Maja Voje: Go-To-Market Strategist

Go-to-Market Strategy (GTM)

A go-to-market strategy (GTM) refers to a company’s plan and approach to bring its product or service to market and reach its target customers.

A well-designed GTM strategy leads the company to cross “the chasm” and reach the Growth phase.

In GTM, it is essential to win Innovators and Early Adopters to create a critical mass of adoption so you can start to win an early majority in the next evolution of your business – the Growth stage in which you scale upon proven Product-Market Fit (PMF).

• Market: Carefully choose the terrain on which you want to win. Want it or not, the market and timing matter.
• Early Customers: Niche down and serve the selected audience first. Niching down and solving the target audience’s specific pain points and problems makes a huge difference.
• Product: Craft a product, an offer, and a business model that the target market cannot refuse.
• Pricing: Capture this value with value-based pricing or a proxy of it.
• Positioning: Learn how to communicate your solution for users to understand and fall in love with it.
• Growth: Select channels that are actually relevant to your target audience and add fuel to it with Growth Loops.

A holistic GTM plan:

• What market opportunity should you pursue?
• Who is your target audience?
• What is your value proposition and product?
• How should you price the product?
• How do you present it in a unique and compelling manner?
• Which channels work best for your product, and how do you scale them?

Think and Act like Special Ops

6 Principles of Special Ops “A simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly rehearsed and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.”

The principles of special ops’ planning, preparations, and execution jointly empower a smaller force to win.

Stage 1: Planning Simplicity is the most crucial and difficult principle to follow in planning.

• Limit the number of objectives.
• Good intelligence.
• Play on your strengths.
• Innovation.

Stage 2: Preparation.

• Security
• Repetition is indispensable in eliminating the barriers to success.

Stage 3: Execution.

• Surprise

Goals and Objectives are Your GTM Compass

Speed means getting to your objective as fast as possible. Purpose is understanding and executing the mission’s prime objective regardless of emerging obstacles and opportunities.

Strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a goal. Without a goal, there is no strategy.

Two frameworks embrace the dynamic nature of GTM:

• North Star Metric is the stable element of goal setting in GTM.
• OKR (a system of objectives and key results) helps to break down the broader goals into smaller.

In GTM, measuring value delivered is one of the single most important metrics to predict success in the market.

North Star Metric, as defined by Sean Ellis, is a core measurement of how much value added you are delivering to your target market.

All digital products are playing one of three possible games:

• The Attention Game.
• The Transaction Game.
• The Productivity Game.

A company normally has one NSM, but if you operate with different product lines, there could be multiple product NSMs, but they should still align with the overall company’s NSM.

After understanding the core principles, it is time to find your NSM. These steps will help you get started. What game are you playing? Is it an attention, transactional, or productivity game?

• Identify your core value proposition.
• Determine the key actions that drive your business.
• Identify the metric that best represents the key action.
• Act on your NSM.

To grade an objective, take the average of all KR grades. The aim is to achieve an average of 1.0 for commitment objectives, while aspirational objectives are considered successful if the average KR is between 0.4 and 0.7. For learning objectives, any mean grade is acceptable. If your average grade is below 0.5, you should probably continue with a different assumption. If you scored above 0.5, you are on the right path.

The Good and the Bad GTM Strategy

A strong GTM strategy is critical for a company’s success.

• Market.
• Early Customer Profile (ECP). If you are serving everybody, you are not doing a fantastic job for anybody. References matter; early traction matters.
• Product.
• Pricing.
• Positioning.
• Growth.
• Systems.

Most companies struggle to create an effective GTM due to the following:

• Misalignment with the company’s core strategy.
• Lack of market research.
• Poor alignment between departments.
• Unclear goals and objectives.
• Very tight resources.
• Resistance to change.
• Lack of leadership.
• Loss of enthusiasm.

Good GTM strategy:

• Context.
• Market.
• Early Customer Profile (ECP).
• Product.
• Pricing.
• Growth.
• Systems.

What great GTM strategies have in common.

• Do it as an interdisciplinary team.
• A clear sense of direction.
• Create a critical mass.
• Iterate fast.
• Implement adjustments.

There will always be new opportunities, distractions, potential partnerships, and other shiny objects. In GTM, you have to be extremely careful to resist them and commit your limited attention and resources to the mission that you have already committed to. Do not scatter yourself too thin. Center your efforts on a single point, then move forward. Be proactive instead of reactive.

