Building Your Go-to-Market Strategy (Proven GTM Guide for 2023)

A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is an essential factor in the success or failure of a business in the new market. You can sell a bad product with a good GTM strategy, but you can’t sell a good product with a bad GTM strategy.

A GTM strategy’s objective is to provide a plan for launching a product or service to end users, taking into account things like price and distribution. A GTM strategy is comparable to a business plan, although the latter is larger in scope and takes into account other elements such as finance.

This guide is intended to assist businesses in developing a data-driven go-to-market strategy. First, we’ll explore exactly what a go-to-market strategy is and why it’s important. Then, we’ll offer a step-by-step process for developing your own. 

• What is a Go-to-Market Strategy?
• Why is a GTM Strategy Crucial for Your Business?
• The GTM Strategy Checklist
• How to Create a GTM Strategy
• Executing a Data-Backed GTM Strategy

Running a business is a constant race to find new customers. Whether launching a new product, entering a new market, or even branding your business, you have to get the message out. That’s what the GTM strategy is for. 

Let’s start with a proper definition: 

What is a Go-to-Market Strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a tactical action plan dictating the steps a company needs to reach the right audience with the right message for business growth and branding. It covers all aspects of business strategy and operations between product development and customer support. 

A GTM strategy answers these questions:

• What is your product and what specific need does it solve?
• Who is your ideal customer and what are their pain points?
• Where are you going to market your product? 
• What markets do you wish to enter and how are demand and competition in those markets?
• How are you going to contact your target clients and generate demand?

A GTM strategy involves significant expenses. And, no matter how innovative your product is, how you advertise and sell it may determine its success. Developing a GTM plan ensures that you are taking everything into consideration and avoiding costly mistakes, such as introducing your product to the wrong audience or in a market already saturated with comparable offers.

Why is a GTM Strategy Crucial for Your Business?

A go-to-market plan provides you with a complete roadmap for launching a successful new product. Even if you put in a lot of work, time, money, and resources to produce a new product or service, a poorly thought-out go-to-market strategy can lead your project to fail.

When implemented correctly, the GTM approach will align all stakeholders and provide a timeframe to guarantee each stakeholder reaches the stated milestones and results, paving the way for market success.

Overall, go-to-market strategies are used to achieve the following benefits:

• A well-defined strategy and direction for all stakeholders.
• Reduced product and service time to market.
• Chances of a successful product or service launch have increased.
• Reduced probability of additional expenditures resulting from unsuccessful product or service launches.
• Improved capacity to respond to changes and client preferences.
• Improved challenge management.
• A well-established growth route.
• Ensured the successful design of a client experience.

Developing a go-to-market strategy will help you avoid many of the mistakes that derail new product launches. Even if the product is well-designed and unique, poor product-market fit can derail a launch. A good GTM plan reduces the likelihood of losing significant time, money, and resources on a poor product launch.

GTM Strategy Checklist 

Business expansion into new markets has many of the same risks as starting a new company, and it may be equally complicated and stressful. Following the action steps outlined below will give you a competitive advantage in the new market entrance, product launches, and brand recognition.

• Determine the buying center and personas.
• Create a value matrix to aid with messaging identification.
• Before adopting your adverts on a large scale, optimize them depending on testing results.
• Select one (or more) of the four most prevalent sales techniques.
• Create and optimize your Inbound and/or outbound strategies to increase brand recognition and demand generation.
• Find strategies to improve your pipeline and boost conversion rates.
• Analyze the sales cycle and make it shorter.
• As you proceed, make adjustments and iterations.
• Retain clients and focus on customer delight.

Use the above points as your new market entry checklist to guide your growth. As you continue to expand abroad, make sure your decisions are well-calibrated and data-driven. Examine the market you are interested in extending and don’t leave anything to chance.

How to Create a GTM Strategy 

The process of building a GTM strategy can be segmented into 7 categories: 

Product/Market Fit 

The first step of taking your product or service to the market is determining whether the market is conducive to it. You can sell a product only if your product is a good fit for its customers.

Remember, Google Glass? Google spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its development but quickly shelved the product after launch saying the market wasn’t yet ready. On the other hand, a low-cost CRM would have a good Product/Market fit if it addresses the needs of prospective customers.

Target Audience

The next step is identifying your prospective customers. Generally, this is done extensively at the product development stage, so it shouldn’t be a heavy lift. That said, each subsequent stage in our GTM strategy relies on this target audience, so mistakes made here could be critical. In fact, getting your target audience wrong can sabotage your entire GTM strategy.

