating to help people learn about your new product.
  4. Website: You will need to determine whether your new product will be placed on your main site or if you’ll create a new location for it on a subdomain.
  5. Ads and PR: You will also need to decide if you plan to use paid advertising or a PR campaign to promote your new product.

Identify where the product fits in your overall roadmap

Because the launch is just the first step in promoting a new product, once you’ve launched, you’ll need to identify what priority level this product holds in relation to your other products. For example, when the launch is complete, will your team move on to another launch or will they continue promoting this new product

Choose success metrics

This step is instrumental in determining whether your product launch has been a success. Identify metrics that are meaningful and tied to a specific goal, measurable, operational, and motivational—something your team would want to work on. The goal should be to have an acceptable margin of success where the team is satisfied with the results of their hard work.

In conclusion, creating a go-to-market plan can prevent many of the mistakes and oversights that can tank new product launches. Poor product-market fit and oversaturation can dampen a launch — even if the product is well-designed and innovative.

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. To aid you in this process, we have a free go-to-market strategy template that can help you build a strategy that positions your product in front of your target audience.

About Scala Leadership

Scala Leadership enable’s businesses to execute their Go-To-Market strategies across Sales, Marketing, Product and Digital. We do this by sourcing exceptional senior leaders, building high-performing global teams and mapping the competitive landscape. With 20 years’ experience, an extensive knowledge of global markets and access to wide-reaching networks of technology leaders, we are the global experts in sourcing for, and transforming go-to-market strategies.

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