Market

It is really hard to make a good decision with a limited understanding of the market in the early stages of GTM.

In business, the Beachhead Strategy is all about focusing on a small market segment first to increase your odds of winning. It is called the Beachhead Segment, and choosing the right one can be pivotal for your GTM.

The selection of the Beachhead Segment has a huge impact on your GTM. It will determine other aspects of it: the product, messaging, pricing, branding, marketing and sales channels, etc.

Most practitioners leave some lever for “moonshot projects,” and up to 20 % of available resources can be used to explore such opportunities. However, 80 % or more must be invested into the original GTM plan to create a critical mass of activities for success.

Deciding whom to target is a serious strategic choice since it can make or break the business.

Plan to Win

GTM values speed, intensity, and action. But action could be placed in the wrong direction.

Entrepreneur and GTM expert Rishi Chowdhury shares a convenient rule of thumb rule for selecting your Beachhead Segment: “In B2B, the focus can be as narrow as choosing a Beachhead Segment of 100 companies and consider it a win if you can win 30 to 50 % of that segment in a year and a half.

While the Beachhead Segment can be very small, the total market you choose should be in good shape – preferably low in competition, open to embrace innovation, and with manageable market barriers.

A Beachhead Strategy in GTM leads you to identify the minimal market segment (MVS) that your minimum viable product (MVP) can serve better than anything else. This is how you win markets.

If you need to monetize soon, you will have to test product-market fit and business model simultaneously.

Planning in GTM is all about doing sanity checks that you are not on a bad terrain and generating proprietary knowledge and insights that will lead to creating a truly differentiated and hard-to-copy GTM strategy.

For each new product, I structure a one-pager that answers seven questions:

• What is the core idea of the product?
• For whom is this product the best fit?
• What are the problems the product is solving?
• Who am I competing against? What is their offer, traction, and price?
• What is your MVP and business model that you would like to test?
• What is the customer transformation?
• How can I validate this product in the next 2 weeks?

“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.” Albert Einstein

In GTM, market research is done to prove there is a sizable opportunity for the company to build a sustainable business.

Here are three examples of how different companies conduct valuable market research:

• Social monitoring.
• Marketing test with advertising.
• User interviews and usability tests.

There are two vastly different views explaining whether or not you should pay attention to competitors in the first place: Do not reinvent the wheel. “Steve Jobs and Henry Ford” tribe.

Competition comes in many different shapes and forms. Consider these four types of competitors:

• Direct competitors are companies you compete against neck-to-neck.
• Indirect competitors cater to the same audience at similar prices with your differentiated offers.
• Replacement competitors are sometimes also called phantom competitors.
• Aspirational competitors are companies that you admire and can learn from.

To select the best rivals’ you are competing with, consider the following:

• Your target customers know them and consider them as replacements for you in the purchasing decision.
• Comparable size and resources to your company.

To keep the workload manageable, analyze 3 to 10 direct competitors based on 5 to 10 criteria.

Market and competition analyses are merely reports if you don’t put them into action.

“Don’t try to serve everyone, or you will end up serving no one.” Serena Carcasole, entrepreneur and author.

In most cases, this is price and perceived quality. This will help you determine whether to pursue a Penetration Strategy, where you win a big market share fast, or a Differentiation Strategy, where you create a unique added value and have the opportunity to charge a higher price.

Here are some best practices to consider when making the positioning matrix:

Choose dimensions (axes) that are actually relevant for customer decision-making in the category. Scale realistically.

Represent the market share. Make the “competitor bubbles” different in size according to their market share.

Customers buy solutions to solve their problems, serve their needs, and advance their lives and businesses. It is all about “getting the job done” better than competitors for a selected segment.

Choosing the Market Segment

The process of slicing and dicing markets is called segmentation. A segment refers to a group of individuals or organizations that share a common trait and have similar characteristics, needs, preferences, or behaviors.

There are two schools of thought here: Some GTM strategists and founders swear by empirically testing first and reverse engineering the ideal segment later on by analyzing data from the early traction of the solution.

Others prefer to do a lot of research before going to market.

How to find the “common trait” that is shared by a segment?

• Demographic segmentation.
• Firmographic segmentation.
• Geographic segmentation.
• Psychographic segmentation.
• Behavioral segmentation.

Sounds great in theory, but in GTM, we have very limited resources for market research.

Dr. Else van der Berg suggests using these segmentation bases instead of the standard ones when a “shared characteristic does not compute” or customer data is not yet in abundance:

• Jobs to be Done.
• Pain points.
• Alternatives that they are using now.
• Values and fears.

