A product launch is as effective as its Go-to-market strategy. With so many moving parts, cross-departmental collaboration ensures GTM success.

Go-to-Market is a success story waiting to happen. Within the ever-growing product market, businesses have had to compete with each other over the essential resource: the buyer.

Although it seems negative, many organizations have taken this rapid competition as a challenge and pushed the boundaries of innovation: Culminating in GTM.

GTM has allowed businesses to develop strategies and reach their product-fit market in an efficient time, which helped them hit business objectives that aligned with the product’s launch.

Entering the market can be daunting for innovators, traditionalists, and disruptors alike. Who will buy our product, and why will they buy it? The GTM strategy empowers businesses to answer these questions and eliminate the noise that follows it.

From marketing to product, cross-departmental collaboration is necessary for the process, ensuring a smooth and seamless launch. Innovative companies outperform their competition by delivering value through every stage of the buyer journey, whether content creation or sales.

The B2B industry has especially benefitted from Go-to-Market strategies. It has to be evaluated as a game changer in the SaaS market. And it all begins by understanding what it does for you.

Go-to-market innovates the path an organization takes to reach the ideal buyer.

The buyer has become self-directed. Armed with the knowledge, and opinions of many, the B2B buying committee (a.k.a. the buyer) has an array of choices.

Each organization in the B2B sphere releases products that bring an advantage to them. But, the buyer has their own needs and risks to mitigate. How will they choose the best product?

Here is where GTM comes through. It is not just marketing, as some may believe. It is an entire organization working together to make their product launch a fast success.

What is Go-to-Market strategy?

It is an organization creating a GTM strategy to identify and reach its ideal buyer when introducing a new product. Or an old product in a new market.

By bridging the gap of uncertainty between the business and the buyer, Go-to-market demonstrates the unique value an organization brings to the table. And helps the buyer understand what your product does for them.

It provides your teams with a roadmap towards product success. This involves the KPIs your teams have identified and the possible interactions of your ideal customer with your product or services.

The Motions of GTM Strategy.

An important concept of the GTM strategy is the motions. These are the pathways an organization uses to reach its relevant customers.

Some of the motions of GTM are: –

1. Product-Led
2. Inbound
3. Partnership Marketing
4. Community-Led
5. Event-led
6. Outbound

While you research which strategies to use, you will be overwhelmed by all available options. And that is okay.

Most online resources present this picture of using a multi-motion approach for GTM. But that is not possible. Your organization will have to find its unique motion or motions by identifying what your audience feels comfortable with and by understanding your budget.

Let us be real. Many start-ups and emerging SaaS companies do not have the budget to pull every stop. Here, Maja Voje suggests being realistic and choosing one motion that is doable by your organization.

And that is sage wisdom for those experimenting with GTM. And SaaS in general. Be realistic.

Go-to-Market Approaches for SAAS

Understanding your potential buyer is crucial for choosing sub-strategies and complementing motions for your product. They will help you understand the market you are targeting and the approach you must take to penetrate it successfully.

These sub-strategies are: –

1. The Bottom-up approach or the product-centric approach
2. It involves building a relationship with the end users and small teams. This approach is perfect for organizations that are starting and do not have a huge budget. It helps early-stage SaaS companies achieve organic growth through word of mouth and referrals. It is a very content marketing-heavy approach.
3. The Middle-out GTM approach or the sales and product approach
4. The middle-out GTM approach is ideal for established companies entering new markets or expanding their reach. With this approach, a business may target specific market segments and direct its sales and marketing efforts through outbound and inbound campaigns.
5. The Top-Down GTM approach or the sales-led approach
6. The top-down approach is known for its high-revenue potential. It targets organizations with substantial revenues. This is the “traditional” way of SaaS marketing. It has longer sales cycles, enhanced brand recognition, market penetration, and high costs. It is a high-risk high-return strategy.

When implementing your GTM strategy, you must choose between the three approaches. And it depends on the budget of your business.

Approach 1 – GTM Strategies Provide Positive Signals to the buyer

Go-to-market strategies serve more than just a roadmap for the organization. They also provide positive markers for the buyer.

The buyer and vendor relationship is built on trust. SaaS companies need to show their product can solve target market problems. That is the core of Go-to-Market. Show the right market that your product will solve their problems and mitigate risks.

