How to Create a Go-To-Market Strategy: With Examples

Learn how to create a successful go-to-market strategy with tips from industry experts. Discover the five-layer model for defining your target market, unique value proposition, route to market, solution packaging and pricing, and tactics for engaging prospects. Understand the importance of social proof and building credibility before going after bigger clients. These strategies apply to all businesses, including SaaS products, online businesses, and app businesses. Improve your business outcomes by ensuring alignment between marketing/sales efforts and overall company goals/objectives.

What Is a Simplified Go-To-Market Strategy?

1. Steve P Young is the founder of Webmasters.com, an app marketing agency.
2. He gave a presentation on go-to-market strategy at the Founders Institute in Sacramento.
3. The presentation focuses on a bottom-up approach to finding your target audience.
4. Start with the audience that will quickly say yes and has fewer objections (the A group).
5. Find where your target audience is located (e.g., Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Reddit) and engage with them by sharing good content and asking questions.
6. Educate potential customers by giving them tips they can use even if they don’t hire you.
7. Use social proof to show you’re legit (e.g., previous companies worked for or interviewed).
8. Focus on building social proof before going after more prominent clients with larger budgets.
9. This approach applies to various businesses, including SaaS products, online companies, and app businesses.

What is Go-To-Market Strategy?

1. A well-crafted go-to-market strategy is crucial for business success.
2. There needs to be a common understanding or framework for good market strategy.
3. Go-to-market strategy addresses three fundamental questions: where to play, what to sell, and how to engage.
4. The five-layer model for defining a go-to-market strategy starts with identifying the target market and ideal customer profile.
5. A unique value proposition must be defined for the personas that matter most in the target market.
6. Route to market must be determined (inside sales, e-commerce, direct sales reps, partners).
7. Solution packaging and pricing should be designed into easy-to-buy and sell packages (free trials, freemium models, land-and-expand models).
8. Tactics used to engage prospects include brand awareness campaigns through lead generation efforts culminating in the enablement/training of sales teams.
9. This five-layer model can help businesses define their go-to-market strategies effectively.
10. Applying this model can improve business outcomes by ensuring alignment between marketing/sales efforts and overall company goals/objectives.

Go-To-Market Strategy Examples

1. Copying someone else’s go-to-market strategy is not a great idea if you want to make money or grow consistently.
2. Funnel Vision is brought to you by Mass Marketing, creators of the funnel plane left marketing and the source of 123 B2B.
3. Three different go-to-market strategies are presented, each tailored to meet market needs.
4. The first example involves entering the desktop computing market with a unique product and finding a niche in the design industry.
5. The second example involves an established player in an established market finding new uses and users for their enterprise applications to achieve growth.
6. The third example involves a company in a declining market getting bought out and buried in another company’s technology to become profitable again.
7. Go-to-market strategies should be shaped according to what buyers need rather than what sellers want to do.
8. Market maturity affects buyer behavior, so strategies must adapt from incomplete products for early adopters to complete solutions for mature markets and customization for declining markets.
9. Funnel Plan is a tool that helps sales and marketing teams make decisions based on target segments’ maturity levels and allocate resources accordingly through tactics such as demand generation, environmental marketing (branding), and channel readiness (sales enablement).

Go to Market Strategies for Startup

1. The workshop season is ending with Michael Scott’s Startup Secrets series.
2. Michael has contributed significantly to the iLab, and his workshops are content-rich.
3. There are four guests: Mark Laurian, James Driscoll, Brian Halligan, and Michael’s brother (who may be late).
4. The framework for building a go-to-market strategy involves finding customers from awareness to purchase.
5. Outbound marketing is essential, but inbound marketing is becoming more popular.
6. Measuring and iterating on your marketing program is crucial for success.
7. Branding is essential because it gives credibility to startups that still need to.
8. Your brand starts with your vision of what you want to change in the world and what you promise customers at a fundamental level.
9. Emotion, personality, and style make up the attributes of your brand which can help people get behind it.
10. Founders will be identified as part of their startup’s brand whether they like it or not, so they should be prepared for that reality.

Steve Jobs Marketing Strategy: Go-To-Market Strategies

1. Steve Jobs is introducing a chalk talk about target customers, product selection, and distribution channels.
2. The company has struggled to identify its target customer in the past.
3. The workstation marketplace has two halves: science/engineering and professional.
4. Sun dominated the professional half with an 80% market share in 1990.
5. The professional half is expected to grow from 50k units to 100k units in 1991 and triple to 300k units by 1992 due to users moving from PCs/Macs or terminal emulators onto powerful desktop workstations for better networking, development environments, user interface, and economics.
6. Sun will remain a major competitor but may also help convince users to move into this segment through marketing efforts.
7. Customers need sophisticated networking capabilities for network-intensive applications that cannot be found on PCs/Macs and require seamless communication with databases running on large servers like IBM mainframes or Oracle/Sybase on sequent machines.
8. Every customer needs at least one custom application which requires a critical development environment.
9. The company’s new products have won against Sun in all recent matchups (15 out of 15).
10. This emerging market presents an opportunity for the company to dominate with potentially up to a 50% market share if they can ship enough computers (50k) into these markets this year alone.

What Is a Value Proposition for a Product?

1. The value proposition is essential to ensure a company solves a practical problem and creates value worth investing in.
2. The workshop will help define, evaluate, and create the value proposition.
3. Ideas are only meaningful once they address a problem or opportunity.
4. Defining the target audience (who) is crucial for success.
5. A minimum viable segment should be identified to sell the same product repeatedly without changing it.
6. Evaluating through customers’ eyes helps identify if they can identify with the product/service being sold.
7. A well-stated problem is half solved; identifying pain points makes it easier to focus on building solutions/products/services that solve them effectively.
8. Frameworks like unworkable, unavoidable, urgent, and underserved can help identify problems that need solving.
9. Sharon’s bike seat aims to reduce pressure and friction caused by biking for women as an example of addressing an underserved health issue caused by biking long-term.
10. This session aims to build out each team’s value proposition statement using these frameworks and insights gained from defining their target audience and pain points needing solutions.