If your list of Beachhead Segment candidates consists of more than five segments, it will be challenging to do additional research. Resist making this decision solely based on the “gut feeling.” You might choose the non-optimal segment and end up failing or leaving a bunch of money on the table. According to Dr. Else van der Berg, the sweet spot in GTM is to compare 3 to 5 possible segments and research them further to find “the one.” To narrow down to 3 to 5 segments, you can use a segment ranking table. This can help reduce the number of segments to a manageable selection you will research further.

A Market-Problem Map. This was originally crafted by Simon Belak. A Market-Problem Map is the process of identifying the most pressing problems your customer is facing that you can solve. At its core, the model has two dimensions:

• Two to 5 potential segments.
• Problems that your solution could be solving.

Under each problem statement in the inner section, you score them based on the following:

• Pain level.
• Ease of sale.
• Ease of implementation.

For most GTM companies, a Beachhead Strategy – winning one segment after another by focusing all the resources to get the job done – is the key to success.

Early Customer Profile

Winning Beachhead Strategies are built around your selected Early Customer Profile (ECP).

Luring an “ideal customer” in the GTM stage is not always possible. We work with what we have. Your product, offer, marketing, communication, channels, messaging, and price points should suit the needs and preferences of Early Adopters. It will help you bridge the gap to the Early Majority.

The data shows a correlation between having personas, lowering customer acquisition costs (CAC), and having a higher Net Promoter Score (NPS). Researched personas scored 26.45 % lower in CAC, whereas the willingness to recommend the product was a whopping 41.80 % higher.

Great customer archetypes are research-driven, proprietary to the company, and constantly evolving with new insights.

Make ECP Decisions Confidently

In recent decades there has been a drastic shift from “a leader should make decisions and tell the team what they should be doing” towards empowering team members to co-decide by participating and challenging different assumptions.

OODA Loop is a mental model created by the U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd.  It consists of four stages: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, collectively known as the OODA loop.

Three critical steps:

• Map and rank your assumptions. Not all assumptions you test will move the business.
• Choose two to five research methods that are stage-appropriate.
• Build a system of experimentation for constant learning and improvement.

An Assumption Map is a mental model that will help you list and prioritize assumptions that you should test first.

What problem does our customer want to solve in the first place? Why can’t our customers solve this problem today? What is the outcome – what does our customer want to achieve?

Assumption mapping model originally consists of three types of assumptions-desirability, viability and feasibility.

• Desirability assumptions – Do they want this?
• Feasibility assumptions – Can we do this?
• Viability assumptions – Should we do this?

There are two types of research methods. In professional jargon, we often refer to them as qual and quant.

• Qualitative methods (Qual) such as user interviews, focus or user groups, usability tests, etc.
• Quantitative methods (Quant) include surveys, MVP tests, A/B testing, multivariate testing, etc.

Based on my experience, the conversions to waitlists are between 10 and 30 % if the messaging is good (includes benefits and some offers for early adopters).

It is best to consider doing a waitlist in a timely fashion and update and nurture recipients with updates and useful content.

Most early-stage GTM strategists decide to use two to three validation methods at first.

In most cases, it takes 85 to 115 days to show the value of a growth initiative before it gets deprioritized or defunded. Speed is of the essence.

To learn who “the one” is, we experimented and reverse-engineered the ECP from the results of an actual campaign instead of guessing.

Early Customer Profile (ECP)

One of the hardest elements of running a business is focus. Especially if you are a curious soul on a mission to help as many people as possible solve their problems.

In a simplistic view, GTM should be laser-focused on one audience, one offer, and one channel. But the reality can be a bit more complex.

Before getting a chance to convince the ideal customer, you will most likely have to win the hearts and minds of early customers.

Kevin Kelly argues that to build a healthy business, all you need at first is a list of 1,000 people who are all true fans.

Early adopters need to see the product. They need to try it. They need it to solve their problem. They are eager to read, learn, and dive into the solution itself if they see the value.

A Decision-Making Unit (DMU) considers all decision-makers in a purchasing process.

• Initiator first thinks of a purchase.
• Influencer’s views sway the purchase.
• Gatekeeper can say no to the decision.
• Decider actually decides what to buy.
• Buyer makes a purchase (can be different from the Decide). He might mention this to his parents, who would like to buy a gift. Purchasing department after procurement.
• User uses or consumes the purchase.

