How to drive more impactful GTM strategies with market and customer insights

Hi there! Thanks for joining me as I share my insights on how to drive more impactful go-to-market strategies with market and customer insights.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• The high stakes of going to market
• What makes a strong go-to-market strategy
• Four practical ways that market and customer insights can inform your strategy and execution
• How you can get started today

But first, let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Mike Greenberg. I'm the Director of Product Marketing at Momentive, where I lead a fantastic team looking after our core SurveyMonkey products and competitive intelligence.

Now, without further ado, let’s dive in.

The high stakes of going to market

I’ll start with some data from PMA’s State of Product Marketing Report. We, as product marketers, have a pretty tough job. Just look at this list of responsibilities:

The majority of us own positioning and messaging, sales collateral, market research, and much more. More than half of us also handle things like building personas, conducting competitive intelligence, and content marketing – and that’s just scratching the surface.

On top of all this, according to PMA’s 2022 State of Go-to-Market Report, most product marketers are in charge of leading the go-to-market process and product launches. 

Now, go-to-market strategy can really make or break your business. If you get things wrong, demand generation programs fall flat. Prospects don't move through the sales funnel efficiently, and basically, the business suffers. Get things right, and your marketing ROI improves, sales is more motivated, the business thrives, and the PMM team is celebrated.

Yet, despite their importance, launches aren't always successful in terms of meeting customer adoption and financial targets. The same PMA report on go-to-market showed that 50% of PMMs said that their launches are successful half the time or less.

Now, there are lots of reasons that this could be the case. Going to market is highly cross-functional, after all. But if we're real with ourselves, a lot of the success – or lack thereof – can be attributed to the go-to-market strategy, which is generally the PMM team’s responsibility.

What makes a strong go-to-market strategy?

There are a lot of things that need to go right in your go-to-market strategy:

• Aligned launch processes
  • Clear launch goals
  • Launch timeline
  • Allocation of roles and responsibilities 
  • Success measurement and tracking
• Focused strategy
  • Market and competitive intelligence
  • Ideal customer profile and target personas
  • Product messaging and differentiation
  • Pricing and packaging
• Effective execution
  • Product readiness (product-market fit)
  • Acquisition strategy
  • Sales and success enablement
  • Effective content and collateral
  • Customer advocacy

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Product Marketing AllianceJames Shaw

Four practical ways that market and customer insights can inform your strategy and execution

Now, it would be impossible to cover all the areas above in one article, so let’s take a high-level view of how market and customer insights can influence these four areas of your go-to-market strategy: 

1. Refining your target buyer personas
2. Testing and validating your messaging
3. Improving your sales teams’ confidence
4. Establishing credibility with great content

1. Refining your target buyer personas

To craft an effective go-to-market strategy, you first need to arm yourself and your partners with a firm understanding of who you're targeting, what they're challenged with, and how they buy.

At Momentive, for each of our top buyer personas, we’ve produced what we call "persona packs." These are essentially summaries of our persona messaging frameworks. They're used as internal overviews for training – cheat sheets, if you will – about our personas. When our partner teams need information on our personas, they generally go straight to these packs. 

The packs contain information about buyers’ responsibilities, their challenges and how we solve them, what might trigger a purchase event, and buyers’ evaluation criteria for selecting vendors. 

We've also got a section on the ideal customer profiles, so that we can align our marketing and sales teams on who to target. On top of all this, there’s guidance on which solutions or use cases to lead with, and of course, customer stories.

Now, these persona packs have proven to be a pretty amazing resource for our teams. I'd recommend developing them, but it can be difficult and time-consuming to get in front of enough customers to do the necessary research to refine your personas, especially if, like us, you have a horizontal tool that appeals to multiple personas.

The State of Product Marketing Report shows that more than one in five product marketers actually never talk directly to customers, which has to make persona development really difficult. 

Ultimately, you want a wide variety of data sources to inform your personas. And this might be why some PMMs just don't do it. It’s a lot of work, right? 

You want quantitative data that helps you understand what customers need. However, while quantitative data can provide great information about what's going on – and you might even have some quantifiable data on hand – it usually doesn't provide a complete picture.

On the flip side, qualitative research, like interviews, can give you great contextual information and a deeper understanding of customers’ pain points, but it's really hard to gather at scale. 

This is where surveys are your friend. You can deploy them at scale to gather a healthy balance of both qualitative and quantitative insights.

