Why Having A Go-To-Market Strategy Is Important For Your Startup

Do you know the difference between a successful startup and a struggling one?

It's not just about the product—it's about how ready the company is to market it.

There are so many brilliant ideas, but it won't matter how much potential your product has if you don't have a solid go-to-market strategy. You must be ready to get your message out there and sell, sell, sell!

A startup that creates a go-to-market strategy that's clear about what it wants to accomplish and how it'll do it is much more likely to be successful than one that doesn't have a plan for reaching its goals.

In this post, I'll discuss why go-to-market strategies are crucial for startups and some factors you should consider when creating yours.

What is a go-to-market strategy?

To start, let's define what a go-to-market strategy is. Go-to-market (GTM) strategies are action plans for when you're ready to deploy your product or service in the real world. Once you have a working solution and are prepared to share it with customers, a go-to-market strategy will help you identify who those customers might be and how best to generate interest in your product/service.

A solid go-to-market strategy provides clear guidance on allocating resources based on what works best at any given point in your company's life cycle. It also sets clear expectations for everyone involved (from customers to investors) and helps keep everyone focused on achieving specific goals and targets. With a solid go-to-market plan, you can ensure profitability by providing benchmarks against which progress can be measured periodically throughout each stage of development so that the team can make adjustments if things aren't going as planned.

4 Common Types of Go-to-Market Strategies

Companies usually employ a combination of marketing and sales strategies when creating the go-to-market system that best suits them. Here are four common types.

Account-based marketing (ABM):

This strategy focuses on selling to business-to-business (B2B) companies. It identifies specific companies within a market segment and then targets and sells to them. It may employ various sales techniques or methods, including cold calling, email marketing, and social networking.

Demand generation:

This strategy focuses on generating demand for a product or service by having marketing take action to raise awareness. Methods may include TV or radio ads, email marketing campaigns, social ads, and online or in-person events.

Inbound:

An inbound strategy focuses on personalizing the sales process by offering your audience what they are looking for when they are looking for it. This is more of a long-term play and often requires a significant investment in content creation and marketing.

The inbound sales process differs from the outbound sales, which involves initiating contact with potential customers.

Sales Enablement:

This go-to-market strategy ensures that you can identify and close leads throughout the rollout or sales cycle by supplying your sales team members with all the necessary tools and resources. This includes creating a sales enablement team that can help build and maintain your company's CRM, ensuring the proper training is available for your sales team members and providing tools like white papers to help them close more deals.

The main steps to creating a winning go-to-market strategy are:

1. Identify the target audience.

This involves knowing your consumer and their needs and wants. You'll also want to identify what channels they use to interact with your brand and the most effective messaging to deliver to them based on their preferences. Find out what makes this target audience unique from other potential customers regarding demographics, psychographics, or behavior patterns (e.g., where they live and how old they are). 

Ensure that your product or service addresses an apparent problem for which there is a viable solution no matter who buys it — otherwise, it won't have widespread appeal among potential buyers!

2. Determine the value proposition.

Once you know who will buy from you, think about why they would choose your option over similar ones available today (or soon). If possible, try not just one but several different messages so that if one doesn't work out, then another might succeed instead - keep testing until something sticks!

Write down these messages in a format that's easy to understand and digest. Once this is done, think about how you want to deliver them through the different communication channels available to you. For instance, if parents with young children who like eating out at restaurants are your target market, they might be more likely to respond well if they receive an email from someone who shares their same interests rather than one that's all sales-y straight off the bat.

If you're not sure of how to do this, try looking at your competition and see what they say about their product or service. You might also want to look at some of the marketing messages already out there for similar products or services (like yours). You'll be able to better understand what works well and what doesn't work so well. Once you've got everything written down, it should be easy to figure out where best to post all these things.

Once your marketing message is written down, try to find the best place to post it. You might want to consider Facebook groups or email lists as places where people interested in what you're offering will hang out online. You can also try other social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter.