If you suspect that your ECP is more likely a DMU than a single person, make sure you don’t only focus your efforts on the Initiator.

Personas were intended to be a visual aid for helping you align with selected target audiences, but they don’t do their job if they are completely vague and made up.

Personas are only a figment of imagination when they lack real data, research, and good GTM strategy judgment.

Conduct research and experimentation.

You can either reverse-engineer them from actual data or find patterns by doing customer discovery interviews and surveys.

GTM appropriate. A good customer segment, according to the Beachhead Strategy, has a burning desire to solve a problem, is easy to access, has good growth, and WOM potential within the 18-month timeframe.

Dive deeper. Once you have a hypothesis of your Beachhead Segment, you want to understand and learn more about it.

Visualize. Visualizing ECP is done to present your findings and effectively communicate them to others.

Validate. Start verifying if they are valid.

Elaborate. As you get new insights and information, your ECP will evolve.

Patrick Campbell, founder of ProfitWell and strategy advisor at Paddle, shared a fantastic MVP Persona Template for B2B SaaS Companies. What’s great about his framework is that it acknowledges the Early Adopters and nurtures a focus by defining Anti Persona and segments that are bad for your business.

Product

You create and deliver value to customers through a product.

GTM magic happens when the selected market segment loves your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), finds value in it, and continues to use it and recommend it to others.

Product-Market Fit (PMF). It is the holy grail of GTM.

Here is your plan:

• Craft a Unique Value Proposition Hypothesis.
• Start building and ideating on your Minimum Valuable Product (MVP) and Minimum Valuable Business (MVB): Products that customers usually love the most are SLEPPERY. Simple. Low or no adoption costs. Easy to adopt. Proves value quickly. Plays well with others. Easy to use. ROI is obvious. Your customers cannot live without it.
• Analytics.
• Securing PMF in your GTM.

Why Should Customers Care?

April Dunford suggests GTM companies consider two principles regarding communicating value: Do not overestimate the buyer’s ability to translate features to value for the business.

Value alone doesn’t win deals; differentiated value does.

Differentiated value is a pillar for building your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), which is a statement that describes the unique benefit your solution provides to its ECP.

In B2B, the UVP is usually centered around getting the job done faster, better, and cheaper.

A tool that helps you find compelling UVPs throughout your product development journey is your Value Proposition Canvas, originally developed by Dr. Alexander Osterwalder.  It consists of two parts: Customer Profile and a Value Map.

Start with a customer profile. List out all of the customer jobs. What are the tasks the user is trying to complete? Continue with listing the pains. These are the obstacles that are preventing them from getting a job done. Finally, list gains. These are positive outcomes that customers aim to achieve by getting the job done.

Next is a Value Map, which shows how the business’ products or services create value for the customer. Pain Relievers: How could you develop solutions to customers’ pains? Gain Creators: How do the business’s products or services create gains for the customers? Select pain relievers and gain creators: Only focus on what is mission critical at first. Products and services: Based on features and ideas, you can find out which ones will create more value and highlight them in your communication to a certain audience.

“What do I see and is it relevant for me?” Your prospects when they first see your landing page.

The simplest way to express your value proposition effectively is presented by Steve Blank, a professor, author, and the founder of the Lean Startup Circle. We help [X] achieve [Y] by [Z].

Developing a UVP is an iterative process that consists of:

• Conducting customer and market research.
• Identifying the key benefits of your product or service.
• Developing a unique value proposition hypothesis.
• Testing your value proposition hypothesis.
• Integrating your value proposition in your messaging sales.
• Continuously evaluate and refine your value proposition.

Deliver Value

Tania Kefs shares her GTM story: Many companies spend a lot of time building a product, but they know very little about the market.

By testing the product early, you maintain a chance to pivot into a different target audience or solution. The sooner you start challenging your assumptions, the lesser the sunk cost of development in a non – optimal direction will be.

In GTM, we often decide to test the MVP and business model simultaneously.

Product development usually starts with the identification of a business opportunity. The next step is to do market research to get some rough estimations of how much potential there actually is. Next up is creating your business case. It is a structured document where you explain how the benefits and potential revenue of the project outweigh its costs. Be careful when estimating potential earnings, and be realistic about all the costs involved, not just the direct cost of development. After the business case is approved, the next step is to translate the business case to business requirements. User journey is the step where you sketch all of the points of contact between the user and your product. Next is to translate the user journey into initial specifications for what needs to be developed as an MVP. In the next stage, the UX designer will prepare wireframes. This is a layout of fundamental elements that need to be designed and developed. When the wireframes are confirmed, the design stage follows for detailed prototypes of how the final product will look like. The design then needs to be translated to technical specifications and development planning. When the product is good to go as an MVP, it’s launch time – your moment of glory!

