Go-to-Market Planning

Ensure that a Product or Service is Well Positioned for Entry and Growth

/ Revenue Growth / Go-to-Market Planning

Answer fundamental questions about why your business does what it does

What is a Go-to-Market Plan?

Every business’s primary goal is revenue growth. The majority of revenue for most businesses comes not from investments, acquisitions or other assets but from the sales of products and services. Thus, properly marketing a company’s product and service effectively to generate sales is a must for any business to grow.

GTM Plan is Not a Marketing Plan

Planning is an essential management tool for any business to grow. The most fundamental of plans is the Go-To-Market (GTM) Plan, a subset of a Marketing Plan. Businesspeople often think that a Go-To-Market Plan is the same as a Marketing Plan. It is not. You might be executing a marketing plan by running ads or displaying products and never engage in a GTM plan. For well run businesses, a new GTM Plan is necessary every time you introduce a new product, re-launch an existing product, or expanding into a new market.

A GTM Plan includes strategies and action plans to ensure that a particular product is well positioned for entry and growth in a market. It focuses on a specific product or market, answering the central questions from buyers of why, what and how. In addition, its is advisable for a business to share the GTM Plan across the entire internal organization as well for maximum effectiveness.

What Goes Into a Go-to-Market Plan?

A Go-To-Market Plan answers fundamental questions about why a business does what it does. It answers questions about what its products and services are, who benefits from their use and how they benefit.  It is a guide for companies to stay on track when introducing a new product into a new market. It is also a medium to present a new product into a new market.

A lot of factors need to be considered and incorporated into the Plan to make it as comprehensive and memorable as possible. These concepts must be presented in a concise manner that can be easily understood by all employees within the company and for a prospect to quickly understand the company’s story. Here are a few essential concepts which need to be incorporated to create a viable GTM Plan.

Product Definition

When communicating a GTM Plan, the company must be able to identify the product or service, what it is for, and for whom.

It is important to present what problem or concern the product or service solves, too. In short, determining the product and market objectives is of utmost importance. Identifying the product features are also necessary.

Fundamental questions around product definition messaging are:

  • Do customers, partners and employees clearly understand what you sell?
  • Does your content effectively communicate your expertise
  • Is your offering presented clearly?
  • Also is what you sell valuable, compelling or differentiated enough to get a potential buyer’s attention?

Why questions include a discussion about the mission of the company, its value proposition, how they are positioned in the market, details of the offering itself and any brand elements that help define the business or the product.

A product roadmap should also be an element within the GTM Plan. The roadmap shows a path from product inception through its maturity. The Plan must be able to assess where the product will be in the next six months, one or two years, and so on.

Market Identification

Before launching or relaunching a new product or expanding into a new market, a company needs to know the target market segment.

Otherwise stated, “Who is the buyer?”

The Plan needs to answer who is buying, how many are part of the buying decision, and literally where is the market?

The buying power of the target market is also necessary to establish for proper pricing. 

An understanding of the “buyer’s journey” through their decision making as well as any demographic, psychographic and market behavior of the targeted clients is helpful, too.

 

Competitors

In every business, one needs to identify not only the possible customers but also the likely competitors. The Plan must have action plans on the reactions of competitors when a new product is introduced. Customers must be able to realize the reason why they are getting your product instead of the others available to them. Knowing these data will help a company establish if the new product and new market are viable.

 

Distribution, Sales & Support

Launching a new product in a new and undiscovered territory has many challenges. A company must know how it can efficiently distribute the product to consumers.

Positioning and messaging are two crucial concepts companies must identify to ensure wider a broader market reach.

Most companies nowadays also offer aftersales or customer success support to retain the loyalty of customers. It is also a strategy imperative to build and nurture customer relations to engage and retain them in order to market going forward. One key statistic is it can be half the cost and double the margin to sell to and expand the relationship of existing customers.

Internal & External Marketing Plan

With the availability of technology, companies are able to market their products and services worldwide anytime. Content Marketing, PR, video promotion, case studies, social media and advertising play an essential role in promoting a company and what it offers. Having a Search Engine Optimized website is helpful when launching a new product.

Business can also leverage internal communication to keep employees updated on its activities and to help them tell the story to the market.

Budget & Resources

Budgetary requirements are important items in every plan. A Go-To-Market Plan can only be appropriately carried out if resources are available.

Building a Go-to-Market Strategy

Creating a GTM Plan can have many elements as a business creates awareness, educates the market, validates the decision to buy, completes the transaction and builds the relationship to please and retain customers. Here are four essential steps in building an effective GTM strategy.

Identify

Buying Center and Personas
Determining your target customers and identifying their roles as buyers need to be considered. There are seven personas of kinds of customers in every buying center as follows: Initiator. User. Influencer. Decision-maker. Buyer. Approver. Gatekeeper.Some customers can take one or more of these personas; thus, it is critical to understand their behavior and motivations.

Craft

A Value Matrix
After determining the market personas, it is critical to identify their problems and how your product can solve them. An appropriate marketing message needs to be developed, taking into consideration the medium to be used for sending the message.

Choose

A Sales Strategy
Remember that there is no single sales strategy that is applicable to all products in the market. Choosing the perfect plan to market a product will largely depend on its complexity, scalability, and cost. There are times when businesses need to mix strategies depending on the size of customers.

Create

Content that Generates Interest

Content marketing creates interests from customers and new markets on new products being launched. Getting the attention of consumers can lead to awareness and eventually buying the product.

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey

No business would want to bring a product out in the market then realize that nobody is interested in buying the item. It would be a disastrous waste of company time and resources. That is why the Go-T-Market Plan is vital to avoid unnecessary business losses.

Companies that have new products and services need to understand and feel their consumers. Businesses see the consumer buying press like a funnel, wherein the various interests are filtered to a much narrower population.The GTM plan must be able to identify this buyer’s journey every at every stage to ensure sales and repeat sales.

Attract or Awareness Stage

The objective is to reach and connect with those prospects with the highest propensity to buy.

The tactical devices to attract buyers can take the form of videos, blogs, social media posts, or any type of advertisement. The digital marketing infrastructure producing these awareness experiences are “omni-channels” requiring capabilities in things like SEO, PPC, social, programmatic, email, retargeting, and content management, all of which need to be closely coordinated to be effective.

Experience using dashboards with KPIs, and predictive modeling to deliver personalization at scale with agile brand management is mandatory for an effective marketing organization.

Consideration or Education Stage

This stage indicates that the customer has a problem, which the product or service being offered can solve. The customer takes a step further by inquiring about the product more, asking for its features, price, and trial availability. Your messaging should be registering with the buyer’s needs in one of any number of areas such as innovation, growth, profitability, compliance, ease of use, convenience, etc.

 Decision or Conversion Stage

The sales team plays a vital role at this stage. Since customers are already considering purchasing at this point, skillful use of sales methodologies are essential.

Go-to-Market and Customer Success 

As mentioned previously, the sales team makes a difference in carrying out a Go-To-Market Strategy. Their work does not end when a customer buys a product. Customer success strategies around customer onboarding, customer support management, renewal management and customer advocacy for the purpose of retention and repeat buying are key to profitability.

Businesses also need to determine the business models and markets and marketing channels they will use to sell the products. Will they be directly selling through stores, online, or through a sales force? A company must be aware of the available tools and resources to sell their products.

Understanding their clients will also help companies determine the most appropriate selling approach.

 

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