GTM enables an organization to create experiences that reflect these ideals. If your buyers do not perceive you as an expert in your domain through lackluster sales processes or irrelevant marketing messages, they will be put off by your brand and product.

Approach 2 – Go-to-market strategies work best when there is cross-departmental collaboration.

While sales and marketing alignment is becoming the norm, GTM takes it a bit further and involves vital players from: –

1. Product
2. Marketing
3. Sales
4. Customer Success
5. and Finance.

These are the core members of the strategic team. They are not limited to these five teams and could have more teams involved, like operations for development. In short, the whole organization must work for GTM’s success.

Each member(s) of the individual teams acts as a point-of-contact between the GTM team and departmental stakeholders, ensuring a smooth workflow and transfer of information between the teams.

The transfer of information provides a vital recipe for GTM success. Every Point-of-Contact should be intimately familiar with the KPIs set by their departments because it will be the driving force of the roadmap.

Asana has one of the best GTM templates.

As you can see from their templates, and they agree to it. Go-to-market has a lot of moving parts. It is necessary to understand that a successful GTM strategy comes from visualizing the journey and executing it as close to the original vision as possible.

Approach 3 – Joining the moving parts

What are the moving parts you can identify in your organization? For SaaS companies or typically B2B companies, moving parts consist of Marketing, Product (or service), Finance, Customer Success, and Sales.

1. Marketing

Marketing is seen as the driver of the strategy, which is not false but is not the complete truth either. Marketing is rather in charge of gathering the perspectives and honing them into a single message.

This requires the marketing leaders to collaborate closely with the other teams.

2. Finance

That brings us to finance. GTM strategies hinge on the financial success of the product entering the market. Every ad copy, content marketing strategy, Email campaign, etc., should be seen through a fiscal lens.

What are the metrics of success? ARR, or Annual Recurring Revenue, has been a solid metric for SaaS companies thus far, but it is a long-term metric. Based on your approach and the size of your company, the finance team can create similar short-term leading and lagging metrics of success, which is crucial for your GTM success.

One such metric is the potential buyer’s initial interactions with the product.

That means, after your potential buyer has used the demo, are they satisfied? And who best to answer that but

3. Customer Success

It is up to Customer Success to ensure that your product is solving the pain points of your potential buyer.

What do they like and dislike about the product?

1. Is it something that can be solved by learning more about the product?
2. Or is it something fundamental about the function of the product?
3. And how can we, the developers, solve buyers’ queries?

Customer success, finance, and marketing must evaluate customer lifetime value as a KPI.

They ensure a smooth transition from this phase to the next.

4. Product

Product plays a pivotal role in the GTM strategy and could be called the true driver of your long-term strategies. Today’s marketing is product-led. Marketing has to be heavily involved with product teams to understand the unique proposition of the product and what it does for the user.

Product dev leaders must be involved in the messaging and conveying of the marketing campaigns.

• Has the message conveyed the solution of our product in a way that touches on buyer concerns?

Product teams must understand buyer needs. And for that, sales is the only place to go.

5. Sales

The lynchpin of success. Sales has to act as a consultant to the buyer. Before selling

1. they must understand the product
2. what it does for the buyer
3. and what the buyer wants to solve.

The fieldwork that sales do empowers the rest of the teams to create a cohesive vision. It reduces the uncertainty of understanding the buyer and market.

The information that sales gather cannot and must not stay in a silo. Maruch with the ICP.

Salesforce and Slack: The two GTM successes examples of the SaaS era.

Slack or Bottom-Top approach

Slack is the master of PLG or product-led growth. What is their recipe for success?

1. Their awesome product (And whoever has used Slack knows it)
2. Community-Led (They have communities in most major cities)
3. Content (Look at their blog, and you will understand what we mean)

Slack is successful because it understands the vital aspects of work communication. It should be quick, flexible, and connected —allowing for streamlined communication and workflows. And while working on their app, they gave Slack away to teams and understood the successes and failures of their product. Iterating the product as they went.

Slack gave and still gives a freemium model for teams to use. And it is a great product. They invited people to use Slack—end users—to try it out. It was a massive success.

People who used the app became its champions. They entered a market rife with competition and won.

Their only competitor can be said to be Microsoft Teams. Imagine that.

No company signifies a Go-to-Market strategy better than Slack. They made it possible by being consistent with their messages, understanding their limitations, providing the end user rather than big corporations, and iterating their product based on user feedback.