Metrics and Analytics

A metric is a quantifiable measurement to evaluate various aspects of a business.

A well-crafted analytics system is a compass on your way to achieving PMF and winning GTM. The best analytical systems are designed in a way that they can be scaled once your business is evolving.

There are multiple types of metrics. Overall, there are two differentiators – input vs. output metrics and leading vs. lagging metrics.

Start at the end. What are you trying to achieve (your KPIs)? Choose your One Metric That Matters (OMTM) and focus your GTM operational efforts around optimizing for it.

According to Lean Analytics, a good OMTM is:

• Understandable.
• Comparative.
• It is a ratio or a rate.
• Is behavior changing.

Focus and interlinking the actions in a way to complement each other and take you closer to the end goal is a powerful lever of growth on the product-growth journey.

It is useful to also measure customer satisfaction, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), virality coefficient (K) and word-of-mouth (WOM).

Most GTM companies are either undermeasuring or overmeasuring.

For understanding retention, cohorts are essential. Here, you validate which groups of users get the most value from your product and, later on, try to attract more of them.

When planning a dashboard, make sure that your customer journey is well-represented and that you offer different interfaces to different decision-makers.

Once you plan and build crucial dashboards and data interfaces, make sure you incorporate a notification system to build a habit of reviewing them regularly, or start your team meetings by discussing the metrics on the dashboard.

Aiming for Product-Market Fit (PMF)

Searching for PMF and validating it is a unique courtship between each company and its market.

Testing for PMF involves collecting data from customers or prospects and using that information to make informed decisions about how to refine a product or service to better align with market demand.

Product-led growth and experienced product manager Leah Tharin suggests measuring PMF in three steps for each ECP separately:

• Proof of value experience: Can you retain enough of such users?
• Proof of monetization: How much are users willing to pay to get the value?
• Proof of value proposition: Do users experience the Aha moment?

Customer retention rate is one of the most widely agreed signals of a PMF.

Once you have built an MVP and proved the PMF, you should pay careful attention if you continue to provide value to the target audience and get value exchange for that.

After winning PMF for your Beachhead Segment, you will aim to expand to adjacent markets to grow.

• Same use case, new segments.
• New use case, same segments.
• New use case, new segment.

In the words of Brian Balfour, there are three other fits that you should consider:

• Product/Channel fit: are you delivering your offering through the right channels?
• Channel/Model fit: is the selected channel sustainable to unlock profitable business?
• Model/Market fit: is the end customer willing to pay what is sustainable for your business model?

Find your One Metric That Matters (OMTM) and focus your GTM operational efforts to optimize for it. OMTM is an actionable metric that addresses a bottleneck in your customer journey or strategic goal.

Pricing

Other GTM elements spend money. Pricing makes it. Pricing is a mechanism of value exchange between you and the client.

Validating the Willingness to Pay (WTP) brings you one step closer to a successful launch and to the Product-Market-Pricing Fit.

Research has shown that 72 % of innovation fails due to pricing, monetization, and business model flaws.

Seven pricing mistakes and misconceptions that are often suffocating the growth of GTM companies:

• The solution simply does not deliver the promised value to users.
• Setting up a price that is way too cheap.
• Customers do not convert and say it is too expensive.
• One price fits all.
• Giving away too many core functionalities for free.
• Waiting too long to monetize.
• “Set it and forget it” pricing.

What Influences Pricing?

“Features perform actions. Products solve problems. Businesses deliver value.” Eugenia Koo, Product Leader at Amazon.

A value metric is a quantifiable measurement used to determine and measure the value exchanged.

In a perfect world, you charge by a value metric, and this pricing strategy is called value-based pricing.

When selecting a value metric, consider that it has to make sense to you and the customer. Look at benefits, not features.

It is your job to set up the price points, not your users.

Van Westendorp’s Sensitivity Model. The following four questions must be posed at the end of the survey: At what price would it be so low that you start to question this product’s quality? At what price do you think this product is starting to be a bargain? At what price does this product begin to seem expensive? At what price is this product so outrageously expensive that you would not even consider it?

If you are entering the market with a rather undifferentiated offer in a crowded space, as a GTM company, the best you can hope for is roughly 10 to 30 % cheaper or more expensive than the established competition.

