How Do You Create a Go-to-Market Strategy?

What Is a Go-to-Market Strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a written decision about which offering you’ll lead with, which buyer you’ll sell it to, how you’ll reach and convert that buyer, and how you’ll know it’s working. Channels, campaigns and launch dates come out of those decisions, so a strategy that starts with them is a schedule of activity with the reasoning left out.

Labels such as sales-led, product-led or partner-led describe how a company reaches and converts its buyers, and they’re worth deciding, but only after you know who the buyer is, since the right motion for a property manager responsible for several buildings is different from the right one for a developer trying out software on a free plan.

In ProfitPaths®, our method for building revenue you can measure and predict, the decisions follow six steps, and the first is the IMPACT Offering: which of the things you sell will lead, because every later decision depends on it.

What Are the Key Elements of a GTM Strategy?

The key elements of a GTM strategy are six decisions, made in this order: the offering, the buyer, the reason you give them to get in touch, how you convert them, the channels that reach them and how you measure the result, and when you spend more. Each step on this site covers one of them, and the question pages linked below go deeper.

1. IMPACT Offering: choose the offering you’ll lead with, by comparing your offerings on gross profit per customer after the cost of winning them, since the biggest seller is often the wrong one to grow (IMPACT Offering, and how to find your most profitable products).
2. IMPACT Prospect: name the buyer who makes that offering most profitable, described well enough that sales would recognize one in the first conversation, including who is a poor fit (IMPACT Prospect, and how to create an ideal customer profile).
3. Prospect Magnets: give those buyers a reason to raise a hand (Prospect Magnets, and do lead magnets work).
4. Prospect-to-Lead Conversion: decide where interested buyers land and what happens next, which means a page built for that buyer and that offer, and a person who follows up quickly and can answer their questions (Prospect-to-Lead Conversion, and why your website isn’t converting).
5. Channel Selection: decide what you can afford to spend to win one of those buyers and choose the channels where they already pay attention, then decide which numbers you’ll judge them by and which source you’ll trust, usually your CRM, with cost per customer and customer value by channel instead of the conversions each platform reports (Channel Selection, and how to measure digital marketing ROI).
6. Marketing Action Plan: set the conditions for spending more, including the size of each budget step, the limit most likely to stop you and when you’ll review the plan (Marketing Action Plan, and what is more important, profit or growth).

Write the six answers on one page, so that a new channel or campaign idea has to be argued against what’s already agreed, which is what the Marketing Action Plan page calls putting the plan in writing, and how to create a marketing plan adds the budget, calendar and review dates that turn it into a plan.

What Does a Go-to-Market Strategy Look Like in Practice?

In practice a go-to-market strategy fits on one page, with a line for each of the six decisions and a number behind most of them. The example below is the one we follow through every step on this site, condensed to its strategy.

The order did real work here, because the forecast only appeals to a buyer who has to budget years ahead for replacing equipment, so the Prospect Magnets line couldn’t have been written before the IMPACT Prospect line. Each line has its own page with the full numbers, linked from the list above, so this page leaves the detail there.

Who Is in Charge of the GTM Strategy in a Company?

The leadership team should make the first two decisions, the offering and the buyer, because they draw on finance, sales and operations, and one named person should own the written plan and its numbers after that. We’d give that role to the owner at a smaller company, and at a larger one to whoever leads marketing or revenue.

The first two decisions sit above any one department because finance knows the margins, sales knows what buyers ask for and where deals are lost, and operations knows whether the business could deliver twice as much, so leaving the offering to marketing alone tends to favor whatever already sells the most. The other four decisions need a single owner, because when each channel has its own owner and nobody owns the plan, budget meetings turn into negotiations between channels.

Sales needs a seat from the start rather than a copy at the end, since the buyer description is only useful if sales would recognize the same buyer and agrees to follow up the way the plan says.

How Is a GTM Strategy Different for a New Product or a New Market?

For a new product, the offering decision rests on estimates, so the strategy has to include a small, time-boxed test to replace them with real customers. For an existing offering going into a new market, the offering is already proven, so the work starts again at the IMPACT Prospect step.

• A new product has no history of how long customers stay or what they cost to win, so score it with your best estimates, say which ones are guesses, and spend only enough to learn whether real buyers behave the way you assumed before you scale it.
• An existing offering in a new market can earn a different profit from each new kind of buyer, so rerun the IMPACT Prospect comparison for that market before reusing the old channels, because the buyer who was easiest to reach at home can be the least profitable one there.
• Several offerings at a larger company need one strategy for each offering and buyer pair you lead with, since a single strategy written for the whole company tends to give every line a little and none of them enough to grow.

In each case the six decisions stay the same and only the confidence behind them changes, which is why the measurement and review lines matter most when the strategy is new.