As an example, usage and attitude studies (U&As) are a great way to get the insights you need at scale to inform your buyer personas. They’re most frequently done at B2C companies – Procter & Gamble is a great example of a company that regularly refreshes its knowledge of its target customers using U&As – but now we're seeing more and more B2B companies also doing this type of research too.

These are just some of the things that a U&A study allows you to do:

• Profile your buyer segments by demographic, psychographic, firmographic, and behavioral characteristics. 
• Quantify and prioritize their top challenges. 
• Uncover insights about the purchasing process: who's involved, who owns the budget, where your buyers go to look for information, and more.
• Learn which attitudes and behaviors lead to outcomes like purchase intent. 

These types of studies can be incredibly helpful – they’re just about as close as you can get to a one-stop research shop for your persona development, which is the foundation of a solid go-to-market strategy.

To give you an example of how powerful U&A studies can be, let me tell you about the impact they had at JUST, a plant-based food company. 

JUST leveraged survey-based insights and discovered that not only vegetarians and vegans, but meat-eaters – a group that they weren't initially targeting – were interested in their products as a way to eat healthier. This added a new target audience for them, and they’re now growing their business through a go-to-market motion targeted at those customers.

2. Testing and validating your messaging

Once you’ve pinned down your personas so you know exactly who you're targeting, the next thing you need to do is develop messaging that's going to resonate with your target personas. 

Easy, right? Just look at their pain points and claim that you can solve them. 

If only it were that simple. 

Communicating the value you deliver, in a way that stands out from the crowd and entices your customer to learn more, isn’t always easy. That's why it's critically important to test and validate your messaging before you go to market, so you know it’s going to resonate.

I recently hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) for marketers, and the top question I received was, “How do you know that your messages are resonating?” I think that’s probably the biggest challenge we face as product marketers.

To tackle this challenge, there are several approaches we can take. One is through implicit data, which you can gather by tracking click-through, conversion rates, and win rates, and carrying out A/B testing. 

The challenge with implicit data is that you can never be 100% certain that you're capturing the true impact of messaging, unless you're spending a lot of time in the tedium of running copy-only experiments after you've gone to market. 

I’m a big fan of A/B testing, but it has some downsides. For instance, you really can't change anything else in the funnel while you’re doing A/B testing if you want a clean result. 

Plus, it lacks human context; even if you get a clean result showing that one piece of copy resonates more than another, you can’t pinpoint why by looking at clicks and conversion rates alone.

Then, there's explicit data, where people tell you directly what they think in a forum like an interview or sales call. Again, it’s possible to carry out message testing here, but overall, explicit data can be time-consuming to collect and really challenging to synthesize.

To address these challenges, we've started using survey-based message testing in our process, and it has significantly sped up our time to market and boosted our confidence. 

Message Testing is a purpose-built solution that Momentive offers, and it's probably the one we use most often internally. It allows you to survey your target buyers; you can then compare how messages score across a variety of default and custom attributes – and you want to make sure that these align with the associations that you're trying to achieve with your product or brand.

Let me share how we recently used this tool at Momentive. We needed to overhaul our homepage to better communicate what we do and how our solutions offer value. We chose six headlines to test, all corresponding to a value proposition, a category message, or a platform message. 

We ran these options through our message-testing solution, looking at factors such as overall appeal, clarity, brand impression, whether a message is seen as innovative, and most importantly, the likelihood that it would motivate visitors to learn more.

From these results, two messages won by a landslide. Both used simpler language and related back to one of our key value propositions: ease of use and speed. The top messages were, "Making it easier to know how your customers think and feel," and, "Real insights, from real people, really fast." 

Armed with these results, we designed homepage hero components for the top two messages (that way, we wouldn’t waste any traffic on messaging that didn't resonate) and then ran an in-market split test, and “Real insights from real people, really fast” emerged as the winner.

The important takeaway here is that this data was invaluable in discussions with leadership. It allowed us to validate and explain why we were choosing the messages we were using, well before going to market.

3. Improving your sales teams’ confidence

So, you've done market research to learn all about your buyers and to target the right audience. Your messaging is exciting and fresh. You’re generating leads. 

This all sounds great, but none of it matters if your sales team lacks the confidence to deliver.