Anchoring matters, but where to position yourself?

When deciding on pricing for your product, make sure to put together a sheet of expenses and a revenue projection as realistically as you possibly can. From there, try to reverse-engineer the quantity that you need to sell to get there in your GTM lifeline period (3 to 18 months) and prepare a couple of well-informed and research pricing hypotheses to test.

Pricing Strategies

Based on the research of 760 B2B SaaS companies, Paddle’s researchers found the three most frequently used pricing strategies in GTM: competitor pricing (38 %), value-based pricing (32 %), and cost-plus pricing (30 %).

There are only two fundamental strategies to build a sustainable business and get from the GTM to the growth phase:

• Optimizing for adoption.
• Optimizing for profit.

Pricing has two jobs to be done:

• It’s going to indicate what you are offering for the value you provide.
• Maximizing profits in the longer run.

Penetration pricing suggests entering the market at a lower price than competitors in the hope of achieving the critical mass for innovation to work well and change customer preferences.

Another strategy you can do is to give away a (part of the) product for free.

The freemium model gets your foot in the door. Once they have adopted the product, users will consider paying for it. With this approach, you agree to be a loss leader who sells some of their entry offers at a loss or very low profit, which is later compensated for by higher-priced items.

In the long run, there can always be one cheapest solution on the market. It takes a lot of resources and scope to achieve economies of scale that make low-price positioning sustainable.

• Skimming pricing: When you are new to the market and create high value-added in a market with high demand, you can charge higher prices than existing alternatives.
• Premium pricing: For some categories and target markets, the price can be whatever you and your customer agree on.
• Dynamic model: This means you are selling at different prices at different times to different customers with an aim to optimize profits.

In business, multiple pricing strategies can coexist.

Pricing Models: How to Charge for Your Product?

There are multiple mechanisms of value exchange. They are called pricing models, and you need to take them into account when crafting your pricing strategy.

• Value-based.
• Usage-based.
• Fixed.
• Hybrid Model (Usage-based or Value-based + Fixed).
• Seat-based.
• Free trial or freemium model.

Packaging: How to Package Your Product?

Most B2B pricing packages are based on Starter/Pro/Business/Enterprise logic and center around time to access, typically monthly or annually.

Having 2 to 5 packages based on different usage needs and features is a great way to capture value. It’s not always possible, but usually less is more.

Behavior and Psychological Aspects of Pricing

Meet one of the oldest tricks in the pricing books – price anchoring strategy. When customers are making decisions, they are always comparing us against alternatives. Yet, every customer wants to maximize their benefits. When presented with a set of choices, we learn to find the best value for us.

Using anchoring and decoy strategies are possible if you have bundles and different packages for various market segments or usage needs.

Pricing Work is Never Really Finished

Patrick Campbell’s treasury of insights.

Growth is harder than ever. CAC went up 94 % in the last five years, and WTP has dropped 70 to 80 % in the last five years.

Real money nowadays comes from experimenting with activation, retention, and monetization.

The metric you should be optimizing for, in Campbell’s belief, is revenue per consume.

How to Run Monetization Experiments

Each product and feature launch sets up a wonderful opportunity to test different packages and price points.

Do not oversimplify pricing. Some customers will require custom offers, and you are leaving money on the table if you do not serve them.

Pricing is not done in isolation, and it is also used for signaling the quality and who the product is for.

Only use discounts if you need the project for a reference or if they buy in bulk or for a longer time period. Wherever you agree on a discount, the client should feel a slight pain of losing something from the original offer.

Positioning

Positioning is about identifying what makes a company’s product or service unique for your target audience.

Messaging refers to how you communicate that identity and value proposition to your target audience.

Branding is the process of creating a distinct and memorable identity for your company or product.

April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome book. “If you have some loyal customers, but new customers don’t understand what you do, you have a positioning problem.”

Positioning: Be in Control of the Narrative

“Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. You position the product in the mind of the prospect.” Jack Trout, a marketing strategist and author of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

The symptoms of bad positioning are:

• Not attracting enough leads.
• Attracting mixed audiences who don’t want to pay your prices because they don’t see you as a specialist in your field.
• Poor conversion rates.
• Poor engagement in the product.
• Long sales cycles.

The truth to the matter is that your potential customers and users will have opinions. They will position your product whether you want it or not.

Your position on the market consists of the following elements:

• Target audience.
• Problem-solution fit.
• Alternative solutions (your competition).
• Differentiated value.
• Market category.

