Accelerating your routes-to-market with optimized GTM alignment

This article originates from Janani's presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in San Francisco, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.

Why do you need a GTM strategy? Well, not to freak you out, but 95% of new products fail in the first year. Those launches could fail because of poor timing – for example, I worked in an automotive company that was trying to improve energy efficiency, and then electric cars started entering the market.

Maybe it comes down to product issues – let's just blame it on the product team. It’s always the product and never the marketing, right? Well, no.

The truth is you could build the best product in the market that solves all your customers’ pain points, but if they don't know where to find it, they're not going to buy it. That’s why you need a rock-solid GTM plan that puts the product or services in your customer's hands.

In this article, I'll look at:

• The key questions your Go-to-Market strategy should answer
• The target customer
• Value propositions
• Routes to market
• Our multifaceted approach to Go-to-Market
• A communication plan
• Pricing strategy
• Operational readiness
• Metrics
• Key takeaways

The key questions your Go-to-Market strategy should answer

So we know we need a Go-to-Market strategy, but what are the key questions it should answer? Let's see.

Who is your buyer persona?

This is critical. When I was consulting for a data analytics company, they told me their buyer persona was everybody. I said there was no way it could be everybody. They said anyone who uses data is their persona. We all use data – we use email and we have shared folders, but we're not all their customers, right?

After much probing, that buyer persona went from everyone to one particular target market. We found out that their buyer persona is IT vendors who build data warehousing products.

What are you trying to sell?

Not the features, not the capabilities, but what is the pain point you're trying to solve for your customers? Why should they care about your product? What is the unique selling proposition of that product?

How do you reach your customers?

This is where routes to the market play a critical role. You want to make sure customers can find your product. You also want to look at how they’re going to buy it. Is there a promotion or a discount? Are you in a very competitive market, where you need a solid pricing strategy to be attractive to customers?

Why would your target customers want to buy this product?

Is it unique and disruptive? Is it paradigm-shifting? Is it a price play? For example, imagine that you have an anti-virus product, and, I come from CrowdStrike and I say, “Hey, I have a product that'll do it better and cost you less.” That might be a pretty tempting offer.

When are you launching?

Timing is everything. Ideally, you want to have the first-mover advantage, but if you don't have it, you at least want to make sure that you hit the market before your competition gets there.

Where are you going to focus your marketing and sales strategy?

How are you going to enable your sellers to reach the target audience? What is your marketing mix going to look like?

These are the six key questions, and I’ll repeatedly touch upon these themes as we move through the article.

Now I’m going to lay out a seven-element activation plan that will enable you to answer all these questions, nail your GTM strategy, and measure your success after your product has launched. Whether your company is big or small, you’ll want to keep all of these elements in mind as you prepare to go to market.

Target customer

Who are you selling to?

The first thing you want to do is identify your buyer personas. Once you’ve researched them, you want to make sure you validate them – people often forget this step. Validating your personas means talking to analysts, talking to your customers, talking to your sales reps, and making sure that your personas hit the mark.

Because I'm in the cybersecurity space and I don't want to get into trouble, I'm going to use a fake company for all of my examples. It’s an amalgamation of all the companies I’ve consulted and worked for – we'll call it AcmeCloud.

These were some of the sample personas we came up with at AcmeCloud. You might think six personas are a lot, but they each fulfill different functions. There’s not just a buyer; there could also be an influencer or a ratified.

For example, we found out that procurement and the CFO office were questioning why the company was buying products and what problem these products would solve.

From this list of personas, we built persona cards that talked about their problems, possible solutions, and where they’re shopping to boost our sales playbooks.

Value proposition

What should you address in your messaging?

Now you have your buyer persona, it’s time for the fun part. I see a lot of product marketers get excited about writing the messaging document, but in order to write that document, you need to understand the market and what it is about your product that uniquely solves the customer's pain points.

You also need to also understand how the product works so you can translate it into something the customer understands.

For this, it's critical that you get the messaging and the value proposition right and make sure your competitive differentiation really stands out.

Rather than simply saying that your feature sets are better, communicate to the customers why the old way doesn’t work and how you’re going to fix that, always keeping in mind the brand experience you want to drive for the customer.

The final thing you want to do is create messaging pillars. Your marketing team needs to be able to tease apart each of these pillars and use them to run campaigns that will hit different target audiences, so you want to give them options.

