Go-to-market strategy (“GTM”) used to be one of those terms that I loathed. The term was used with such frequency and consistently out of context that it became meaningless to me. In practice, it’s an important concept. GTM is the tactical application of your sales and marketing efforts in order to grow, whether that be your product, brand, market expansion or new feature. The way in which you target customers and distribute your product has become critically important, if not more important than the product itself.
For startups, your GTM plan should be the strategies and actions that you’ll execute to reach product market fit. A lot of ink has been spilled regarding what stage you should launch your product, but GTM is comprised of two essential things:
- How to attract customers
- How to monetize product
This plan should derive from your user discoveries. Through this process, hopefully you’ve honed your unique, differentiating value statement and are able to concisely communicate that to potential customers. The lessons from your discovery should inform the basis for how you’ll acquire your first customers. For many software businesses, you’ll need to answer: “where do your potential users aggregate online?”. Answering this basic question provides a direction to where you’ll find and best target those customers. Offline methods are also extremely valuable; however, they have more overhead and are harder to implement in a repeatable and predictable manner.
As a practical example of the GTM challenge, I was talking to a founder of a platform that helps engineers manage their hardware development cycles, software for hardware. He himself was an aerospace engineer and built a solution to a problem he discovered as a practitioner. We were discussing his GTM. The company was in the midst of an evolution into the enterprise. I asked if his team attends trade shows. This is a common method of finding and attracting enterprise clients. However, his user audience is hardware engineers and they’re nowhere near a trade show. Even their managers, who most likely don’t have purchasing power, were not going to things like CES or other conferences that congregate hardware professionals.
This founder needed to get his platform in front of the engineers, provide value and then transition that value to individuals that can sign on to purchase the platform. No small task. Each founder will have unique questions in captivating users and selling their product. Act on the insights and data gained from listening to early adopters.
