Understanding your target customers

Everything in your go-to-market strategy should starts with a tight understanding of your ideal customer profile. Teams need to nail down the characteristics they see in their ideal customer, ideally using the following data types:

• Current customer data. Use data from your CRM and billing systems to analyze top customers. Find out what they have in common to assess what makes up an ideal customer.
• Firmographic data. Details about employees, branches, regions of operation, size, etc.
• Technographic data. What technology are your ideal customers already using and what are their digital pain points? 
• Intent data. What are target customers researching online?
• Contextual data. This data allows you to know how a business is using technological tools and how much it’s currently spending on its tech stack.

Building awareness and trust among potential buyers

Whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses, a company needs to build awareness of its product. This starts with a marketing plan and hinges on sales and marketing alignment. When sales and marketing work in sync—especially with a well developed account based marketing plan—teams can go after the same accounts, with consistent strategies, and coordinated touch points.

In this stage, consider what content you’ll create, what customer stories or social proof you can pull from, what touch points you can coordinate at events, and so on. 

Key elements of a great marketing plan include:

• Personal networks (whether in-person or on social media)
• Digital assets 
• Referrals and word-of-mouth marketing
• Events
• Direct mail
• Outbound advertising
  

With customer reviews and online content, B2B buyers have more power than ever. In fact, Gartner reported that "when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers." The majority of their time is spent doing independent research. Sales representatives play a small role in the actual decision-making process.

This means there’s extra pressure on B2B marketers and sellers to build trust and a sense of authenticity with their potential buyers. They can do this by creating helpful online written content, valuable webinars, and building human relationships at events. Focusing on building a culture focused on customer happiness and loyalty is also key for attracting more customers.

Above all, a successful go-to-market strategy relies on alignment across internal leaders. Here's a quick checklist of what sales and marketing teams should keep in mind:

• Obsess over your ideal customers and target accounts. Use data to get to know them inside and out, identify who will be the best early adopters that will help you gain traction. Who could be your MVP?
• Raise awareness – and then build trust. Raising awareness of your brand must be backed by authentic engagement with customers that trust in your product.  
• Develop a pricing and sales distribution model. Identify the right channels to deliver the product based on market trends and buyer behavior.
• Measure and reiterate often. Identify what’s working and where you have room to improve, all good GTM plans take iterating. 
• Build processes and scale. As your company matures, implement frameworks and repeatable processes that make growth a smooth experience.
  

Pricing

Choosing the optimal price point for any product or service is a complex task. You don’t want to undercharge and lose revenue, and you don’t want to overcharge, sending customers to your competitors. Dedicated pricing teams do in-depth competitive research and analysis when going to market - considering factors like the value offered to customers, their willingness to pay for it, and which upsell or cross-sell opportunities will be a big part of your. longer-term strategy. Pricing should be a fluid element of your strategy with room for adjustment based on sales performance, market reaction and customer feedback. 

Sales distribution channels

There are several ways to sell products: direct sales, wholesalers, retailers, distributors, channel partners, and digital channels. The type of sales channel depends on the type of product and the type of relationship a business has with its customers. A consumer-facing application could be bought one time in an app store, whereas an enterprise application could require an intricate onboarding process. 

If a business is just starting out, the company’s salesforce may be simple. As it evolves, it can expand its reach—offering different ways to distribute the product. Some will opt for a touchless buying experience, while others will hire an enterprise sales team. It all depends on the product, and if the price of the product can justify the cost of the sales channel.

Measuring the success of your go-to-market strategy

There are a number of metrics that indicate whether or not your GTM strategy is benefiting your business. Common metrics include:

• Sales conversion rates
• Duration of sales cycle
• Customer acquisition cost
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)
  

These are not the metrics that assess whether or not your product has great product-market fit, or how your customers are engaging with the product, but rather signals of how effective your marketing and sales teams are rallying together to drive revenue.