In the positioning steps, you will take inputs (your target customer, your market, and your competitors) and position your product to deliver outputs that drive practical value for your company.

• Step One: Your target audience.
• Step Two: Alternatives and the market gap.
• Step Three: Assets (how you will build your differentiation). Positioning is a story. That story needs to hold up. All of the elements of the story must be true, or your customers will get red flags when we tell them that story.
• Step Four: Turn your assets into benefits. We do that with a simple “so what” question. Take an asset and ask: “So what?” or “Why does the customer care?”
• Step Five: Build your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). The asset needs to be viewed as valuable by the client. The asset needs to be unique to you.
• Step Six: Merge your assets and benefits into a beautiful story for the customers.
• Step Seven: Test your position.
• Step Eight: Make positioning practical for your team.

“The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position.” Al Ries, marketing professional and author of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Positioning for new companies and startups: When you are creating a GTM strategy from scratch with no prior data, obviously, most of your decisions will be based on assumptions.

Horizontal positioning: There is no business sense of positioning vertically (per industry or demographic), but you want to keep your options more open and position horizontally, which means solving a specific need.

A chameleon product that fits tons of customer segments but attracts no one because it’s not specific enough.

Messaging: How Do You Tell It?

Messaging refers to how you tell your story across different channels to different audiences throughout their customer journey in a consistent manner.

Based on research from the CXL Institute, messaging determines 80 % of your conversion rate on websites.

Messaging guidelines are then a document where you put it all together. It is a short one or two-page document where you write down everything you defined: positioning statement, USPs, key messages, and also examples of “boilerplate” texts which you can use or adapt for specific purposes later – this refers to short product descriptions, a company description, founders’ biographies, hashtags you are using, etc.

Robert Kaminski, a messaging expert for Early Stage and GTM B2B companies.

Robert suggests five narratives that work well for attracting different audiences in B2B:

• Tragedy: A cautionary tale with a negative outcome.
• Overcoming the Monster: A hero sets out to destroy evil.
• The Quest: An aspirational journey.
• Rags to Riches: An underdog overcomes adversity to win.
• Rebirth: An event forces the hero to evolve.

Best messaging is not you-based but customer-based.

In case you have to do the messaging for multiple target groups, adjust the core messaging strategy to each.

The next element to consider is that messaging varies across a customer journey. Your best approach is to lead with your most differentiated features.

• Awareness Messages: Lead with the problem and use case.
• Acquisition Messages: Lead with capabilities.
• Activation Messages: Lead with feature guidance.
• Habit Messages: Lead with benefits. Your user has reached their first aha! moment.
• Expansion Messages: Lead with adjacent capabilities.
• Monetization Messages: Lead with scaled capabilities.

While your UVP should remain consistent throughout the channels, specific messages need to be persona, stage, and channel adjusted.

Peep Laja, a conversion optimization expert and the founder of CXL, suggests you start with the following formula on your web pages:

• Headline. What is the end benefit you’re offering in one short sentence?
• Sub-headline or a 2 to 3-sentence paragraph. A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom, and why it’s useful.
• Three bullet points. List the key benefits and features.
• Visual.
• Call-to-action (CTA).

Optimizing messaging for different channels and developing clever content plans is a long-term game but only worth playing if a channel delivers on its potential.

Branding: Express Yourself

Strong brands have raving fans, strong communities, and incredible word-of-mouth (WOM).

Mood board – a collection of images or other brands that inspire you and feel relevant for your product, customer, and vision, no matter if they are in a different industry.

Strong brands resonate with their customers when they overlap with both their customers’ expectations or personal values but also with the product’s functionalities.

In business, it is never (only) about you but primarily about the value you can deliver to your customer, the transformation to a desired outcome that you promise (and fulfill), and the vision of a better life for your customer.

Corporate branding means that the company’s products or services are all marketed under a single, unified brand name.

At endorsed branding, the corporate brand endorses or lends its name to individual products or divisions.

A branded house is a solution where a dominant or master brand is used across all products, services, and divisions, but the sub-brands also have more distinguishable identities.

The house of brands approach keeps product brands separate, with little or no reference to the corporate brand.

Growth

Traction Channels

A couple of additional tips for channel selection and prospects and how they may evolve when you grow your business. Channels are born and die faster than ever. The law of diminishing returns or bad CTRs: Channels age, and you can outgrow them. Some are here to stay: Email is not dead just because it’s an older, established digital channel. Some channels stand the test of time and become a fundamental part of how we communicate, buy, and sell.