For example, at AcmeCloud, our first pillar was, ‘Everyone is adopting digital transformation, so you need to think about moving to the cloud.’ Great, but maybe they're already in the cloud.

For those customers, we zoom in on the fact that we’re faster or cheaper than their current cloud solutions. That’s just one example of why it’s important to have different messaging pillars to hit a broader audience.

Routes to market

How are you going to reach your target audience?

Now you’ve figured out our messaging, let’s dig into where you’re going to share it. You’ll need to make a lot of important decisions here:

1. Direct vs indirect: Do you want to go after direct sales, or will you be selling indirectly, through a reseller or distributor?
2. Push vs pull: Are you pushing the products through advertising, or are you waiting for people to search for content before you serve up your products?
3. Horizontal vs vertical: As I said earlier, your persona cannot cover everyone. Maybe you want to target finance because they’re early adopters.
   Maybe you want to go after retail because you have data warehousing for retail customers. Maybe you want to go after defense because you're a cybersecurity product. Your channel mix will depend on the horizontals or verticals you’re focusing on.
4. B2B vs B2C: Are you selling directly to your users through, for example, Facebook or Instagram, or are you selling to enterprises that service other users?

Our multifaceted GTM

At AcmeCloud, we took a multifaceted approach to our GTM plan. We started with a direct sales team, which consisted of field sales and inside sales, as well as some more specialized folks.

Next, we looked at strategic services. This meant identifying specialized GTM partners for the verticals we were targeting, plus sales and services partners.

For example, as a cybersecurity firm, we went after legal firms because they get a lot of questions from their customers about how to make sure they were secure. Those legal partners would then recommend AcmeCloud.

We also mapped out our global channels, giving us the reach we needed to scale and go after different geographies. These included cloud marketplace, global system integrators, and regional value-added resellers.

We had to make sure that when these resellers are selling our products, they're bundling them as solutions – that increases customer stickiness.

Next, we built strategic partnerships. We secured technology partners, integration partners, MSSP partners, and OEM partners. These partners bundle up solutions and sell them as a whole.

Last but not least, we leveraged product-led growth through self-service options and free trials. Your sellers can’t be on the go 24/7, but you always want customers to be able to discover your products. Free trials are a great way to make this happen. You also want to make sure you have freemium offers to get people hooked.

Communication plan

How will your customers hear about this?

As you plan your channel mix, you want to think about where you are in terms of your product adoption lifecycle. Are you marketing to the innovators or the laggards? You want to create your marketing mix based on that lifecycle and all the homework you’ve already done on your personas.

You also want to think about which part of the funnel you’re targeting. Are you building market awareness and brand reputation at the top of the funnel, are you aiming to secure more leads further down the funnel, or are you trying to get more conversions through demos and hands-on technical collateral for your customers at the bottom of the funnel?

At AcmeCloud, we used a simple framework from SiriusDecisions which spans the entire funnel. At the top of the funnel, we looked at AR, PR, and executive comms, ensuring that leaders would socialize our message.

We also looked at demand gen activities like webinars, content syndication, and events, and then we made sure we solicited customers for testimonials, case studies, and all that good stuff.

Pricing strategy

What’s the best pricing model for your product?

Now let's move on to our pricing strategy – my favorite topic. It’s really hard to get good pricing. Sometimes you’re just putting your finger to the wind and seeing what happens.

With SaaS products, there are multiple pricing options. You can go freemium and give customers the product for free for 15 days before the billing kicks in. You could offer a flat rate and bill your customers the same amount each month no matter how much they consume.

Or, you could go for a consumption-based model, so customers only pay for what they consume. Alternatively, maybe a tiered pricing model would work best.

You’ll also want to think about the product introduction phase. You could give out promo codes and discounts while you’re getting your product off the ground. Credits are an option too. For example, the more instances you run with Amazon, the more credits they give you back.

At AcmeCloud, we started with direct sales pricing – a very simple subscription-based yearly pricing model. If the customer buys 1000 units, we charge for 1000 units. Defining the unit is critical when you're building your pricing strategy. You want to make sure that you have the right quantities in the right tiers for your customers.

Next, we created a discount strategy. We had to look into how we could give discounts without giving up our margins. After that, we created channel-based pricing.

Remember: every region has different channels, and they have different pricing structures, so you need to make sure you give discounts that are applicable to your channel. We also built tiers within the channels. Better partners get better discounts, and that’s an incentive for them to climb the ladder.

