Look, we all know the success of your business depends on how well you market. However, the way you market can have a huge impact on your results. So, what are some of the best strategies you can use to improve your marketing? One of the most effective strategies is to use a proven template framework.
You are a business owner and you want to increase your revenue. You are tired of sending out a million emails to potential customers to market your product and services. You want to get in front of the right prospects who will take action. This blog will show you how to sell your products and services using a proven template framework. You will learn how to prospect, evaluate and close sales. This is a proven approach that will take you from idea to business.
No business wants to be left behind in the growing market for green products and services, and no business wants to be left behind in the growing market for green products and services. This means that no business wants to be left behind in the growing market for green products and services. It is therefore important that businesses that are interested in the green market go to market in a way that is effective and efficient. This blog will provide a free template that can be used by businesses that are
The Winning By Design Blueprint Series offers practical guidance for every aspect of a sales organization, including creating a go-to-market plan (also known as a GTM strategy).
We address the following questions in this guide:
What is the definition of a go-to-market strategy?
How can you develop an effective GTM strategy for YOUR product or service?
First, let’s clarify what it means to “go to market.” Then, for startups, established software businesses, and everyone in between, we’ll offer our tactical approach to developing a go-to-market plan. Finally, we’ll go through why you need a GTM plan and how to implement one.
This will allow you to diversify your income, make your company more robust to economic downturns, and prepare for future development. What more might your business require?
Contents Table of Contents
What Makes a Good Go-To-Market Plan?
A go-to-market strategy lays out the actions that must be taken in order to break into a new market and succeed with those consumers. This requires a thorough knowledge of your target market, a compelling message outlining how your solution addresses their issues, a sound price strategy, and a well-executed distribution strategy.
Before you launch your product, you must also establish your pricing strategy and have a distribution strategy in place.
What is the Purpose of a GTM Strategy?
Only half of small companies survive beyond their fifth year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Seventy percent of projects collapse after 10 years.
Typically, an entrepreneur in a small company comes up with a concept and falls in love with it. They may grow oblivious to apparent dangers or simple realities that, if ignored, would ultimately bankrupt their company.
Unfortunately, even the greatest of ideas may fall victim to this. These failures, on the other hand, might have been avoided with a well-thought-out go-to-market plan that included the appropriate product-market fit and a compelling value proposition.
A strong GTM plan provides a framework that allows you to track your progress, identify and solve problems before they become big enough to force you to close your doors. This is important for every business, whether it’s a startup with a brand-new product or an established firm seeking to grow into new or unproven areas.
Where Can This Go-To-Market Strategy Be Used?
Across the board
It would be nice if you could take on the entire world, but unless you’re in the S&P 500, it would be much more feasible to focus on a smaller geographic area at least to start with. Usually, the best place to start is the region in which your business is located and operating. Then, from there, you can expand to other adjacent locations.
Cultural and geographical areas (think Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific) typically react to the US market with a 1-2 year delay. Some parts of Scandinavia, for example, act similarly to the United States. Others, such as Germany and Spain, need a focused strategy.
Markets spanning
In which industry, or vertical, does your product or service address your consumers’ most urgent issue? Are they resolving issues for healthcare workers? Executives in B2B SaaS marketing? Officials from the state or municipal government?
Healthcare, MarTech, Government, and other vertical industries may have extremely stringent entrance criteria. This may need the creation of a unique product or price model on your behalf. Each vertical may also need a unique or specialized distribution strategy.
Covering a variety of topics
Is your target market made up of individual users or big corporations? When you’re targeting individual software users vs corporate companies, your go-to-market approach will be significantly different.
Individuals often have far shorter sales cycles and cheaper pricing than businesses, which typically have many decision makers and stakeholders over a much longer sales cycle. SMBs are usually located in the middle of the spectrum.
AN EXAMPLE OF A CASE IN POINT: SkyStream followed Cisco’s lead in infrastructure sales in the late 1990s. It was mainly marketed to high-tech firms. The “bubble” burst in 2002, wiping out the majority of Silicon Valley. SkyStream, on the other hand, was able to stay afloat thanks to a $10 million deal with Disney for a new product, a $5 million three-year contract with the Department of Defense, and a $2 million income stream from both the EMEA and APAC regions.
How Do I Create a 7-Step Go-To-Market Strategy?
It doesn’t have to be so difficult to create a go-to-market plan framework that it prevents you from taking action. We’ve broken it down into seven simple stages that you can follow like 1, 2, and 3!
Step 1: Define your ideal customer profile and target market.
To discover the greatest product-market fit, you must first define your target audience’s demographics, psychological characteristics, geographic regions, and interests.
