A product launch is as effective as its Go-to-market strategy. With so many moving parts, cross-departmental collaboration ensures GTM success.
Go-to-Market is a success story waiting to happen. Within the ever-growing product market, businesses have had to compete with each other over the essential resource: the buyer.
Although it seems negative, many organizations have taken this rapid competition as a challenge and pushed the boundaries of innovation: Culminating in GTM.
GTM has allowed businesses to develop strategies and reach their product-fit market in an efficient time, which helped them hit business objectives that aligned with the product’s launch.
Entering the market can be daunting for innovators, traditionalists, and disruptors alike. Who will buy our product, and why will they buy it? The GTM strategy empowers businesses to answer these questions and eliminate the noise that follows it.
From marketing to product, cross-departmental collaboration is necessary for the process, ensuring a smooth and seamless launch. Innovative companies outperform their competition by delivering value through every stage of the buyer journey, whether content creation or sales.
The B2B industry has especially benefitted from Go-to-Market strategies. It has to be evaluated as a game changer in the SaaS market. And it all begins by understanding what it does for you.
Go-to-market innovates the path an organization takes to reach the ideal buyer.
The buyer has become self-directed. Armed with the knowledge, and opinions of many, the B2B buying committee (a.k.a. the buyer) has an array of choices.
Each organization in the B2B sphere releases products that bring an advantage with them. But, the buyer has their own needs and risks to mitigate. How will they choose the best product?
Here is where GTM comes through. It is not just marketing, as some may believe. It is an entire organization working together to make their product launch a fast success.
What is Go-to-Market?
It is an organization creating a GTM strategy to identify and reach its ideal buyer when introducing a new product. Or an old product in a new market.
By bridging the gap of uncertainty between the business and the buyer, Go-to-market demonstrates the unique value an organization brings to the table. And helps the buyer understand what your product does for them.
It provides your teams with a roadmap towards product success. This involves the KPIs your teams have identified and the possible interactions of your ideal customer with your product or services.
The motions of GTM strategy.
An important concept of the GTM strategy is the motions. These are the pathways an organization uses to reach its relevant customers.
Some of the motions of GTM are: –
- Product-Led
- Inbound
- Partnership Marketing
- Community-Led
- Event-led
- Outbound
While you research which strategies to use, you will be overwhelmed by all available options. And that is okay.
Most online resources present this picture of using a multi-motion approach for GTM. But that is not possible. Your organization will have to find its unique motion or motions by identifying what your audience feels comfortable with and by understanding your budget.
Let us be real. Many start-ups and emerging SaaS companies do not have the budget to pull every stop. Here, Maja Voje suggests being realistic and choosing one motion that is doable by your organization.
And that is sage wisdom for those experimenting with GTM. And SaaS in general. Be realistic.
Go-to-Market Approaches
Understanding your potential buyer is crucial for choosing sub-strategies and complementing motions for your product. They will help you understand the market you are targeting and the approach you must take to penetrate it successfully.
These sub-strategies are: –
- The Bottom-up approach or the product-centric approach
- It involves building a relationship with the end users and small teams. This approach is perfect for organizations that are starting and do not have a huge budget. It helps early-stage SaaS companies achieve organic growth through word of mouth and referrals. It is a very content marketing-heavy approach.
- The Middle-out GTM approach or the sales and product approach
- The middle-out GTM approach is ideal for established companies entering new markets or expanding their reach. With this approach, a business may target specific market segments and direct its sales and marketing efforts through outbound and inbound campaigns.
- The Top-Down GTM approach or the sales-led approach
- The top-down approach is known for its high-revenue potential. It targets organizations with substantial revenues. This is the “traditional” way of SaaS marketing. It has longer sales cycles, enhanced brand recognition, market penetration, and high costs. It is a high-risk high-return strategy.
When implementing your GTM strategy, you must choose between the three approaches. And it depends on the budget of your business.
GTM strategies provide positive signals to the buyer
Go-to-market strategies serve more than just a roadmap for the organization. They also provide positive markers for the buyer.
The buyer and vendor relationship is built on trust. SaaS companies need to show their product can solve target market problems. That is the core of Go-to-Market. Show the right market that your product will solve their problems and mitigate risks.
GTM enables an organization to create experiences that reflect these ideals. If your buyers do not perceive you as an expert in your domain through lackluster sales processes or irrelevant marketing messages, they will be put off by your brand and product.
Go-to-market strategies work best when there is cross-departmental collaboration.
While sales and marketing alignment is becoming the norm, GTM takes it a bit further and involves vital players from: –
- Product
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer Success
- and Finance.
These are the core members of the strategic team. They are not limited to these five teams and could have more teams involved, like operations for development. In short, the whole organization must work for GTM’s success.
Each member(s) of the individual teams acts as a point-of-contact between the GTM team and departmental stakeholders, ensuring a smooth workflow and transfer of information between the teams.
