Go-to-Market
As I started writing a post defining Product Marketing, I realized it might be helpful to first define Go-to-market strategies and planning. At the highest level, this is the foundation of a commercial strategy — a fundamental part of an overall business plan that should have been considered when the company was first founded and funded. But the GTM strategy should be kept up to date and aligned with changes in the market, and each product may call for its own. This is not a “one and done” sort of endeavor in most cases.
If you find yourself needing to build a GTM strategy for a new product line or update a GTM strategy to account for a seismic shift in business conditions, where should you start? If you do a search on “GTM strategy” you’ll find many, many results. I recommend you look at the templates, read the blogs (including this one), and arrive at your own conclusions about what you need in your GTM strategy. For what it’s worth, here’s a simple approach that’s worked well for me:
What are we trying to achieve? This is the most important question a Product person can ask of a customer, and it’s no less important to ask it of their own organization. To formulate a strategy we need to be clear about the goals we have for our business, and our product(s).
What is our target market? This is a great example of why it’s so important for Product people to be steeped in the market. We can’t be successful at selling something in a repeatable fashion unless we know what kinds of people or organizations we want buy our products, which of those people or organizations make the best buyers for our products, what problems we’re solving for them, and why those problems are important enough to solve. Taken together, the answers to these questions create a picture of who will ultimately pay our bills and make us successful.
What is our solution, and why should anyone care? I once had a new CMO boss ask me “Who cares?” every time I put a roadmap of well-researched features in front of him, until I figured out I needed to give him a roadmap defined not by features but by value we would deliver to the customers. This is a common trap for Product Managers, who are often fixated on the first part of this section and not the second (the what rather than the why). It’s also worth noting that Product Marketers are usually thinking more about the why than the what. In any case, if we can’t articulate why the buyer should care about what we’re selling, we don’t have anything to build a message with.
What channels will we use to offer your solution to customers? Is it best served by an OEM/embedded strategy? Going through an App Store? Partnering with another ISV, a SI, or someone else? Selling directly? If so, through an eCommerce site or a captive sales channel? Should that channel be inside or a field sales team? The answers to these and other questions of course depend on what we’re selling, how it fits with the rest of the world, how it is consumed, who’s buying, and more. Chances are there are a few obvious choices relative to what we’re building and we won’t have to look at all of these options, but these are important decisions which can have downstream consequences. For example, one of my past companies sold most of its products for most of its history as an OEM. The CEO ran the business with a shoestring marketing team because he didn’t need to sell to anyone other than the OEM partner. When I joined it was a very profitable $350M software company sitting in one of the hottest high tech regions in the country, but it had virtually no brand recognition — which was a problem as we tried to sell products under our own brand. When I told people where I worked, they’d usually never heard the name, or confused it with a similar brand.
What’s our offer? How will we price, package and deliver our solution? Will customers be able to try it? How will they experience onboarding? How will we make sure they’re successful? How will they renew? All of these and more go into defining the offer - the net of what people are being expected to pay for, and the mechanics they will experience in consuming it. If it’s not already clear, defining the offer is often not just a Marketing or Product question, but a cross-functional operational question.
How will we market our solution? We’ve already covered channels above, so this is really the demand side of the commercial operation. How will we drive awareness and nurture prospects into customers? How will we encapsulate and share the value proposition we’ve articulated above with the markets we’re trying to reach? How will we differentiate ourselves against the alternatives in the market (including do nothing and roll-your-own). What kind of buzz do we want to generate, and in what channels? And as important as all of these other questions, what can we afford to do, and how will we prioritize and resource our marketing work?
At the company level, this is executive-level work, and again it should have happened at the startup stage, with true-ups when significant shifts happen within the business or the market. At the product level, it’s work that a senior Product Management or Product Marketing resource can take point on with executive approval, and it should be reviewed and updated with each major release of the product.
Again, there are literally dozens of templates out there for you to use. If you don’t care for the approach I’ve spelled out here, find another model you like better. The key is to do the research needed to answer the questions well and formulate a thoughtful, defensible set of recommendations for socialization, discussion, adjustment, approval, and adoption.
Thanks for reading,
John