Not only should you know who you’re selling to, but you should also know what issues you’re addressing for them:
- Who will be your most lucrative and engaged customers?
- What issues are you addressing for them?
- What kind of client experience do they aim to provide?
In order to build your value proposition, you’ll also need to establish ideal client profiles or buyer personas.
Step 2: Define your value proposition and offer.
In one or two brief lines, the value proposition explains how your product addresses your prospects’ issues and makes their lives simpler and better.
Follow these steps to create a good value proposition:
- Create the best persuasion-inducing 30-second elevator pitch you can.
- Make a note of it. Then trim the fat and get rid of the keywords.
- Reduce it to a phrase that takes less than 10 seconds to read aloud.
The more precise your target market, the simpler it will be to develop a compelling value proposition or product messaging that will set your business apart from the competition.
Step 3: Establish your brand identity and positioning
You’ll need to create a brand for your product or service and then position it correctly in front of your target market. First and foremost, what is your brand’s message and how do you wish to convey it? Take into account the following:
- Personality
- Language
- Colors
- Values
Then you’ll want to establish your brand’s position in your target market:
- What do you want people to think about your product or service?
- How do you distinguish yourself from your competitors?
- When you go to market, what advantages do you want to highlight the most?
Step 4: Select the channels via which you will communicate with your target audience.
What would your prospective consumers think of your product or service when they see it? What will you do if you can’t locate them? If you’re a SaaS company, for example, you may simply utilize internet channels like websites, online shops, and webinars. Trade fairs, seminars, door-to-door sales, and direct partners are examples of other channels.
Here are some considerations to consider when deciding which channels are right for your company and which ones should be smoothly integrated for a better purchasing experience:
- Where do you go to discover your ideal clients?
- What stores do they frequent?
- What is their preferred method of communication with you?
- What is the most appropriate distribution model for your product?
- How can you make your channels work together to provide a consistent consumer experience?
Step 5: Choose a pricing plan.
You’ll also need to figure out a good pricing plan. Working with your marketing and financial departments, if you have them, is the ideal way. If not, look at what your rivals are up to before you start writing.
You may move in either way of the sliding scale between high volume/low pricing or low volume/high prices if you have a product. However, you must also consider quality. If you want to break into your target market and make a statement, start with excellent quality and cheap pricing to attract new consumers to move from your rivals to you.
You might, on the other hand, begin with a “economy” product. This would be poor quality/cheap price (by “low quality,” we imply fewer or restricted features; after all, no one wants to purchase or sell a low-quality product). SaaS companies accomplish this by offering a free but restricted tier and then attempting to upsell their trial clients to a higher tier plan with additional features.
Wikipedia is the source of this image.
You may also go premium if your volume is smaller but your customer lifetime value (LTV) is greater due to superior service or features.
Step 6: Create a sales and distribution strategy.
Do you want to sell directly to consumers, through wholesalers, or via retailers? Is your product just available on the internet?
To market your goods, your distribution strategy should include location-based techniques or methods. You should provide information about where your prospective consumers may get comparable goods and services from rivals. What impact will such channels have on your brand, sales volume, expenses, and profit margins?
Equally crucial, what message does selling via those distribution channels convey to your target customers? Consider how your consumers would react to your goods if you offer it via a boutique rather than a big store.
If you go wholesale, you may pay greater fees, but you’ll make up for it with bigger sales volume since you’ll have access to larger shops than you would otherwise have.
When you sell directly to consumers, you cut out the middlemen and save money on wholesale, retail, and sales rep fees, but you still have to pay for shipping and customer service.
Distribution is easy for a B2B SaaS solution since everything happens online, lowering your overhead expenses significantly compared to conventional brick-and-mortar or even eCommerce companies with tangible goods. For B2B SaaS businesses, this alone significantly streamlines their go-to-market strategy.
Step 7: Select the appropriate metrics to track your success.
Early and frequent monitoring of your GTM plan will allow you to make adjustments before you run out of runway. The following are some of the most useful metrics:
- Return on investment for a sales strategy (total revenue divided by total selling costs)
- CAC (California Association of (customer acquisition costs, or what it costs to acquire a single customer)
- LTV is a term that refers to the (customer lifetime value)
- Conversion rates for leads
- Length of the sales cycle (average time it takes to close a sale)
Other sales KPIs you may utilize in your go-to-market strategy are listed below.
What Are the Components of a B2B GTM Strategy Template?
In the case of B2B, your GTM plan template should have three essential elements:
- intelligence on the market
- Segmentation
- Customer acquisition costs
Incorporate market information into your go-to-market strategy.
It is not sufficient to just comprehend the market. You should also know how your product connects to your target market.
You’ll need to conduct the research and work on your message in stages 1 and 2 above, as well as figure out how your offering differs from that of your rivals, to create your GTM strategy template.
