The Complete Guide to Building A Go-to-Market Strategy (+6 Examples)

If you’re launching a new product, you’ll need a solid go-to-market (GTM) strategy to ensure your product succeeds.

Without one, you could risk a failed product launch, going to market too late, or an audience that doesn’t understand your messaging. It would be best if you had an actionable and innovative go-to-market plan to avoid these costly mistakes.

To help you shape your go-to-market strategy, read below for a comprehensive guide on the key steps and components and killer examples of successful companies. This guide will help you get started you innovate your go-to-market strategy to make it key to your success.

What is a go-to-market strategy?

A go-to-market strategy (GTM) is a detailed plan that defines how your company successfully engages your ideal customers and influences them to purchase your product or service. A best-in-class go-to-market strategy outlines your target audience, ideal customer profile, marketing plan, partnership strategy, and sales process.

Much work goes into a GTM strategy, including pricing, marketing promotional channels, sales process, competitive analysis, product or service launch, and position. All of which will allow you effectively market your solutions to the right audience.

Here are several questions a go-to-market strategy would answer:

• Who are my ideal customers?
• What pain point is our product or service solving for?
• Where does our target audience go to learn about new solutions?
• How do we engage our ideal customers?

When do you need a go-to-market strategy?

You’ll need to build a go-to-market strategy when ready to bring a product or service to market.

Typically there are three phases of a go-to-market strategy which include distinct goals for each. Here are the three different phases:

• Minimum Viable Product (MVP): This stage focuses on finding initial traction. Find anyone to be a customer, and collect as much information as possible to iterate.
• Product-Market Fit: This stage focuses on acquiring and retaining customers. Does your business look healthy when acquiring customers? Are you efficiently spending your budget on finding new customers? Additionally, are the customers renewing or buying more of your product or service? Customer retention is equally as important as new business growth, which is a primary indicator of healthy growth for the company.
• Scale: This stage focuses on growing your company to meet the large demand for your product or service. In this stage, you’re focused on hiring the right people, creating a hiring process, and building a repeatable and predictable business model.

Regardless of a startup or a well-established company, a go-to-market strategy is necessary to introduce a new product or enter a new market segment. Buyer behaviors are constantly evolving, and so is the competition, so you’ll need to adapt your strategy.

Who is responsible for GTM strategy?

Marketing, sales, and product management teams all play a collective role in shaping the go-to-market strategy.

As companies scale, processes, communication, and responsibilities also grow, increasing the difficulty of aligning different teams. And the go-to-market strategy is no different.

Since most tactics and execution fall under marketing, they often lead the go-to-marketing strategy. This includes brand awareness, analyst relations, demand generation, product marketing, customer advocacy, content, social media, etc.

The importance of cross-department alignment

But this doesn’t mean the go-to-market strategy or plan solely falls on the marketing department. An effective go-to-market strategy requires insights from Product and Sales as well.

Product Management is responsible for the lifecycle of your product and is accountable for its success. Therefore, the product department should collaborate with marketing to provide product insights and shape the go-to-market strategy.

Whereas Sales is responsible for reaching out to potential buyers and engaging them in a sales process. In doing so, they’re a feedback loop to understand what messaging and positioning resonates with your target audience. This feedback loop is important for optimizing your GTM strategy and differentiating from the competition.

The role of Product Marketing in go-to-market

Often, the go-to-market owner falls under Product Marketing with roles such as Head of Product Marketing, Head of Product or Marketing, and in some companies, Head of Go-to-Market Strategy. It works best when Product Marketing owns the GTM and has support from the executive team to execute the strategy.

Product Marketing is responsible for go-to-market strategy because it requires a lot of cross-functional relationship building while understanding the KPIs, objectives, and how each department functions.

Product Marketing is also a strategy-rich function. The product marketer’s responsibility is to launch the product to be successfully positioned within the marketplace. Don’t get confused between product and product marketing teams. Although both have a say in the product direction, product marketing focuses on business strategy, whereas product management focuses on UX and technology.

How to build a go-to-market strategy with confidence

Ensure your strategy survives and can even differentiate how you compete in the marketplace. By breaking your go-to-market strategy down into components, you’ll know what to optimize if results aren’t happening or happening fast enough. Operating and tweaking your strategy as you grow.

