In this article, you’ll learn why a good go-to-market is critical to business success and how to approach market entries with a structured plan.
A Go-to-Market Plan is as concrete an action plan as possible that describes repeatable and scalable processes for initiating, winning, and growing customer relationships.
Two milestones a company must pass on the way to a successful Go-to-Market are the Problem-Solution Fit and the Product-Market Fit.
Repeatability in the Go-to-Market context means that the company can easily adapt market entries with similar products or in similar markets in marketing and sales.
Scalability in this context means that the go-to-market approach requires fewer resources for growing results as market penetration progresses.
For an overview with tips from practice for practice, see our video below.
Many marketing managers do think hard about the type of company they want to enter into a customer relationship with. However, the extremely important step of examining the buying center with regard to the ideal customer profile is often missing. This means understanding who within the company I will definitely have to deal with in the initiation phase. And in addition: who do I need to understand well in his/her current situation in order to provide him/her with an excellent customer experience.
Marketing and sales managers often struggle with the question of which messages are suitable and effective within a storyline, which should grab the customer as strongly as possible, during the Go-to-Market Strategy. Here it is particularly important to understand that the path is often taken to create or use a content or a message for a wide variety of customer profiles.
Over time, companies often assemble a patchwork of marketing channels. In doing so, they are often influenced by the complexity of competition, market and internal company factors. Especially for an effective Go-to-Market strategy, it is essential not to overload the portfolio of sales channels in order to be able to test elements quickly.
Go-to-Markets often pose the difficulty for companies to set up measuring points, KPIs for transparency at the right places. Here, companies get bogged down either by a multitude of key figures that are no longer easy to keep track of or by not measuring success at all. This is particularly fatal when a competitive advantage has just been established within the target market.
What conversions represent a bottleneck in the overall Go-to-Market pipeline where things take a long time?
What conversion steps from an unknown/unaware person to a customer purchase decision can we measure?
What key metric can we use to document the success of the Go-to-Market ?
In most cases, market entry means defining a category and positioning oneself as a business strategy in a customer segment. In doing so, it is important to understand which market segments exist, what the competitive landscape is like, and whether customer needs are not sufficiently met.
This results in sustainable product marketing within the right target segments.
What we consider an extremely good example of a Go-to-Market Strategy from a very well-known (former) startup is Rand Fishkin’s company MOZ (formerly SEOMoz). In his pitch deck from 2011, Rand shows very clearly how they went about their marketing at the time (similar to our recommendations).
We published a playbook that shows the way tractionwise masters Go-to-Markets or product launches in customer projects. You can use this playbook like a Go-to-Market template or a Go-to-Market checklist for your own market entries and product launches.
Use this playbook as a basis for an internal training for your product-, marketing- or sales team. This is guaranteed to give your marketing and sales strategy a boost. Successful customer experiences thrive on information sharing.
Take a look!
The market entry strategy or the strategy for the product launch should be structured into the following elements:
1. Target customer, customer development or customer development 2. Development of a relevant value proposition design including content storyline 3. Define a powerful, sustainable marketing and sales portfolio 4. Define and optimize key performance indicators (KPI)
Read more in our Go-to-Market Playbook.
The plan for a unique market entry or product launch is a replicable and at the same time scalable plan of action, which takes into account the customer orientation in order to sustainably reach the right target groups without wastage.
A product market fit, in startup or lean startup parlance, is the milestone where both a sufficiently large target market exists into which the targeted product and business model fit.
Feel free to read more about this in our article on Product-Market-Fit.
While prototypes are used internally in companies for product management and product development, the Minimal Viable Product (MVP for short) is used to gain early adopters, i.e. early users or customers in the target market.
Read more about the Minimum Viable Product in our article.
As a founder and entrepreneur, I experience daily how important customer centricity is for companies.
Incorporate the essential perspectives of customers into your product genesis and marketing processes. That is what puts horsepower on the road and moves your projects forward.
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