We won’t go through the stages that cover this aspect again since we’ve previously covered them; instead, we’ll move on to segmentation.
Customer segmentation for your B2B clients
You’ll see that deals start to segment around discount levels when we map the number of offers committed against a stated price (ACV).
When salespeople get involved (!) discount amounts quickly cluster around 10% and 20%. Although this is shown in the form of a bell curve, it is not required.
Figure 1: B2B transaction distribution as a function of price (a product of discount and list price).
B2B segments include:
- Enterprise/Corporate — selling a platform (CRM/ERP) on a multi-year basis.
- Mid Market/Department – yearly contracts are used to market platforms and apps.
- Selling apps on an annual/monthly/usage contract, similar to SMB/Group.
- Selling a browser plug-in on a freemium/monthly/usage contract is known as pro-user.
Several bell curves are expected to appear in these parts. The following graph depicts segmentation in relation to the number of transactions per section.
Figure 2: Deal Size-Based Segmentation (ACV).
Going Upstream vs. Downstream in the SMB Segment
Moving Up-Stream refers to the process of a SaaS company starting in SMB and progressing to Enterprise. Going Down-Stream refers to when a company sells in the enterprise and then moves on to the faster-paced SMB or Pro-User market.
The most frequent issue is that businesses just hire more salespeople to migrate upstream or downstream without considering the implications for the rest of the company. Pursuing a new market sector, on the other hand, must be a company-wide effort. It may even need a rethinking of your product-market fit and your GTM strategy template.
Figure 3: The SMB segment’s significance.
When it comes to spending freedom, Pro-user is the most cost-conscious, with a limit of $1,000 per year. In the Mid-Market, the value of a particular product is frequently hidden by the worth of many other goods, and you may find yourself selling to just a small group or department at most.
Enterprise vs. SMB: Enterprises may employ long RFP/RFQ buying processes depending on expenditure criteria and are often focused on the service provided. SMBs, on the other hand, have more flexibility—they may spend anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 and have shorter 30-90-day sales cycles since they want to make an effect right now.
CASE IN POINT:
A small business with a $100,000 issue is willing to pay $12,000. For a $300,000 issue, the same SMB is prepared to pay three times as much. Three times the issue, three times the cost. An organization with a $1 million issue is willing to invest $100,000; however, convincing the organization to spend three times the money for three times the problem is difficult. Over the years, purchasing processes and expenditure limits have smoothed out spending flexibility.
It explains why so many SaaS companies utilize SMB as a launch pad for their first marketing efforts. When compared to the Perpetual Software business, which starts with the Enterprise market, there is a significant difference. Startups will not have the same go-to-market strategy as established companies (more on this below).
What impact does CAC have on your GTM strategy?
Selling a Pro-user a $5/month Chrome plugin? It’s pointless to fly across the nation for a protest in person!
Similarly, expecting an Enterprise customer to commit to a $100,000 platform just by viewing your website and providing their payment card information is ludicrous.
To put it another way, one SaaS go-to-market strategy differs from the next. It’s dependent on the specifics of your company and its services.
Each of them has a distinct Go To Market strategy, and the customer acquisition cost (CAC) must be proportional to the income generated.
GTM Approaches as a Function of Annual Contract Value (Figure 4)
As a function of Annual Contract Volume and Volume of Deals/Month, the table below shows a variety of GTM methods currently in use. Each of these methods is based on the greatest possible client experience.
This may be adjusted for speed (online) for Web Sales, and complexity for Local Sales (integration in the existing infrastructure).
GTM models as a function of Annual Contract Value (Figure 5).
6 Examples of Go-To-Market Strategies Based on Your CAC
1) A freemium model
A client registers for a no-cost service. The client becomes addicted and must pay for more premium services (e.g. more storage, personalization etc.) Using these Freemium consumers as a lead source is a typical approach here.
Credit card transactions are handled online, and questions are answered through the FAQ and YouTube videos. Consider a Google Chrome extension or plug-in as an example.
2) Online sales
If many clients from the same domain join up for a Freemium account, you may persuade them to upgrade to a “Corporate License” with “security” as a bonus feature. This is something that can be automated. Take, for example, LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator membership.
3) Sales through the internet
Customers will have more queries as the solution gets more complete. Signing up for a Zoom.us group license, for example.
Instead of utilizing the online FAQ, customers prefer to speak with someone. Inside Sales Reps (ISR) may answer client inquiries through online chat. This is recommended over incoming phone conversations to prevent any issues with accents or other language barriers.
4) Internal sales
A. Inbound-focused
As the solution becomes more sophisticated, new questions emerge, and consumers must go through the buying process once again.