Salesforce or the Top-Down Approach.

Salesforce is synonymous with SaaS. Being a cloud-based software, the original CRM was easy to adopt and set up by big enterprises. And Salesforce knew this.

They made the software free for the first year for teams of up to 10 members. And, like Slack, they had a great product.

But what set them and their GTM apart is the Trailblazer’s community program. The first product community. Salesforce realized that their teams enjoyed solving answers to problems they didn’t know and then shared their knowledge.

The trailblazer community was thus formed as a group of experts who could solve problems and share them with their peers. This helped customers and users by providing real-time value on dynamic problems.

It was revolutionary.

Salesforce’s approach shows that having a product and community is the key to GTM growth. Along with iterating and improving the approach to the strategy.

They understood the need for knowledge workers to share and solve problems, connecting them to like-minded individuals and teams.

It worked because they understood the unique behavior of Salesforce users and created a solution around it.

Go-to-market is about understanding the product’s solution and user behavior.

GTM is a recipe for success. But it is a long-term and iterative process. There has to be room for pivots and flexible changes.

But two things remain unchanged.

• What unique proposition is your product tackling?
• How does the user behave with it, and how can an organization leverage this behavior as an advantage?

The strategy moves around these two levers, and they are customer-centric.

Understand your buyer, iterate, find a unique proposition, and reiterate. That is the essence of GTM.

How will leaders and employees work when inundated with calls, emails, and, worst, the ever-ringing social media buzz? We have fallen into a dark cycle of unproductivity. According to a study, 1 out of 5 employees leave their jobs because of poor work environments.

If a business, B2B or otherwise, wishes to close more deals, they should tackle and improve their external and internal business processes. By streamlining everyday tasks and long-terms goals, the daily decision fatigue of a working environment will decrease and give way to creative thinking.

Business process improvement or BPI is necessary for innovation in a work culture, bringing forth new and efficient ideas for doing things. From agile practices and six sigma methods to deep work, our current gurus are hellbent on improving the lack of focus in today’s work culture.

Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the scientific study of working during the Industrial Revolution. He would stand with a stopwatch and measure the time taken for each task.

The Historical Roots of Process Optimization

He set the stage for business processes to flourish and transformed it into a scientific study. But as time flows, we deal with the problems our forefathers did not have to. i.e., the chaos of an always-on society.

Attention spans have decreased, and burnout within 67% of leaders and 76% of employees has increased. If closing more deals and driving growth is the aim, the process to reach that goal must be different than the competition.

A new business process improvement plan must be set by understanding the unique views of your company, its product, and its culture.

Improving business processes is about creating more space for creative undertaking.

What is Business Process Improvement (BPI)?

Business process improvements are the methods an organization undertakes to improve productivity, well-being, and profits.

Business processes are part of the work culture and decide the paths an employee takes to complete their work. There are a host of techniques and methods a business must employ for growth and frictionless work.

BPI is internal and external. From the supply chains (if they exist) to the FTE working at their desk. It all can be streamlined, made efficient, and improved through novel ideas and innovation.

By improving business processes, businesses can decrease internal and external decision fatigue and boost productivity, customer relations, and the bottom line.

Example: A SaaS company adopts Agile practices into their workweek for time and task management and integrating self-buy tools for their product to be easily accessible to the end user.

BPI is imperative for businesses.

Automation, machines, and AI have us forgetting a crucial aspect of work. And that is, we humans have finite energy to do our assigned tasks.

Burnout, lack of focus, and ill-management of time lead to unproductivity. And according to SurePayroll’s Productivity Prohibitors infographic, unproductivity costs employers $1.8 trillion yearly.

That is a lot.

And all of this is caused by not iterating and finding a business process that works for your company and culture. However, it can be improved on an employee, leader, and organizational level by assessing the literature and creating a dynamic yet unique structure for your organization.

Business process improvements mean working to improve internal and external friction points of a company.

The list of methods discussed here are not novel ideas. They existed before the Industrial Revolution and will exist long after the AI revolution of our current century.

As creatives — and make no mistake, from programmers and writers to designers and strategists, we are creatives — focus and concentration will elevate the quality of our work.

The internal business process improvements elevate the quality of a leader’s and an employee’s work and their subsequent enjoyment.

