Key questions to guide your go-to-market plan
I’m all for anything that will help me create better Go-to-Market plans and this week, it was Yasmeen Turayhi’s talk, “The Most Important Questions to Ask When Building a Go-to-Market Plan”.
I’ve summarised the thoughts in this post and added a bit of my own perspective. If this is helpful to you (or if you have any constructive feedback, please send me a message on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear it!
So, what questions should you ask when you’re building a go-to-market plan?
1. Have you identified your target market and market segments?
If you’re an early-stage company, you’re likely going through a lot of changes and iterations at this stage so don’t spend too much time over-defining your target market. For later-stage companies, the product is very defined and you know your customers better so you have a bit more resources at your disposal for a deep dive into your market segments.
Understanding your customers is a foundational block for everything that’s to come. A lot of top-level stakeholders usually don’t see this stage as important because there is no “direct result” - like the numbers you get from running a paid ad. This is sad for something that’s so important.
You can have your hypotheses about who your customer is and what they want but always back this up with customer research and feedback. I’d push persona research as a great way to understand your segments and who you’re targeting.
2. Do you understand your customer pain points and how much time + money they want to spend on your platform/product/service?
This was something I learnt from reading The MOM Test, a book by Rob Fitzpatrick-the best way to validate an idea is to have people pay for it. Yasmeen also echoes this in the webinar.
The bigger the pain point the bigger the value proposition. Everyone thinks an idea is a great idea till it’s time to pay for it. In your GTM plan, push to understand what your customers think you’re worth and how much they need the product you’re offering.
3. Do you understand your value proposition and how your customer perceives it?
This is where positioning work comes in. In April Dunford’s book, Obviously Awesome, she shares that understanding your product from your customer’s viewpoint is even more important than how you see your product.
Let’s imagine I created an app called Black to help managers monitor their employees better. Manager X starts using Black and discovers it sucks for monitoring but it has a great messaging feature that trumps anything else they’ve ever used. If I as the product marketer at Black took time to understand how Manager X interacts with my product and how they perceive my value, I would end up going with one of the following options:
Positioning Black as a collaborative messaging app for work instead of what I initially planned it would be
Doing an app overhaul so that Black actually works as a monitoring tool
If I stick with positioning myself as a monitoring app without changing anything, I’ll be losing both ways- customers who only need a monitoring app will end up leaving as I’m not solving the needs I advertised and I’ll lose out on the market for my awesome messaging feature. People who would have come to me for the messaging feature wouldn’t even know I had one because all I’m selling is “a monitoring app”- they wouldn’t even know I exist.
This is why it’s so important to understand your value proposition side by side with how your customers perceive it.
4. Do you have a robust GTM plan that includes the perspective and input of key internal stakeholders?
The goal of building a Go-to-Market plan isn’t to be superman or superwoman and prove you can do it all. The goal is to get the job done.
You own the GTM plan but you have to delegate if you want to be effective. You will almost never get anything done if you do everything in the GTM plan along with no perspective and input from other stakeholders. The ability to delegate effectively is a great skill to have here.
Influence is also important in the go-to-market process. Apart from influencing execs like the CEO to back you up on a decision, cross-functional influence is also important.
5. Do you know your customer journey intimately?
The customer journey shouldn’t end at conversion. It should end closer to advocacy. You don’t just want them to buy your product, you want them to become advocates and be a part of the referral loop.
Understand how many touchpoints are on your customer’s journey- to help you do this, map out your customer marketing strategy against your customer journey. This will help to determine moments of impact and how you can influence them to make key decisions.
6. How are you measuring the success of your launch?
Determine your metrics for success and have clear targets and KPIs before you start your GTM plan. Understand what your company’s goals are long term and how your GTM plan can help you get there. This way, you’ll measure success in a way that is directly connected to your company’s goals.
The content in this post is mainly from Yasmeen Turayhi’s talk, “The Most Important Questions to Ask When Building a Go-to-Market Plan”. You can follow her here on LinkedIn.
Have any comments or feedback? You can send me a message on LinkedIn.
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