Identifying a high-level audience is not enough. Diving deeper, you should also be well aware of your addressable market. 

Addressable Market 

After you identify your target audience, it’s time to get an approximation of their size. 

There are two primary methods for calculating your company’s total addressable market.

1. Top-Down

The total addressable market (TAM) is identified by utilizing industry data, market surveys, and research studies in a top-down manner.

2. Bottom-Up

TAM is calculated using the bottom-up technique based on past sales and pricing data.

Total Addressable Market can be further narrowed down to Serviceable Available Market (SAM) and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). Dive into more details here. 

If you misidentify your target audience, your assessment of the addressable market would also be flawed. This will impact other crucial components of your GTM strategy, such as pricing strategy and ultimately ineffective sales and marketing strategy.

Pricing Model 

Choosing the appropriate pricing is a matter of balance. Prospective customers will not purchase your product if you overprice it. They’ll buy it if you price it too low, but your margins will suffer.

Correct pricing necessitates a grasp of consumer psychology. What does high or low pricing indicate to your customer? High pricing may actually increase the perceived worth of something, especially if it is a luxury item connected with prestige and desire.

Marketing Plan 

A marketing strategy and a marketing plan are two different things.

The marketing strategy should define how the company is positioned, how its offerings are segmented, who its target audience is, and how the organization’s underlying goal, vision, and values influence the marketing message. The strategy should also incorporate the general goals of the marketing effort.

Finding the right balance between outbound and inbound efforts is crucial. You can aim for a 50/50 mix between inbound and outgoing traffic when developing your GTM strategy. 

Inbound leads are easier to convert and less expensive to obtain than outbound leads. This is due to the fact that inbound prospects are already educated on the business problem you solve, are aware of your solution, and are typically more interested in purchasing your goods. 

The average cost per lead decreases by 80% after five months of regular inbound marketing plan execution. Hence, inbound marketing strategy becomes more crucial for generating interest and leads as it drives relevant prospects to your top of the lead generation funnel.

For outbound strategy, traditional cold outreach is ineffective in today’s highly competitive market. However, modern day sales professionals and marketers use sales intelligence tools for effective prospecting and outreach. Sales intelligence tools help you get in-depth knowledge and data about your prospects and customers that helps you to personalize your conversations, enhance conversions and close more deals. 

The greatest advantage of outbound marketing is its capacity to immediately get in front of a huge number of people and raise awareness. If done right using data, you can create an outbound marketing campaign, reach millions of people, and get new clients in a matter of weeks.

All said and done, you need to track continuously what’s working and what isn’t working for your business. 

Sales Strategy 

A sales strategy is one of the most complex and important tactics. You’ll want to spend time detailing how you plan the sales process to function. A few things that you need to consider for your sales team include tools and resources, client acquisition, and training and support.  

• Support for training. Provide training for the sales force so they can confidently market the product or service.
• Tools and resources. Provide tools for the sales team to find, engage with, and sell to customers, as well as manage these connections and showcase your products and services.
• Client acquisition. Determine the best method for acquiring customers.

Executing a Data-Backed GTM Strategy 

It is critical to establish your core competencies, build your market and buyer definitions, focus on your message, and package and price correctly while developing your data-driven GTM plan.

You want to collect data that will reveal who is buying your products and services, know your industry, and set market criteria. More importantly, you want to learn what drives their decisions. This entails defining your buyer personas via the use of — you guessed it – data!

However, implementing a good GTM plan necessitates the precise collection of countless data points. Firmographics, demographics, technographics, and Buyer Intent Data are all forms of data that may assist you to determine who you should be targeting (and, most importantly, when and how.) 

Before a site visitor or interested consumer becomes a lead, you may determine how valuable or interesting they are by combining numbers surrounding appealing client groups – demographics, who they work for, their location, available lead scores — and their connected market data. As a result, organizations want a platform that can give reliable data.

SalesIntel delivers 95% accurate human-verified contacts, allowing you to create your own personalized company and contact lists in only a few minutes. Here’s a step-by-step instruction on how to accomplish it. Here’s how you can successfully execute your GTM strategy with SalesIntel. 

Get Ready to Create a Full-Proof GTM Strategy

Before releasing your new product, you must develop a go-to-market plan. You’ll be well on your way to launching a product or service that solves a problem for your potential clients and becomes successful in the market if you follow the advice in this book.