Here’s a walkthrough of the 9 critical components.

1. Identify a market problem

A product or service’s value depends on the problem it solves.

For example, Netflix allows consumers to access a library of movies and shows in their own homes for a small fee each month. Uber removes the friction for consumers to call a taxi. Slack reduces emails in the workforce by facilitating communication. HubSpot helps marketers build campaigns quickly.

Every successful company starts with an apparent market problem they are trying to solve. They then identify the right market and create a unique value proposition to address those pain points.

Launching a new product is easier when there’s already established demand.

2. Build an ideal customer profile

Once a market problem is found, understand who your target audience is. Your go-to-market strategy will not work without clearly understanding your ideal customer profile.

In B2B, building an ideal customer profile (ICP) is one of the best ways to define who your target buyer is.

Ideal Customer Profile

An ICP is a fictitious outline of your ideal customer. It’s a representation person or company with the traits that would make them a fit for your company’s solutions.

When creating an ideal customer profile for your company, consider the following traits:

• Industry: if you’re selling into a consumer market (B2C), research the demographics of your customers. If you’re selling to businesses (B2B), identify your target industry, such as financial services, manufacturing, or technology.
• Size: For B2B companies, company size is a characteristic. Find the right company size such as individuals, SMB, mid-market, or enterprise. For example, Freshbooks provides accounting software for entrepreneurs and SMBs, while Sage offers business accounting software for mid-market and enterprise companies.
• Geography: Region and location pinpoint the cultural differences Geography helps you understand where to deploy employees. For example, many US-based B2B companies start in North America because of the time zone, language, and culture.
• Job Title or Role: Every job has unique challenges. Your customer’s role will determine their pain points. For example, a salesperson engages prospects to bring in new business. While an engineer codes and builds products. They work for the same company but their responsibilities are different.
• Budget: Consider the size of the pain point you solve and how much your ideal customer will spend to solve it–that’s your value gap. The budget will influence your pricing strategy and the market perception of your product. 

Get to know your ideal customers. Clear buyer personas help narrow your market and deploy the most effective use of resources.

3. Create value messaging

Connect your product and service offering to your ideal customers using value messaging.

A value proposition should articulate what benefit you provide to your audience and how you differentiate against alternative solutions.

Understand how your competitors are positioning and their product or service. Figure out how your product or service is different. Identify your unique selling proposition and position how you differentiate your offerings against other solutions in the market.

When thinking about positioning, phrase your pitch in simple terms:

4. Follow the buying journey

Each buyer is different and goes on a different path to purchase. Develop content and engagement paths based on their buying journey.

Break down the buying journey into distinct phases: problem awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness 

When they are aware of the problem they’re facing. Prospects do not know the cause yet nor what solutions can help. In this stage, they’re searching for their problem or symptoms. For example, if you have a toothache, you’re searching for a toothache remedy to narrow down the list of solutions.

Consideration 

They’ve identified several solutions but are unsure which one is the best. In the example of toothache, several solutions could be an electric toothbrush, flossing, or braces.

Decision 

When you’ve narrowed your search of solutions to specific companies. Let’s use the toothache example again to illustrate the decision stage. Once you’ve identified that an electric toothbrush is the right solution, you may need to determine which brand or model. So, you’ll likely read reviews, ask your friends for personal recommendations and read the product information to help with your decision. In B2B, you’re reading customer reviews on G2, reading case studies, and talking in peer groups to help your evaluation process and eventually choose the right solution for you.

Each stage requires different content and tactics to engage buyers. By understanding what channels your buyers use to learn about your solution, you can market on those channels to stay top-of-mind.

5. Research competition and market Intelligence

Understanding the overall market landscape and the competition is another integral part of your go-to-market strategy. Once you’ve determined your target audience and the pain points your product or service solves, you’ll want to research the market.

Learning about the market and your competition will help you identify underserved markets, which customers resonate most with your message, and how to position against your competition.

When researching, here are some helpful questions to answer:

• Who experiences the pain points that our product solves?
• What solutions are already available that address those pain points?
• How big is the market, and is there enough demand?
• How competitive is the market? And what market segments or needs are underserved?
• How does our product differentiate from the competitors?