The external BPIs are based on the logistics of a company (for SaaS and AI-based companies, these could be the data centers), the interactions of the end user/buyer with the company’s various touchpoints, and the perception of the company.

Smoothing the internal processes will increase your external efforts.

A high-quality input gives a supreme output. Remember the Pareto Principle: 80% of outcomes come through 20% of your hard work.

Internal

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law Time is not the same for everyone. Think all the times it went in a flash, stretched, and moved in ways you could not comprehend. That is Parkinson’s law in effect. Well, somewhat. If you have an hour to do something, it will take the entire hour, even if you can do it in 10 minutes. It says work expands to fill a given time, wasting this most valuable resource. To improve business processes, we must become aware of the inherent procrastinating tendencies in our work and business environment. This is a personal endeavor and can be solved by just doing it. But that is not too actionable. Here is a list of things you should do to overcome the employees’ and your procrastination streak.

• Encourage the use of the Pomodoro timer. 60% of users who use the technique feel they have control over their time.
• Plan your day: Breaking tasks into manageable chunks is a time-saver. And it is fun to experiment with the time we have. For example, take 15-20 minutes out of the day to prioritize the work. P1, P2..PN. Once the priorities are identified allot time to it (everyone knows their ideal time), and make sure to finish it in that time given by yourself. This planning out saves almost 2 hours every day.
• Time Blocking: One of the most vital tools for a leader. It will help you identify your tasks, balance your schedule to include things you like, and create data for you to review and create more flexible periods in your schedule. It increases productivity by 80%.

Deep Work

• That brings us to deep work. Popularized by Cal Newport in his book, he brings out the timeless techniques from the past and present. Deep work, in a sense, is creating ideal conditions for full-focus work.
• This method increases focus and creativity. However, it does require the sacrifice of distractions (whatever they might be for you and your team). In recent years, it is the onslaught of emails and other work-social tools.
• Deep work gives organizations and individuals a competitive edge. For a busy world, time-blocking is a sure way of getting into this zone. Then it is up to the individual and the work culture if they can utilize this treasure.

Active Listening

• Coined by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, active listening is one of the most vital tools for a leader.It involves listening and understanding different viewpoints, feelings, and opinions. It enables leaders to open trust channels, generate new ideas, and create a positive environment.
• Active listening is game-changing for closing more deals because it enables teams to understand what their end users/buyers are talking about and why. If you are still unsure about this abstract concept, take these statistics as a reference.

The Eisenhower Matrix

• The matrix helps you divide and eliminate work based on priority. It divides the work into Do, Delegate, Schedule, and Delete.
• It takes a while to get used to it. Urgent and important are not synonyms in the matrix; they are different for a reason. Urgent tasks have to be submitted; it can be as tedious as signing multiple finance forms, and important tasks could be to increase ROI. These are two examples of urgent and important tasks.

Rewards

• From recognition programs to incentives, it is a time-old strategy that employee rewards boost productivity and well-being.
• These rewards, however, should not be shallow. Every company has R & R, but employees often find such displays shallow and part of the rat race. A high-performing team does not exhibit this behavior.
• The leaders of high-performing teams understand the value of each team member and bring it out. These teams share credit and engage in open forums of disagreements. It is the leader who will recognize the value of each member and give them appropriate rewards. This could be something small as a thank you note or grand gestures like flexible timings for work well done. Displays like these show trust between the teams.

The 4DX Framework

This framework is similar to the Eisenhower Matrix. It suggests that teams should focus on: –

• The Wildly Important: Identify your organization and team’s critical goals.
• Action on Lead Measures: These are KPIs that show success in the short term. This could be completing an ad creative in x time.
• Keep a Scoreboard: Creating visual displays of success and failure gives tangible reality to outcomes. Simplified data in the form of easy-to-look visuals in the company.
• Creation of Accountability: This is where the idea of a sprint comes from. Enabling clear weekly or monthly goals will give your team clarity.

The Lean Methodology

It is the strategy of minimizing waste and focusing on customer value. Even though lean is customer-centric (Relevant, by the way), it is the ideal framework for team workflows. The key principles of lean are to: –

• Identify Value: The lean method helps teams identify the needs of the user/buyer and provide these to them. By identifying the intricacies of the customer and their requirement, the teams can map out a streamlined creation and delivery process.
• Mapping the Value Stream: By visualizing the entire journey and smoothing out rough edges, teams can identify waste creating habits or processes and eliminate them.
• Creating a Flow: Once all the steps are identified and smoothed out, the creation of flow has teams create and optimize the steps inside the method.
• Establishing a Pull: For marketers, this step is intimate. It is to create what is needed and only when needed, ensuring a demand rather than selling.
• Pursuing Perfection: Reiteration. Identify what works and what does not. Remove the waste-generating steps and experiment with newer models and thought processes.