The transfer of information provides a vital recipe for GTM success. Every Point-of-Contact should be intimately familiar with the KPIs set by their departments because it will be the driving force of the roadmap.
Asana has one of the best GTM templates.
As you can see from their templates, and they agree to it. Go-to-market has a lot of moving parts. It is necessary to understand that a successful GTM strategy comes from visualizing the journey and executing it as close to the original vision as possible.
Joining the moving parts
What are the moving parts you can identify in your organization? For SaaS companies or typically B2B companies, moving parts consist of Marketing, Product (or service), Finance, Customer Success, and Sales.
1. Marketing
Marketing is seen as the driver of the strategy, which is not false but is not the complete truth either. Marketing is rather in charge of gathering the perspectives and honing them into a single message.
This requires the marketing leaders to collaborate closely with the other teams.
2. Finance
That brings us to finance. GTM strategies hinge on the financial success of the product entering the market. Every ad copy, content marketing strategy, Email campaign, etc., should be seen through a fiscal lens.
What are the metrics of success? ARR, or Annual Recurring Revenue, has been a solid metric for SaaS companies thus far, but it is a long-term metric. Based on your approach and the size of your company, the finance team can create similar short-term leading and lagging metrics of success, which is crucial for your GTM success.
One such metric is the potential buyer’s initial interactions with the product.
That means, after your potential buyer has used the demo, are they satisfied? And who best to answer that but
3. Customer Success
It is up to Customer Success to ensure that your product is solving the pain points of your potential buyer.
What do they like and dislike about the product?
- Is it something that can be solved by learning more about the product?
- Or is it something fundamental about the function of the product?
- And how can we, the developers, solve buyers’ queries?
Customer success, finance and marketing must evaluate customer lifetime value as a KPI.
They ensure a smooth transition from this phase to the next.
4. Product
Product plays a pivotal role in the GTM strategy and could be called the true driver of your long-term strategies. Today’s marketing is product-led. Marketing has to be heavily involved with product teams to understand the unique proposition of the product and what it does for the user.
Product dev leaders must be involved in the messaging and conveying of the marketing campaigns.
- Has the message conveyed the solution of our product in a way that touches on buyer concerns?
Product teams must understand buyer needs. And for that, sales is the only place to go.
5. Sales
The lynchpin of success. Sales has to act as a consultant to the buyer. Before selling
- they must understand the product
- what it does for the buyer
- and what the buyer wants to solve.
The fieldwork that sales do empowers the rest of the teams to create a cohesive vision. It reduces the uncertainty of understanding the buyer and market.
The information that sales gather cannot and must not stay in a silo. Marketing leaders must understand that sales are one of the best ways of conducting market research. They are in touch with the ICP.
Salesforce and Slack: The two GTM successes of the SaaS era.
Slack or Bottom-Top approach
Slack is the master of PLG or product-led growth. What is their recipe for success?
- Their awesome product (And whoever has used Slack knows it)
- Community-Led (They have communities in most major cities)
- Content (Look at their blog, and you will understand what we mean)
Slack is successful because it understands the vital aspects of work communication. It should be quick, flexible, and connected —allowing for streamlined communication and workflows. And while working on their app, they gave Slack away to teams and understood the successes and failures of their product. Iterating the product as they went.
Slack gave and still gives a freemium model for teams to use. And it is a great product. They invited people to use Slack—end users—to try it out. It was a massive success.
People who used the app became its champions. They entered a market rife with competition and won.
Their only competitor can be said to be Microsoft Teams. Imagine that.
No company signifies a Go-to-Market strategy better than Slack. They made it possible by being consistent with their messages, understanding their limitations, providing the end user rather than big corporations, and iterating their product based on user feedback.
Salesforce or the Top-Down Approach.
Salesforce is synonymous with SaaS. Being a cloud-based software, the original CRM was easy to adopt and set up by big enterprises. And Salesforce knew this.
They made the software free for the first year for teams of up to 10 members. And, like Slack, they had a great product.
But what set them and their GTM apart is the Trailblazer’s community program. The first product community. Salesforce realized that their teams enjoyed solving answers to problems they didn’t know and then shared their knowledge.
The trailblazer community was thus formed as a group of experts who could solve problems and share them with their peers. This helped customers and users by providing real-time value on dynamic problems.
It was revolutionary.
Salesforce’s approach shows that having a product and community is the key to GTM growth. Along with iterating and improving the approach to the strategy.
They understood the need for knowledge workers to share and solve problems, connecting them to like-minded individuals and teams.
It worked because they understood the unique behavior of Salesforce users and created a solution around it.
Go-to-market is about understanding the product’s solution and user behavior.
GTM is a recipe for success. But it is a long-term and iterative process. There has to be room for pivots and flexible changes.
But two things remain unchanged.
- What unique proposition is your product tackling?
- How does the user behave with it, and how can an organization leverage this behavior as an advantage?
The strategy moves around these two levers, and they are customer-centric.
Understand your buyer, iterate, find a unique proposition, and reiterate. That is the essence of GTM.