Generating or Capturing Demand?

Ideally, you would speak to solution-aware customers who are already actively searching for solutions, comparing them, and are able to make a purchasing decision relatively quickly. This is called capturing demand (demand cap).

There is another way to tackle this challenge – demand generation (demand gen). This is where you meet your prospects sooner in their buyer journey and help them navigate through it, or you create demand for a solution that is positioned differently on the market with little-to-no existing demand.

If you are pressured to deliver results in the next quarter, demand generation is a risky bet.

7 Growth Channels for GTM Companies

There are seven different proven GTM growth Strategies worth considering as a backbone to your GTM growth model.

• Inbound.
• Paid digital.
• Outbound.
• Account-based marketing (ABM).
• Community.
• Partners.
• Product-led growth (PLG).

Before going all in on inbound, you should have reliable analytics and a CRM in place.

Content marketing, SEO, and lead generation are often delayed gratification channels. Most companies invest 3 to 6 months of work before validating the results of these efforts.

87 % of marketers who are measuring the ROI of ABM agreed that ABM outperforms all other channels in B2B in profitability.  If you only have to nurture 50 to 100 accounts to hit your GTM targets, ABM might be the answer. But how to do it? Analyze previous clients that had a high LTV. Create a lead list of top-fit clients. You identify decision-makers in these companies. Nail messaging and positioning. Start with your ABM campaign. Measure success and optimize the approach. Create new opportunities on existing accounts. ABM is resource-intensive. ABM requires organizational maturity. Track the touchpoints.

Building a strong community or becoming a go-to person for what you do in an established community can be pivotal in your GTM. People are tribal by nature. No wonder communities continue to thrive. Groups of people with shared interests, experiences, characteristics, or values make us feel safe and sound. Here is a little Community Playbook that I put together for you.

• Rule # 1: Give before you get.
• Rule # 2: Become obsessed with value and member experience.
• Rule # 3: Be tough but fair.
• Rule # 4: Consistency is the golden key.
• Rule # 5: Express gratitude and empower members.

What’s needed to make a great community. Three elements that shape them are:

• Identity
• Experience
• Structure

Joanna Bunker, Strategic Partnerships Lead at Wing (an Alphabet Company), defines strategic partnerships as a mutually beneficial arrangement between two separate companies that don’t directly compete with one another.

• Solution development partnership.
• Promotion partnership.
• Sales partnership.
• Purpose – driven partnerships.

Jaïr Halevi’s Partnership Playbook was slightly adjusted for GTM by yours truly:

• Define individual and mutual value.
• Do the cultural due diligence.
• Be clear on your timeline and goals.
• Define how you will measure success.
• Assess and communicate regularly.

In SaaS, the biggest difference between product-led growth and sales-led growth is that you engage users before you monetize them.

To decide if PLG is right for your business, Wes offers this decision framework that’s based on three factors: How complex, dynamic, or new the problem and/or solution is. How easy it is for your users to set up the product and start seeing results. How you connect with the buyer and user — top-down or bottom-up.

Growth Loops

The Pirate Metrics – AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue) by entrepreneur and investor Dave McClure.

Growth Loops are closed systems where the inputs generate more of an output that can be reinvested in the input. Growth Loops help to create value, including for new users, returning users, defensibility, or efficiency.

GTM System

Prepare the Grounds

Every successful GTM execution starts with a clear plan that gets buy-in from all key stakeholders.

How much time do you have, or can you negotiate, to achieve your GTM objectives?

In many micro to SME companies, the GTM team is run as a special ops – a project within a company and not as a full-time obligation.

Successful GTM relies on open knowledge, learning together as a team, making data-based decisions, and playing together towards the same goal.

A single source of truth creates a consensus regarding key metrics to track and a dashboard where you monitor the team’s progress toward your GTM objectives.

Project management so you can execute fundamental tasks.

Only one channel to communicate to be effective.

Documentation and your knowledge base will come in handy later on once you are onboarding new team members or leading your next GTM operation.

Weekly meetings are one of the most effective communication tools for alignment and relationship building between team members.

Retrospectives and rituals, brainstorming, and planning how to move forward together are important, but they don’t need to happen during weekly meetings.

While some decisions can be taken from past experience and based on a gut feeling, most decision-making benefits from following a scientific method and generating evidence before going all in.

Focus on experimentation towards a limited number of objectives (1 to 5) that will make the most impact on your GTM operations.