Finally, we also have our self-serve model. Customers can download our product through Google Play or the App Store, which offers pricing mechanisms with free trials and self-serve pricing.

Operational readiness

How will you communicate with your stakeholders?

The final thing that I've always seen as very difficult is operational readiness. How do you make sure that all your stakeholders are educated on what's coming? If you have new people coming in and being onboarded, how do you make sure they're aligned and enabled?

All too often, you can find yourself running a launch event, only for a seller to turn around and ask what the product is because they’ve never heard of it. You need to make sure everyone is kept in the loop when you're bringing in new products. Let’s look at a process for that.

Step one: Identify stakeholders and resources

First, you want to make sure that you identify all the resources you need to launch the product. Whether you call it a tiger team, a scrum, or a war room, you want to get everybody in the same room or on the same Zoom and tell them what is happening.

While you’re there, identify who the owners are. You want representation from sales, support legal, and finance. You want to make sure your product management and marketing functions are along for the ride as well.

Step two: Develop your GTM plan

Then you come up with a GTM development plan, making sure that you cover all your bases from the personas and market research, all the way down to launch plans and pre-briefing your media and analyst relations.

Step three: Align your business processes

The next thing you want to do is process alignment. A problem I’ve seen come up a lot is products being launched without being added to the CRM, which means the sales folks can’t give quotes on it.

Whether product marketing or someone else owns that process, make sure you can cross it off your list. I always make sure that I tell my sellers when a new product is coming and I tell my sales ops folks so they can add it to Salesforce.

Likewise, you also want to make sure that any marketplaces that list your products are updated. At one point we had launched so many products and we then found out they weren’t in our cloud marketplace listings on Amazon and Azure.

Guess what? I own that now. I have to make sure that those marketplaces are up to date, the pricing is matched, the taxes are confirmed, and the terms and conditions are also taken care of. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

Step four: Update your internal communication channels

The next thing to think about is which internal communication channels to use. Whether you use Slack, email, Zoom recordings, or Confluence, make sure it's up to date and everything is in one place. Your sales team is probably using an LMS, and you want to make sure that you update that as well.

Step five: Ongoing reporting

Once you're done with the launch, then come the metrics. How will you measure success? Are you hoping to see more people signing up for your webinars? Do you want to see a bump in revenue? This is where ongoing reporting comes into play.

Metrics

What does success look like?

What success looks like is going to vary from company to company and department to department.

For the sales team, let’s say you decide to focus on revenue – you're not going to hit your revenue targets on day one, especially if it's a new product, so you might also want to look at the number of people asking for proof of concepts (POCs) and the rate at which they convert into sales. You need visibility on where people start falling off. For that, you need metrics at every single stage.

Your marketing metrics might focus on the pipeline. We do a very aggressive pipeline roll-up by region, and I’d recommend you do the same. You also want to tread carefully with your MQLs.

We did an event in New York during the heatwave; they opened the doors, and we got around 8000 leads. Excellent, right? Not really. Most of them were just people coming in off the streets to escape the heat. Make sure your leads are qualified and check how they convert into sales.

At AcmeCloud, we had multiple metrics. For marketing, we focused on share of voice, doing press releases, and paid media to make sure we got it.

We’re in a crowded market, so we tracked search rankings too. And then we looked at campaign performance – in other words, how many people registered and showed up for events, and how many clicked through the emails we sent.

For sales, we focused on annual recurring revenue, annual contract value, total contract value, net new customers, and things like that. We also tracked channel metrics.

They have access to all of our content and products, so we want to make sure that they follow up with metrics as well. What is the growth of the channel? How many channel partners were onboarded? How many partners were sourced?

Finally, we can’t forget the product metrics. We track the lifetime value of new customers, as well as how many people take trials, how many people convert to the paid plan, and the feature retention rate. We always track how many people in 1000 are using each feature and where we see the propensity to convert into a cross-sell too.

Key takeaways

🚀 GTM alignment is critical for your product launch. Keep reminding yourself of the six questions: who, what, how, why, when, and where.

🖼️ Make sure you adopt some kind of framework to make your GTM consistent and scalable. This will really help you as you scale your company and bring new people on board across your cross-functional teams.

📈 Finally, you want to make sure you have the right metrics and keep calculating at each stage how these metrics are performing.

When you do all this, you’ll be able to get the right product to the right audience at the right time through the right channel.