6. Marketing tactics

To reach and engage your ICP, you’ll need to execute various marketing tactics. Once you’ve figured out your ICP and fine-tuned your messaging, the next step is to define your marketing and sales activities.

Companies prioritizing marketing activities before figuring out their ICP suffer from inefficient growth.

Like shooting an arrow, you’ll know where your message will land once you know who your target is.

Define the ways your customers prefer to buy and how they find solutions like yours. Identify the most efficient marketing channels—document the buyer’s buying journey. Most importantly, track your customers’ interactions to understand which marketing and sales tactics work.

Below are marketing and sales tactics for B2B companies.

• Account-based marketing (ABM): is a growth strategy in which Sales and Marketing concentrate their resources on a specific set of target companies within a market. According to a study by ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance, 87% of account-based marketers say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments.
• Inbound marketing: is a growth strategy that focuses on creating engaging and valuable content that addresses the needs of your target audience, helping them find your company. When creating content, ensure you’re researching the keywords, phrases, and questions your target buyer is searching for that would lead them to your product and service.
• Outbound: involves salespeople reaching out to your ideal customer profile. Outbound tactics include cold calling, email prospecting, social selling, and networking.

7. Define your sales strategy

Once you have marketing activities, the next step is to define your sales process. The role of sales is to identify your potential buyers and convert them into paying customers.

Sales is the lifeline of your go-to-market strategy. Without an effective sales strategy, revenue can’t flow in to help your business grow.

Here are four common sales strategies. You can combine these strategies that match your product and business model.

Inside sales

The inside sales model is the process of selling your solutions through phone, email, or online, rather than traveling to meet clients.

It is a cost-effective model since inside sales reps interact with prospects remotely rather than traveling. There are numerous benefits to building an inside sales team, such as cost efficiencies, revenue predictability, and scalability.

Inside sales reps rely on sales prospecting tools like Salesloft, Lusha or Outreach.io to engage prospects with emails, social media, phone, and video.

You’ll need Sales Development Reps (SDR) to create an inside sales team to find and nurture leads. As well as Account Executives (AE) to demo the product, negotiate, and close deals.

This model is best for selling small to medium-priced solutions with sales cycles that last weeks to a few months. Inside sales are the most popular model and further grow because of remote work.

Field sales

The field sales model is when sales reps go out of the office to sell directly in the prospect’s location. Field sales reps spend most of their time traveling to meet with clients, connect with prospects, and nurture relationships.

Compared to inside sales, field sales is more expensive. The field sales model sells complex solutions with a higher price point.

One key benefit is that sales reps can have face-to-face time with customers which helps build stronger relationships. Field sales reps meet with prospects at trade shows, conferences, and industry events.

Field sales are more challenging to scale than inside sales due to costs and training; however, if you sell a higher-priced product to enterprise companies.

Channel sales

The channel sales model is a mutually beneficial collaboration between two businesses to sell your product.

According to Forrester, 75% of world trade flows indirectly through channels, partnerships, and alliances which all have become increasingly important.

Partnerships are a beneficial growth strategy that helps both parties grow and acquire new customers. It’s also cost-effective since you don’t need to recruit or pay for your own internal sales teams. But they don’t come without their challenges.

Recruiting and educating partners on the benefits of your product will be difficult. Since partners don’t work for your organization, they are less likely to sell your product. Often times they have a catalog of products they can sell.

For early-stage startups, channel partnerships are not the most effective. Your team needs to know internally how to sell your product before passing off the reigns to partners. But as your company scales, consider adding partnerships to your go-to-market mix.

Self-serve

The self-serve model is when the prospect finds your product and becomes a paying customer on their alone. This is a common approach for product-led companies such as Slack, Grammarly or DocuSign where the customers get to use the product before purchasing.

This model works best when products are simple, inexpensive, and sales happen at a high volume. Most of the cost for a self-serve model goes into the product and marketing. This improves the product’s usability and drives website traffic and conversions. It’s also cost-effective because hiring a sales team is not needed.

Not every company can adopt a self-serve model. It makes sense if your product requires a low-friction buying process and has shorter sales cycles.

8. Create go-to-market goals

Any good strategy has clear objectives and key results.

