A go-to-market strategy is simply a business plan to launch a new product to market. However, there are numerous pitfalls that businesses can fall into when planning their GTM strategy, and it’s these pitfalls that can cause a business to fail. This means it’s essential to adequately plan your go-to-market strategy and understand what you need to do.
Benefits of a Go-to-Market Strategy
Simply put, a good go-to-market plan helps you:
- Drive your product to the market
- Ensure the success of the launch
- Help your customers adapt to change
- Reduce the risk of failure
- Deliver a better customer experience
All this helps you manage the overall product launch from start to finish by anticipating where your product fits in with the market, ensuring it’s delivered on time and helping you overcome objections before they even start. This results in a better overall product launch and makes it easy for your customers to understand why they should buy the product.
Who Needs a Go-to-Market Market Strategy?
Everyone launching a product needs a good go-to-market strategy, including MSPs. The product in your case may be a bundle or even a new vendor — it doesn’t matter what it is provided it is new to your customers.
In the vast majority of cases, you’ll be launching your product in an existing market: unified communications, perhaps. Ultimately, you will be competing against other MSPs within the same local or regional market, and you’ll often be competing against global vendors.
Knowing where to position your product bundles and services can mean the difference between success and failure.
Steps to Define Your GTM Strategy
The very first step is to define how your product or service fits into the market. In most cases, you want to understand exactly what problem your product solves. In many cases, it will be some sort of communication difficulty or perhaps some issue with efficiency — the majority of MSPs solve one of these broad pain points or something similar.
So whittle it down. How exactly does your product or service make it simple to solve that pain point? Maybe it connects people face-to-face, delivering a unified experience across all their major platforms, helping them solve remote working issues and ensuring common data errors that slow them down don’t happen. You help them do that and provide a single point of service for all their IT and communication needs.
Who do you target?
Once you’ve identified the pain point you solve, you need to identify your ideal customer. Some MSPs will prefer smaller businesses that they can help as trusted advisors. Others may prefer larger businesses that have much longer sales cycles but also much bigger payoffs. And then yet others may prefer something in between — medium-sized businesses.
You may also define your customer in terms of the vertical that you serve. One MSP does particularly well targeting pest control companies within a group of states in the United States, integrating all their VOIP systems with major ordering, risk management and customer management products commonly used in the pest control industry. Others may look at healthcare, industry, retail or hotels. Precisely defining your vertical can often help you decide what customers you want to focus on.
Ultimately, you want a simple statement to sum up your ideal customer:
A CEO in the manufacturing vertical turning over $10 million to $50 million a year, looking for a better way to manage incoming vehicles, customers and 50–500 staff.
From there, you can start developing your ideal customer profiles. Who they are where they live, what they do, what kind of budget they have, any decision-making factors, what their needs are and any motivations they might have.
Messaging
From there, you need to decide what messaging your ideal customer profile will respond to. In most cases, it’s going to be about the value to that person personally — taking our CEO example above, they’ll be looking to improve throughput, reduce wasted time, reduce downtime and manage staff more efficiently. The value to them, however, will be that any increase in productivity will make it easier for them to negotiate a raise and increase their (potential) bonus.
Alternatively, it will help them reach key goals set by their shareholders or the owners — particularly valuable if the business is not breaking even.
There is always some sort of personal goal that motivates people to make a change, whether it’s in business or in their personal lives. That’s what you need to tap into.
The key message might be this: Drive bottom line growth up and raise throughput with integrated manufacturing comms.
This might be a persuasive message to the right person — provided your product and marketing message resonate with the customer you have in mind.
How do you target your customers?
Now that you know what pain point your product solves and the target market, you need to think about how you will target your market. Typically, you need to go to your ideal customer profile and consider what that person looks at when bringing in a new solution. You may have read that there are eight touches to generate a conversation. But this varies hugely depending on what industry you’re in. A new food product might only need a few touches, while a highly complex technological solution might need dozens.
So you need to advertise and reach out in spaces where your prospects are — whether they are reading or consuming some sort of content or physically present, such as for a tradeshow. Your go-to-market strategy may need to break into new forms of advertising, especially if it is a brand-new product for you.
As a result, you’ll need to map the buyer’s journey from discovering there’s a problem they need to solve to the final sale and understanding at what point they reach each stage: There’s a problem, product research, weighing different product options, getting to the demo stage and then purchasing the product.
At each stage, different types of content and advertising can persuade them to get to the next stage: at the top of the funnel, you need to grab attention (problem, initial research); in the middle of the funnel, you need to show that your products are the best option (weighing, demo); at the bottom of the funnel you need to get them to commit (sale).
Don’t get confused between a marketing plan and a go-to-market strategy, however. A GTM strategy focuses on one product, whereas a marketing plan deals with the overall strategy and direction of your marketing. They can be heavily related, however, as your GTM strategy can draw from your long-term marketing plan.
Sales plan
Once you’ve discovered how to market your product, you need to come up with a sales plan. Most MSPs either use an inside sales model to convince prospects to purchase your product or a field sales model, focused more on enterprise deals.
Wildix uses a channel model, where partners sell the product for us, and then there’s the self-service model, used by many unified communication vendors where customers purchase the product on their own without any real sales team involvement.
Whichever model you use, you need to make sure it makes sense with your product and your proposed buyers.
Setting goals
Your go-to-market strategy must have set goals so you can test how well your GTM strategy is working. Each part of your business can have different goals depending on how they contribute to the sale of the product. For example:
Marketing: Send out sales letters to the top 100 prospects in our list and emails to the top 200 prospects within the first two months. Work on four webinars within the next six months to drive prospect interest. Attend four trade shows focused on manufacturing within the next 12 months to generate 50 new MQLs.
Sales: Attend four trade shows focused on manufacturing within the next 12 months to help drive MQLs. Reach out to 40 of the top prospects generated by the tradeshows within six months of the initial MQL as they express interest, driving them down the funnel. Convert 10 prospects to the new solution.
Tech: Provide demos to assist sales with the funnel within two weeks of the request. Provide documentation to assist technical teams, with major technical documentation created within five days of any new feature becoming ready to push to end users.
These are vague, of course, and a comprehensive GTM plan should cover these in much more detail.
Go-to-Market Strategies: Essential for MSPs
Overall, a good go-to-market strategy will help you define what your product does, who it helps and why they should be interested. Then, it helps you deliver the strategy with clear goals so that you can track exactly how well it’s proceeding and identify issues as they arise.
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