Developing Your Go-To-Market Strategy

Developing a strong go-to-market strategy (GTM) is hard to get right — especially for any startup in high-growth mode. The right GTM requires bringing together all of the strategic assets that address your business and growth strategy: sales, marketing, product, channel, brand, and vision. The benefits of developing this kind of strategy are huge, but a lot of pieces have to come together in order to properly prepare and ready your organization for investing in it.

Bringing in experts to help create a GTM strategy brings both a strategic and a valuable outside perspective to the table. It can also help evaluate if you have all the necessary strategic components in place. And also extremely important, that those components are tightly aligned to each other, laddering up to your business goals and objectives.

Evaluating Required Critical Components

Most times, when a company looks to develop a go-to-market strategy they are pressed for time and looking to execute now. They don’t want to take any detours to evaluate readiness. But this kind of evaluation is a critical step — one that separates a winning GTM from one that falls short.

Developing a GTM strategy requires an evaluation of readiness of the following strategic assets:

1. Category: What category are you in? Are you developing a new one?
2. Customers: Who are you selling to? Who is your target customer? What markets are you considering?
3. Positioning: What unique value do you offer in relation to your competitors?
4. Brand Promise: Why does your brand matter?
5. Messaging: Does what you are saying to each target audience to ensure your brand resonates and connects to the business problems they are seeking to resolve?
6. Narrative: Do you have a strong story that articulates what you do, how you do it, why you matter, and what people can expect from you in the future?
7. Channels: — Where do your target customers buy? Where will you promote your products?
8. Product Offering: What product/service are you selling? And what unique value do you offer to each target customer?
9. Pricing: What is your pricing structure? Are you offering a SaaS model? Do you price differently for different customer types?

Methodically evaluating each component of a successful go-to-market strategy is hard. It is often an emotional process. Leadership teams feel like they’ve addressed these many times. From their perspective, all the elements are interconnected and built upon each other. But taking the time to address each one singularly and allowing outside help to bring them together more cohesively can deliver even greater value and stronger ROI, and actually save time.

Getting it Right

Timing is everything. The biggest mistake we see startups making when they go to develop a GTM strategy is two-fold:

1. Not having all strategic components articulated and strategically aligned
2. Not allowing enough time to develop a strong GTM strategy that ladders up to your growth and business strategy

Whether you’re developing a go-to-market strategy internally or working with outside help, allow enough time to systematically and methodically go through the process of evaluating each of the components described above.

Evaluate them with an open mindset. More likely than not, some of those components might need adjustments and tweaking. Each are critical individually and work even harder for you as a set. They are hard to get right. And it does take time. But when they are truly working together, you are really ready to develop a rock solid and winning GTM.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and design agency.

Originally published at www.emotivebrand.com on April 20, 2017.