As you build your go-to-market strategy, you’ll have to establish what goals your company is trying to accomplish. The results will determine if you’re on the right track.

For example, a strategy that involves running monthly webinars. If you consistently run webinars, review your total registrants, live attendees, number of qualified leads, and opportunities to work out your conversion rates and determine results.

By setting goals and measuring the results, you’ll determine how many webinars and leads it takes to acquire new customers. Clear goals will allow you to map out your marketing funnel, pipeline goals, and targets for both sales and marketing teams.

If you’re missing goals, you’ll have a data-driven method of determining where you need to adjust. It could be the frequency of your webinars, the quality of your ICP, or even messaging.

9. Customer retention plan

We’ve outlined how to acquire new customers. Retaining and growing existing customers is important in creating a scalable and repeatable business.

Acquiring new customers costs 5 to 10 times more than selling to a current customer — and current customers spend 67% more on average than those new to your business. Traditionally, customer retention has long taken a back seat to customer acquisition.

Customer retention is increasingly more important for companies, especially in SaaS, where high customer churn devalues a company.

A thoughtful go-to-market strategy not only considers customer acquisition but equally considers how they retain and grow customers. Strategies such as cross-selling new products, upselling, and customer loyalty are common ways to retain customers long-term.

What are the different types of go-to-market strategies?

Product-led

Product-led is when the company relies on the product itself as the main driver for customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.

Companies in this strategy typically rely on word-of-mouth, virality, and content to grow instead of traditional sales and marketing channels.

Slack, SurveyMonkey, and Dropbox are well-known examples of a product-led strategy because they rely on a small handful of users to use the product first.

Sales-led

Sales-lead requires marketing to generate demand for the product or service and capture leads through content.

Salespeople play a pivotal role because they need to reach out to interested prospects and lead them through a sales process, to turn them into happy customers.

Countless B2B companies leverage this go-to-market strategy, such as Salesforce, Marketo, Snowflake, Crowdstrike, and many more.

5 go-to-market mistakes to avoid

1. Wrong market segment: You have great messaging and a well-built product and you’re selling into financial services, however, they need more regulatory compliance features. As you continue to try and build more functionality for potential financial service prospects, you lose out on another market segment that is completely happy with your product, spending budget, and sales cycles on the wrong market segment.
2. Poor messaging: You have a great product but your messaging doesn’t resonate with your target audience. Perhaps, your messaging emphasizes your product’s user experience but all of your customers truly care about analytics and reporting.
3. Ineffective marketing strategy: You are using the wrong marketing channels or simply aren’t marketing where your buyers are. For example, if you’re marketing through billboards and print but your buyers are digital-first and prefer to engage through social media.
4. Not focusing on customer retention: You’re spending a lot of budget on customer acquisition at all costs. You’re filling your funnel with new customers. But those customers aren’t an ideal fit. Your funnel will leak as customers churn. This is often an indicator that you don’t have a product-market fit.
5. No metrics or goals: You’re executing a strategy without clear metrics or goals. This means, there isn’t a positive or negative indicator to identify if you’re on the right path. No metrics mean no visibility into what you need to optimize. In a sense, you’re blindly going to market.

6 go-to-market strategy examples to inspire you

Successful companies often treat their go-to-market strategy and plan as a well-oiled machine. A handful of companies have truly stood out and differentiated themselves from the competition based on their GTM strategy. Below are five examples of how companies have differentiated their GTM strategy.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is in a highly competitive space of Marketing Automation with other solutions such as Eloqua, Pardot, and Marketo. It is important to differentiate their product offering, value and clearly define their target audience. Here’s how they build a successful go-to-market strategy.

Strategic Narrative

HubSpot’s main differentiator was their primary focus on Inbound Marketing which was a contract to other marketing automation platforms focused on being a database and email platform.

Inbound Methodology

The message they proliferated was the “Inbound Methodology” of attracting qualified leads through social media, content marketing, blogging, landing pages, eBooks, and SEO, then nurturing them until their customers. Naturally, their strategic narrative attracted SMB companies who preferred an easy, seamless solution that offered great support.

HubSpot also launched INBOUND, their annual marketing event like a TED talk of marketing conferences. The annual event focuses on what’s happening in the world of inbound and where it’s headed for the future. It was a central hub for marketers to get together and share best practices inbound marketing.

