Building a Best in Class Go-To-Market Strategy

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the way in which a company brings a product to market. It generally includes a business plan outlining the target audience, marketing plan, and sales strategy.

Following a recent newsletter looking at developing product-market fit, this week Dragon Argent look at the importance of developing a GTM strategy in building a successful enterprise.

There are 5 key steps to building a best in class B2B GTM strategy:

1. Buying Centre and Personas

Sounds simple but - who is your customer? What remit and title do they have, what kind of company do they work for, where are they based, what is their decision making and sign off process?

These are critical questions to answer before you can think about taking a product to market. The buyer centre in an organisation are the individuals involved in a decision making process and can be made up of a number of personas including:

• The Initiator: Starts the buying process or shows initial interest

• The User: Uses your product regularly

• The Influencer: Convinces others the product is needed

• The Decision Maker: Gives final approval for the purchase

• The Buyer: Owns the budget

• The Approver: Final approver who pushes the initiative on a larger scale

Depending on the size of the organization you are selling to, these personas could be any number of people. It could be one person if you are selling to an SME or seven different people in larger organizations. But, its crucial to understand what roles could be impacted by your solution and what their goals and pain points might be so you can craft messaging that addresses opportunities and risks specific to your target audience.

2. Value Matrix

A value matrix is a breakdown of the highest priority business problems or opportunities, how your product relates and a relevant marketing message tying the problem/opportunity and solution together.

A value matrix in practice is a simple chart that maps out:

• The pain points or opportunities you've identified for your buyer personas in a prioritised order

• The specific solution your product offers to that pain point or the way it opens an opportunity

• The message that communicates the exact feature and benefit to that specific pain point or opportunity

Whilst this is not a complex step, it does require careful thought. Once this has been done however, it can go on to inform all subsequent marketing messaging and sales strategy.

3. Test & Optimise

Your attempts to map out your buying centre, personas and value matrix should be informed by direct research with your target audience.

It’s a common mistake not to engage with the people and organisations you are hoping to sell to until you ask them to engage with your product. Even after you have done this and mapped out these tools, you need to test your messaging to identify the most effective personas and messages. Often this is achieved through:

• A/B testing of copy, channels and routes to market.

• Tracking and reporting back on the results of your testing

• Maximising marketing spend and resources on the initiatives that generate the greatest engagement

4. Customer Journey Mapping

It’s also important to understand the journey customers go on to buy your product. This allows you to understand where they experience friction, where they are likely to drop off and where you can optimise conversion rates. For instance, a typical B2B customer might go on a journey like the one below:

1. Realise there is a pressing problem or opportunity that needs an outside solution

2. Research possible solutions to solve the problem or maximise the opportunity

3. Engage with sales teams to shortlist vendors before committing to a buying decision

For your business, its crucial to consider this journey in the context of your sales funnel. As a customer moves down the sales funnel, they become more qualified and engaged as they move closer to a purchasing decision. This process begins with the widest target audience possible before narrowing to engaged customers.

The funnel has three stages: awareness, qualification and decision making. Each stage requires different collateral, but awareness and qualification are typically the remit of a marketing team and decision making is the remit of the sales team.

Understanding the processes, systems, collateral, and competencies needed to make this process efficient, joined up and effective is the key to optimising your customer journey.

4. Sales Strategies

Now you’ve done the required foundational work, t’s time to pick a sales strategy that will convert the leads your marketing team generates in the most efficient, lowest cost way. No one method will work for every product or market, so it’s important to consider the complexity, scalability, and cost of yours.

• Self Service Model: Used when a customer makes the purchase of a simple, low cost, high volume product on their own. It is difficult to build and requires a marketing approach that will gain critical mass but when it works it has a short sales cycle and is highly profitable.

• Inside Sales Model: Is used when a prospect needs nurturing by a sales rep to make a purchasing decision of a product with a medium grade complexity and pricing with a sales cycle of a few weeks to months.

• Field Sales Model: This is typically when a full enterprise solution is being used to sell large deals in a B2B environment. These are high cost, low volume, complex deals with long sales cycles. It requires an expensive, experienced sales team that takes time to build and scale.

• Channel Model: Through the channel model an outside agency or partner sells your product on your behalf. In this model, you have less control but less cost as the sales team is not your own.

Typically, you would work with an agent who knows a market better than you or a partner with adjacencies to your product.

Once you have addressed and built these five key foundation stones you must make incremental improvements to your GTM strategy on an ongoing basis, considering:

• Continuously building brand awareness and demand generation

• Creating value adding content for your target audience

• Finding ways to optimize your pipeline and increase conversion rates

• Analysing your sales cycle to reduce friction and maximise efficiency

• Reducing customer acquisition cost

If you are experiencing difficulties building an effective GTM strategy for your business, please get in touch with Dragon Argent to discuss simple actions you can take to build on the above.

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