Additionally, it's a good idea to contact some of your customers or clients and ask them if they'd be willing to share your marketing messages on their social media accounts. You can send them an email asking for permission first, or just let them know that you're going to post something (like a link) and see if they'll help.

3. Define your sales funnel

In this step, you choose how to offer your goods or services and what each selling stage will include. You might want to start by defining a "lead" for your business, then make a plan for moving potential customers through each stage of the sales funnel: initial contact, lead qualification, business case, evaluation, negotiation, closing, and renewal.

Say someone visits your website, for instance, reads an article about the benefits of your product or services, and decides they want to buy something from you. This is an example of a lead.

It's essential to define what each stage of the sales funnel looks like so that you can plan ways to fill in each stage with tactics that help move potential customers forward along the path toward making an actual purchase.

4. Create a sales plan

GTM strategy is about selling your product, so deciding how to reach your target demographic is essential to converting them to buyers. Your sales strategy will help with that. There are many ways your company can guide potential customers through the sales process.

Below is a list of the four most common sales strategies. Choose one or more sales strategies that best fit your needs, depending on your product, market, and business model.

1. Inside sales model: The sales team nurtures prospective customers in order to convince them to buy your product. This is a suitable option for products with a medium price point that is a bit more complex and requires a lot of explanation. For example, if you sell software as a service or enterprise solutions, it makes sense to have an inside sales team that helps prospects understand how your product can solve their problems.
2. Field sales model: Field salespeople focus on closing big enterprise deals. Large companies have more resources and take longer to make purchasing decisions than smaller businesses, but the payoff is worth it. For example, you can reap massive rewards by selling HR management software to a company like IBM or Accenture. However, this option requires more sales investment.
3. Self-service model: All purchases are made at the discretion of the customer. A typical sales process for e-commerce is that customers can find and buy products online without the help of a dedicated sales team. However, marketing is still needed to drive traffic if you want people to visit your website.
4. Channel model: A third party offers your product on your behalf. This choice limits your control over how the product is marketed, but it's also the cheapest choice and works well if your new partner has experience with a similar line of merchandise.

After creating your sales plan, you should also choose your marketing channel. Marketing channels are simply how you create demand for your product and move potential customers down the sales funnel.

Social media paid search ads, blogs, and SEO content are all different marketing channels. The channel choice depends on two things: our target audience and where your potential customers are along their buyer's journey.

5. Set clear goals

Goals are essential to any effective go-to-market strategy. A business goal is a target that gives you something specific to aim for, sets a timeline, and provides feedback on the project's progress.

Setting measurable objectives for your business can be done using these three frameworks. These frameworks can be used separately or combined according to your needs:

• SMART goals: The SMART acronym means you set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable (but challenging), realistic, and time-bound. For example: "In six months, generate 60k total app subscriptions."
• Key performance indicators (KPIs): These are quantitative measures that help you determine progress toward achieving business goals. For instance, you could track total downloads and ad click-through rates during your go-to-market strategy for your new product. You can pair your KPIs with a SMART goal framework, e.g., "Target 70K signups and 700k click-throughs within three months."
• Objectives and key results (OKRs): This strategy comprises two parts: the initiative you want to achieve and how you want to assess its effectiveness. It follows this format: “By [date], I will achieve [strategic initiative] by [method].” For example, "By October 15th, I will increase brand awareness of our new product by increasing traffic to the product landing page by 40%, generating 500k sales leads, and improving customer satisfaction by 20%." Businesses using this strategy include Google and LinkedIn. The advantage of the OKR strategy is that it focuses on the outcome, not just the process. You can avoid becoming sucked into daily activities with enough free time to work towards achieving your big-picture goals.

Prepare, set, and plot.

It costs lots of money and time to bring a product to market. But with a solid framework, concrete goals, and transparent processes, you can ensure success with your next launch.

I hope this post is helpful and informative to you. If you want to learn more about this topic, please contact me anytime.