Market Segment

Despite being in the same category with solutions that address similar pain points, HubSpot‘s differentiated narrative naturally attracted SMB and mid-market companies. HubSpot’s ideal buyers needed a full-suite solution with many tools without the complexity. Ease of use, user experience, customer support, and simplicity were key product differentiators that aligned well with what their target markets were looking for in a marketing automation platform.

2. Gong.io

Gong.io captures interactions between your sales team and potential customers, analyzes conversation data, and provides insight-based feedback to show how your team can improve.

They raised $250 million in Series E funding, valuating the company at $7.25 billion. Needless to say, they’re growing quickly. So, how did they grow so quickly in the past few years?

Strategic Narrative

Gong.io has gone through a transformation in the past 5+ years.

They started with a typical B2B SaaS website with informative messaging and content. Now, they’ve transformed their brand and have used it as a differentiator. Their tagline, “Goodbye opinions, hello, reality,” speaks to the central problem the company solves for sales teams. There is too much guessing and opinions but not enough data to make business decisions.

Their message puts a hard line in the sand for what their company represents and how they help their target audience. It’s direct and actionable, just like the typical characteristics of their audience: sales leaders and sales professionals.

Category Creation: Revenue Intelligence

Initially, Gong.io categorized its solution as call recording and coaching recording software.

Later they transitioned to the category of Conversation Intelligence. However, as the category grew with more and more competitors, Gong’s solution was not part of a new category called “Revenue Intelligence.” Gong’s CEO, Amit Bendov, hoped it would mark a new era where sales teams stop relying on hunches and more on data and intelligence.

Content Marketing

Since Gong.io’s solution sits on thousands of calls and millions of data points they’ve collected from sales calls and deals. This makes their data the most valuable asset for their company and a distinct part of content strategy.

Gong Labs is a category of content that Gong.io produces which provides sales teams with insights based on 10M+ sales calls. Here are a few examples of data-driven content they’ve produced:

3. Drift

Brand Identity

Drift has an established brand identity, and they’ve doubled down on who they are as a company with its marketing. More importantly, their brand identity is also their most significant differentiator.

When you have a brand like Drift, it becomes tough to compete with because you’re competing on an emotional level.

Category Creation: Conversational Marketing

They’ve coined the term conversational marketing.

Everyone knows they’re selling a website chatbot which is a heavily competitive market. But Drift looks at itself as more than a chatbot. They call their category “Conversational Marketing,” a reasonable difference from how their competitors categorize themselves.

Gate vs. Not to Gate Content

If you’re in B2B marketing, one of the hottest debates is whether you should gate or not your content. There are entire B2B marketing playbooks built on gated content to help cover qualified leads. However, Drift turned the traditional marketing playbook upside down and ungated all of its content.

Drift is a conversational marketing company, and lead forms are anti-conversational. Opening up access to their content meant more people would land on their website, consume their content and grow more interested in what solutions Drift offers.

4. Tesla

The car automobile is a massive market with a $706B market cap. In the early days, electric vehicles weren’t the most popular. They were clunky, ugly and weren’t trendy. The growing demand and acceptance of electric vehicles are directly attributed to Tesla Motors.

Company Mission

When Elon Musk joined Tesla as the CEO, he proclaimed that the company’s mission was “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass-market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”

Tesla knew its constraints when introducing a new electric vehicle to the market. They recognized that their goal would be to mass-produce a relatively affordable vehicle. However, building a car startup company is impossible while achieving economies of scale. This would be a deterrent for the average automobile manufacturer but not for Tesla.

Tesla’s first electric vehicle was the Tesla Roadster which sold 2,500 cars before ending product in January 2012. The company took a contrarian route by building the first high-performance electric luxury sports car instead of an affordable car that could be mass-produced. The Tesla roadster established its brand and helped deliver its elective vehicle concept to the market.

Direct Sales and Service

Tesla’s go-to-market strategy and business model are based on direct sales and service versus franchised dealerships, which is the typical approach for automobile companies. They created a massive international network of company-owned showrooms in significant malls and city centers.

Tesla believes owning direct sales gains a competitive advantage in the speed of its product development. Additionally, it creates a more personalized buying experience because customers only have to deal with Tesla employees, whereas traditional car dealerships would have conflicts.