They are in need of help. They contact an Account Executive to speak with an expert (AE). A Sales Development Representative (SDR) answers the phone and routes the call according to the qualification. This is ideal for growing businesses that rely on marketing to generate inbound leads.
B. Outbound-focused
The solution does not produce enough inbound leads, or the quantity of inbound leads generated does not correspond to the quality of the leads.
Sales Development Reps discover and contact potential clients, as well as schedule meetings with solution experts (AEs), using a CRM, but sales engagement technologies are becoming increasingly common. This is one of the most popular ways to jumpstart sales, and it’s usually based on a platform-based service (CRM).
5) Sales force on the road
This is true for platform sales, such as ERP and CRM.
Customers may request customized integrations with their databases, processes, and other applications. They want to talk about their unique circumstances and requirements.
A salesman boards an aircraft and travels to his or her clients. You’ll need a more complex strategy with an Account Development Rep (ADR) who targets several individuals in the account with consistent messaging, often known as account-based selling, to find these clients. To keep travel costs low, this is often divided by area.
6) Sales force on the ground
You may wish to target AT&T Dallas and therefore use a local sales approach with a Dallas-based sales executive. This local salesperson is expected to have in-depth relationships within the account that lets him navigate their org chart easily.
This is usually the most expensive option, but it also yields the best results. This strategy is often used for multi-million-dollar transactions that need a multi-year, end-to-end enterprise agreement to justify the expense of a dedicated employee.
Setbacks of Using a Two-Stage Inside Sales Organization as an Example
SDRs write thousands of emails and make hundreds of phone calls to set up appointments with AEs in 2-stage inside sales organizations.
The AEs are then guaranteed a contract. This strategy has failed across the board, with low response rates to emails and phone calls.
- An SDR/AE team closes three transactions each month with an average deal value of $6,000 per contract.
- Because the AE only wins one out of every five deals, 15 SQLs are required each month.
- To acquire these 15 SQLs, the SDR sends out a few hundred emails and makes dozens of phone calls each month.
- The SDR/AE combination generates ARR of 12 x 3 x $6,000 = $216,000 per year.
- The SDR’s total pay is $80,000, whereas the AE’s is $150,000. As a result, a total of $230,000 has been reached.
Here’s the issue:
The hard CAC of $230,000 is higher than the $215,000 in first-year revenue.
The first solution is to compensate for the tackle.
Reduce SDR/AE compensation by relocating the team to a less expensive area.
For most businesses, the efficiency lost as a consequence of being away from the office leads to a reduction in effectiveness, thus nullifying the benefit.
Figure 6: Using a 2-stage sales strategy with volume-based outbound at a $6,000 ACV.
Solution 2: Use a new approach to prospecting.
Figure 7 shows how to divide the model.
Solution 3: Increase the price of your product (remember, SMBs have flexibility!)
Figure 8: On larger transactions, raise the price and utilize the inside sales staff.
Building Your Go-To-Market Strategy: Resources for Getting Started
There are plenty of issues to address and specifics to discuss with your team as you build your go-to-market strategy framework and apply it to the appropriate regions, sectors, and markets. But keep in mind that you don’t have to do everything at once. Start where you’re most at ease, have a clear goal, and make adjustments as needed to fit your company.
Whether you’re developing a SaaS go-to-market strategy or a physical product marketing strategy, once you have the information you need, you’ll be confident in your ability to carve out a niche in your industry.
We’ve put together some materials to assist you in getting started:
Have we clarified what a go-to-marketing plan is for you?
RELATED: A 90-Day Market Penetration Plan in 5 Steps (In Any Industry)
Also available on Medium.
For companies that are just starting out, the first step in getting to market is to formulate a solid business plan; this is the plan that will help you define your business goals and determine how you will achieve them. The problem is, even the most basic business plans that are written in pencil and notepad can be a huge time-suck. That’s where a template business plan comes in. A template business plan can help you streamline and standardize your business plan so that you can focus on the content of your business plan itself – its business strategy, key success factors, and business objectives.. Read more about go-to-market strategy template and let us know what you think.
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A go-to-market strategy is a plan of action for how a company will enter and grow in a market. It should include the following:
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Frequently Asked Questions
What should be included in a go-to-market strategy?
A go-to-market strategy is a plan of action for how a company will enter and grow in a market. It should include the following: 1) Market research 2) Targeting the right customer 3) Product development 4) Pricing strategy 5) Marketing strategy
What is a go-to-market framework?
A go-to-market framework is a set of tools and processes that help companies to understand their customers, develop products, and ultimately grow.
What is go-to-market strategy example?
A go-to-market strategy is a businesss plan for how it will reach and engage its target market.
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