The people on the front line have a great deal to do with the success of our programs. We need to ensure that they are confident. At Momentive, we measure this quarterly with a sales confidence survey, which we send to all our SDRs, BDRs, AEs, and CSMs. This has been extremely valuable in helping us plan our enablement roadmap and track progress.

When we conduct the survey, we include demographic questions about role and tenure, so that we can filter this data during analysis. We also have confidence metrics across all stages of the sales cycle. 

Finally, we always provide space for open-ended feedback, which is where we often get some of our best ideas. We can even leverage sentiment analysis, word clouds, and other AI-based technology to parse those open-ended responses and quickly identify the most important information.

Here's an example question from our sales confidence survey: “How confident do you feel when speaking about the following insights solutions?” Participants can answer on a five-point scale ranging from "not at all confident" to "very confident." 

In our analysis, we then combine the top two scores to arrive at a number we can track over time. Once you start examining trends over time, this is where the insights truly start to emerge. 

For instance, in 2021, the survey showed that our customer-facing teams weren’t feeling very well-equipped at all when it came to competitive differentiation. Seeing this, our PMM team and strategy department teamed up to create a deep-dive competitive intelligence training program. 

Because we do this survey quarterly, we could clearly see that our training had a massive positive impact on this metric – effectively validating the training's effectiveness and underscoring the value of the PMM role.

We noticed a similar trend for sales strategy and tactics, which were hovering in the middle ground – confidence scores weren’t strong, and they weren’t improving. 

In response, we initiated a cross-functional effort to create a comprehensive sales playbook, consolidating all of our best practices, templates, and tools in one centralized location. This playbook is now an integral part of our new hire onboarding process. 

And once again, the survey results demonstrated the positive impact of this initiative. We’re now seeing much higher confidence metrics, particularly among our shorter-tenured reps. 

It’s been genuinely rewarding to be able to pinpoint where the gaps are, take action to fill them, and then quickly validate the positive impact we’re having through hard data.

4. Establishing authority and credibility

Okay, moving on to our final point: establishing authority and credibility. Or, as I sometimes phrase it: “Why should people listen to what you have to say about how to solve their problems?”

You might be wondering how research and insights fit into this equation. In essence, it's all about creating credible and engaging content to support your go-to-market strategy. 

And it turns out that there's a high demand for this type of content. A massive 82% of people prefer to read something based on data rather than solely on a writer’s opinion.

This data-driven approach is becoming an essential part of modern brand strategy and more and more top brands are embracing it. They’re publishing original, gated research reports as a means to build credibility and establish themselves as authorities in their field. You see this in research reports from companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, Twilio, Zendesk, and of course, Product Marketing Alliance.

Here's an example to illustrate how this approach can power your go-to-market: Brex, a fintech company that supports high-growth companies and startups, was preparing for a product launch that they planned to unveil at a trade show. 

They wanted to make sure this launch would pack a punch with the audience. To achieve this, they conducted a market research survey targeting finance professionals who are responsible for closing the books every month. With this survey, they gathered foundational stats that corroborated the specific challenges that their new product is designed to solve. 

In just a couple of days, they gained valuable insights which they used to create a comprehensive campaign, including collateral for distribution at the conference, as well as a research report that they gated and promoted as part of the product launch.

This is a really great example of how signature market research can become integrated into a campaign to drive more credibility around a launch and demand for what you have to say. If you're not producing signature research, consider making it a part of your next go-to-market motion – especially if you're still in the process of establishing your awareness and credibility in the market.

How you can get started today

So, we've explored how survey-based tools can be a powerful resource in shaping your go-to-market strategy. They offer insights that allow you to develop your target personas, fine-tune your messaging, boost your sales teams' confidence, and establish your authority.

Now, let’s explore the four steps that are going to help you start putting all this into practice. Here’s how you can start bringing more customer and market insights into your go-to-market motions today:

1. Assess the current state of market and customer research at your organization.
2. Identify just one or two things that you're doing manually today that would really benefit from fast insights at scale. 
3. Pick one project – target personas, messaging, or case studies, for example – to optimize with market research and customer surveys.
4. Document the research process so that you can tell the story of what you did and scale it within your team and organization as a best practice.

That's a wrap! I hope these insights on best practices and customer stories were inspiring, and I hope they empower you to lead your own successful data-driven go-to-market motions. 

This article is based on Mike Greenberg's brilliant talk at the Product Marketing Misunderstood online event. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. Head over to your membership dashboard for even more exclusive insights.