New Products

As Tesla continues to grow, they have launched multiple products throughout the years, all of which have addressed different market segments with different needs.

• Model X Tesla began delivering its first SUV, the Model X, in September 2015
• Model 3 Tesla delivered the Model 3 in July 2017 as its first entry of affordable cars.
• Powertrain systems: Tesla sells powertrain systems and components to other auto manufacturers.
• Cybertruk is, its first entry into the light-duty trucks to compete with the Ford F150.
• Tesla Semi: Tesla plans to begin producing the Tesla Semi, an all-electric-powered semi-truck.
• Powerwall: Tesla sells the Powerwall that serves as an energy storage system in homes or businesses.
• Solar panel roofing: Tesla’s solar roofs are made up of solar panels, which look like roof tiles that are very different from what typical solar panels look like.
• Financial services: Like other automakers, Tesla offers car owners financial services such as vehicle loans and leases.

Tesla did not create the electric car market. Tesla innovated based on a successful business model and a differentiated go-to-market strategy. They made electric cars famous and appealing and created a brand known for quality and innovation. By owning sales and services, they achieved a unique customer experience and is a significant reason why Tesla owners are raving fans.

5. Slack

Slack is one of the fastest-growing companies. Since their public launch in February 2015, here are just some of the many accomplishments they’ve achieved:

• Accumulating 8 million daily active users (and 3 million of those are paid, users)
• Having the highest conversion rate (30%) among freemium software products
• Being used by 43% of Fortune 100 companies
• Achieving a valuation (in August 2018) of $7.1 billion

Strategic Narrative: The Anti-Email Company

Slack’s stance was to “kill email” because emails made it difficult to keep track of conversations and made collaboration much more challenging.

They leveraged Slack’s hook as the email killer in their marketing and public relations, becoming a powerful form of word-of-mouth marketing. They understood how painful email was for their target market, and their customers wanted a better conversation workflow. That’s where Slack stepped in.

Product-led Growth

Slack’s growth strategy differs from a typical B2B SaaS company. They did not rely on a sales team to reach outbound to decision-makers and management. Instead, they relied on the virality of their product and focused their efforts on targeting the end-users. Then as more and more users from a company used Slack, they successfully expanded organization-wide.

Integrations

Slack offers over 1,000+ integrations in its marketplace. The company gains referral traffic to its website, but it also rides on the success of those integrations to grow.

For example, if someone connected their Google Calendar to Slack, the integration would make Slack much more sticky and difficult to remove.

Fair pricing policy

Not only does Slack offer a free plan, but it also operates under a “fair billing policy.” Slack gives you the money back through prorated credits if a Slack user does not use the software for 14 days.

Their pricing strategy is not only helpful for creating excellent customer value. It also enables Slack’s teams to work diligently and ensure they provide seamless product onboarding and a robust user experience so that users continue to be active in the platform.

6. Notion

Notion is a no-code software that allows teams to build spreadsheets, manage workflows, and share documents elegantly and flexibly – making it great for small and large businesses.

Unique Selling Points

Notion’s growth, in comparison to its competitors, has not been the result of extensive marketing budgets utilizing paid social, search, or display advertising but rather through its value to the community it fosters.

Over 90% of its traffic is driven through a direct search, with paid search at a little over 5%.

Community-led Growth

Notion’s Reddit community is incredible. It has 46,000+ members in the Subreddit, and it’s the central place for users to connect and share templates, ideas, and different ideas.

Notion also leaned on its community strategy further with the launch of its ambassador program, Notion Pros, to find users interested in improving the product and staying closely connected with its community.

Beyond Reddit and Notion’s ambassador Program, dozens of content creators create resources using Notion and share it with their niche audiences.

The lesson to learn from Notion is the power of finding your users and building a community for collaboration. Let your users take the lead and provide them with the content and flexibility to help you grow. They provided Notion with their pain points and the best ways to develop their product.

Ready to go?

Are you ready to deliver your product to market? As you set up your launch, you’ll need to determine the best process for determining your target audience, strategic narrative, goals, and markets.

All of which may seem daunting without a plan. With the steps outlined below, you’ll be able to confidently create a go-to-market strategy without guessing.