Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define what a go-to-market strategy is.
- List the components of a successful go-to-market strategy.
- Identify key considerations for creating a go-to-market strategy.
Share It with the World
If a product makes it to market, the first iteration probably won’t be perfect. To even get your product in the hands of your customers, you need a go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
Let’s dig deeper.
What Is a Go-to-Market Strategy?
The product roadmap laid out the journey for your target customer and the business and customer outcomes you’re trying to achieve. But the product isn’t going to sell itself. A go-to-market strategy stretches beyond the product roadmap with an end-goal of achieving a competitive advantage. It’s a strategy that outlines how you’ll:
- Successfully launch your product to your target audience.
- Acquire new customers.
- Drive awareness, adoption, and engagement.
What Makes a Successful GTM Strategy?
Since each product and market requires a custom approach, there’s no “one size fits all” to your GTM strategy. But there are certain elements you should include to build a successful strategy.
- The problem you’re solving and how your product solves that problem.
- Details of the product you’re building, including the value proposition and pricing.
- Your target customer, including needs, pain points, and pricing considerations.
- Your competitors, including market positioning and how your product differentiates from theirs.
- How you’ll distribute your product, including information on how your customers will find out about the solution.
- How you’ll measure and track performance and value.
To ensure your product’s success, keep these considerations top of mind.
- What are you competing with (including doing nothing)?
- What user behavior changes are required? What barriers prevent that change?
- How does this fit in the user context/system?
Cloud Kicks’s GTM Strategy
Because of its unique position in the niche market of custom, personalized sneakers, Cloud Kicks’s GTM strategy incorporated a number of unique elements.
Much of its GTM strategy led with the exciting new delivery tracking feature. Not only had the CEO prioritized it, but it was the most requested feature from Cloud Kicks’s current customers. Without it, customers only received updates through the shipping service, and information sometimes disappeared into the internet ether when a delivery hit a snag in the supply chain.
Cloud Kicks used Salesforce programs like Tableau to analyze current patterns across the supply chain, and Experience Cloud to build a more accurate customer journey that optimized the value chain for increased customer satisfaction. Working with the strategy designer and UX designers, Cloud Kicks developers built a product that lets customers see real-time explanations on the website and mobile app whenever supply chain exceptions occur.
Developers decided that for the first release of this feature, they would skip some nonessentials–like the photos at different stages of the supply chain journey and information on Cloud Kicks’s sustainability tactics–in order to launch the feature faster and relieve customers’ biggest pain points.
The design strategist worked with the product manager to create:
- A feature roadmap to bring the new Tracker to full-featured maturity in three release cycles.
- A plan to stay up-to-date on changes in the supply chain so that users are not subjected to outdated information.
They also identified a number of important KPIs to track and measure the feature’s effectiveness using Salesforce Community Cloud. These KPIs included the number of surveys completed, the number of discounts used, the channel used (website vs. mobile), new vs. existing customer, where the customer heard about the feature, and so on. The customer feedback was incorporated into the design process for further iterations of the feature.
A successful go-to-market strategy builds off the product roadmap to help you launch your product and achieve a competitive advantage. In the next unit, we look at how you can use a GTM strategy to deploy your product and achieve a competitive advantage.