External

Outcome Based Marketing

• One of the biggest complaints in marketing today is cutting budgets and more work. Google says to tackle this by communicating with your CFO and providing tangible growth metrics aligned with the company’s yearly outcomes.
• This means creating metrics that help a business generate its intended revenue while covering or giving ROI over the marketing cost.
• Reading that article, you will find that Andrew, VP of Mariani Premier, created a three-year business plan processing that involves quantitative objectives for client acquisition, retention, and revenue expansion.

Omnichannel Strategies

• The omnichannel experience is about reducing customer-brand friction or creating a frictionless customer journey. It is vital for companies today. Google says that omnichannel buyers have 30% more LTV.
• Omnichannel strategies are a clear reflection of the internal structure of a business. It showcases that your sales, marketing, and customer success are aligned.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

• Whether your sales strategies to close more deals or your three-year business plan. helps close deals.
• It streamlines the process for both teams and establishes clear ROI metrics that each must meet. It also helps customers learn more about your brand and close high-quality deals.

Business Process Improvements are strategy and creativity coming together in cohesion.

You must have noticed that establishing an internal and external BPI structure complements each other. Alignment, omnichannel marketing, and outcome-based marketing’s success hinges on internal improvements.

This creates a healthy work environment and reduces decision fatigue in employees and leaders, giving them space for broader and creative decisions. It is no coincidence that we see productive gurus on the rise. Because we are facing an extensive lack of time and distractions, unproductivity has increased, and with it stress and fatigue.

And everyone faces it, the buyer and the marketer. We need to create systems that give us a sense of purpose and control of time. Whether closing more deals or fostering care in your work culture, now is the time to iterate and improve.

If you’re investing more time in technology than it’s freeing up for you- is it an investment or a mere liability?

We’ve all had our fair share of experiences with complicated technologies that make most of us want to pull our hair out. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

We’ve also had experiences that are the polar opposite- they make life easy. These platforms and technologies are smooth and intuitive. You get what you need without racking your brains too hard.

Simplicity wins in the digital world. Your customers want seamless experiences with the products and services they interact with; brands that provide ease and convenience with a solid backbone of technology will continue to leapfrog their counterparts that don’t. Because complicated doesn’t always mean intelligent.

The stacks

If your tech stack is causing your team more problems than it solves, you might be going about building it all wrong. Tech leaders must bring transparency at all levels to break down organizational silos and ensure no team or department is sitting on data it doesn’t share across the business.

If you want to keep your customer, keep it simple- the entire customer experience with tech, processes, and people.

There’s a massive opportunity in simplifying your tech stack. Start with not building any process in isolation- bring it all together. As leaders, it’s imperative to gauge how the dots connect. Ask your team some crucial questions related to the tech stack- which technology acquisition made sense and which didn’t in terms of usage, training, and ROI. Prioritize the processes you want to automate first without jumping on the bandwagon.

Not every fad becomes a trend, and not every product is worth your investment.

What’s it getting you

Every business unit will face complications, but it’s the difference between complicated and byzantine that matters. If you’re investing more time in technology than it’s freeing up for you- is it an investment or a mere liability?

Have a customer-centric mindset when you buy, manage, or scrap technologies. What makes the end goal easier? New technologies keep emerging in the market with added features; this has also led to tech leaders choosing the best-of-the-breed approach rather than relying on a single vendor.

Modern organizations need specialized, more focused solutions that align with the overall business objectives.

Tech complexity has implications on team composition too. The kind of tools we need and build today rely on different skill sets and constant collaboration; cross-functional teams are the new competitive advantage.

The Editor’s Note

The tech industry works on the premise of adaptive learning, but it’s crucial to gauge the value of technology before you decide to invest in it. Each technology adoption comes with opportunities and risks, and it’s up to the leader to weigh the pros and cons to interpret what makes the most sense for the business requisites and customer satisfaction.

It’s time tech leaders manage change with a result-driven approach because technical debt doesn’t look good on anyone.