Despite its complexity designing go to market strategy and preparing go to market has some rules that can be generalised for any situation or organisation. Newly founded businesses, SMEs, enterprises, or NGOs could learn a lot from start-ups how to build traction on different channels and how to use rapid experimentation process. On the other hand, start-ups can benefit from understanding and managing complex distribution from large sales or distribution focused organisations, especially when designing marketplaces, platforms, and ecosystems. A start-up is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a start-up. Nor is it necessary for a start-up to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with start-ups follows from growth.
A lot of knowledge and wisdom how to design a Go-to-market and build your growth machine comes from venture capital investors and other people since their high-risk investments focus on companies that have high growth potential and they have been through this process repeatedly. The hardest part of designing a go to market strategy is to think about its execution at the same time you are building it. There many go to market frameworks available online that can be used for your specific situation. It can be just a simple diagram that organizes the dimensions of your Go-to market project in a helpful way that you share with your team. Understanding and framing your problem in an approachable way that you share with your team will bring clarity and speed of execution and a good framework enables us to execute better and faster. “Strong Opinions Weakly Held” approach is a framework to overcome biases and is the most effective way to make decisions when faced with complexity, uncertainty, and time pressure. There are lessons to be learned from companies outside your category. You can have an amazing product that is technically superior but with not having the right access to the market you will lose.

Enterprise with better distribution could launch something far inferior but would beat you in this process. Not getting initial traction for your product is often connected with spending too much time on building and not on allocating enough time and resources on distribution and attracting users. Sequoia Capital has followed a basic mantra “Market, product, team.” Understanding your Go-to-market strategy as a function of the primacy of sales or marketing is paramount.
Mark Leslie says, “If you’re marketing-intensive, the product is bought. If it is sales-intensive, the product is sold.” Mark Leslie uses a simple framework to quickly establish whether you have a sales-intensive or marketing-intensive product that you are bringing to the market. Besides smoother Go-to-market strategy, this process will help marketing and sales to better coordinate their efforts to win customers.
Start-ups are commonly instructed to just focus on product market fit in the early days. While I agree in the earliest phases you focus on proving Market Product Fit, that does not mean you can ignore the others. You need to find four fits to grow to $100M+ company in a venture-backed time frame. Market, product, channel, and model all must interact and work together as part of one constant ecosystem and Brian Balfour designed a framework to align all four fits and explained why you cannot think of them separately.
Building a great product is not an answer that your company will grow successfully. Great products have failed, while terrible products have grown to a huge company. “Go-to-Market Strategy is focused on how the organization will put offerings into the market to reach market penetration, revenue and profitability expectations. This charter is a superset of marketing strategy as it impacts all functions within an organization with the goal of preparing the entire company for market success.

A comprehensive GTM strategy includes a detailed analysis of your target markets, customer segments, budget requirements, offers, positioning and can take several weeks or longer to formulate. It is focused on the entire product lifecycle and has to be adjusted and changed when the market conditions change. The strategy includes positioning, brand, targeting, and segmentation. If you want to drive a competitive advantage in your go to market your segments need to be small enough to be actionable but big enough to be meaningful. Minimum viable product comes hand in hand with the minimum viable segment and his great start-up secret is that if your segmentation is based on needs that will lead that customer will reference each other. In the tactical part, the focus is on the marketing and sales cycle, driving to market and results-oriented and measured execution.

Go-to-market is both strategic and tactical and Skok believes just as Rome wasn’t built in a day so too your GTM strategy and tactics shouldn’t. GTM business model is driven through continuous integration and improvement and is results-oriented and execution driven.

When designing your go to market it is important to identify your market stage and the strategy required to cater to that phase. It is not what the seller wants to do but respect what the market needs. As Moore argues in his Crossing the Chasm book that there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product and early majority, therefore, is vital to identify your market stage, strategy required and plan for the next phase of the market.
It is not only the first mover advantage nor product-market-fit to dominate the market. If you figure out how to scale with velocity you can overtake successful players that were already in that market. Gil believes that most successful founders can see what others don’t by almost cloning themselves as a customer. You can crack through the markets by being product centric rather than customer centric.
When designing your Go-to-Market market machine you will have to align your GTM plans in operations, marketing, and sales and figure out how all this will be executed in the end. Initially, the go-to-market plan should only be created after gathering user insights and creating success metrics and that will inevitably mean that in the best of the circumstances you will have to tweak your go-to-market strategy.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath