To develop a Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy, I suggest following four steps:

1 Know Your Product Well

It is OK for Sales superstars in Dilbert world to know little about the product. But you have to know it very well to devise a successful Go-to-market strategy. Not only that, you should be able to describe it in sufficient detail to other departments in your company.

Product Management Canvas is one such tool. It captures the product in one canvas and gives a good 360-degree view.

2 Ask Yourself Three Fundamental Questions

2.1 What to sell?

What exactly are you selling? This has to be articulated for each customer segment and each value prop.

Many times a solution could be combinations of your products. In that case, above needs to be done for all product combinations.

2.2 Whom to sell?

Depending on if you are a new product or a mature product, your userbase and customers would differ.

If you are a new product, identify key influencers, usual suspects among early adopters and focus on reaching an early majority.

If you are a matured product, identify key late majority and laggards. Decision makers in large enterprises (like the CTO’s office, the Procurement division) can help you situate yourself stronger while the product team keeps innovating to keep your product relevant to your client.

The key is to identify right recommenders and decision influencers for long-term success.

2.3 How to sell?

Pricing is complex. Sometimes, it is easy to start with tiered prices that allow you to serve small-scale, small-budget customers to allow for revenue while you hunt for large ones. You must have seen ones like this:

Your Pricing strategy should have such Pricing models and option to use channels to accelerate sales.

3 The Sales Funnel

We know the typical sales funnel. It is the journey of your customer from when they become aware of your product to when they actually buy it to when they choose to rebuy it.

The journey in short:

Awareness -> Consideration -> Research -> Selection -> Purchase -> Delivery -> Support -> Repeat Purchase -> Recommendation to Buy

Understand it is very important and a plan to how to egg them on to the next stage.

4 Work on These Nineteen Tasks

1. Time of Launch
2. Launch Strategy and Collaterals
3. Sales and Delivery Channels
4. Positioning and Promotion Strategy
5. Decision Makers and Influencers
6. Recommenders
7. Sales Collateral
8. Content Strategy
9. Marketing Collateral
10. User Support Docs
11. Training Collaterals
12. Change Management
13. Social Media Assets
14. Digital Marketing Assets
15. Brand Playbook
16. Pricing Model Experiments
17. Market Positioning
18. Competitive Positioning
19. Ecosystem Map

Get going on your Go To Market Strategy

It is a great moment to take a product to market. Congrats and best wishes! Check the GTM guide here:

→ Product Manager’s Guide to Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy