The Building Blocks of a Great Go-To-Market Strategy

How do you keep your great technology from falling flat in the market? (I’m looking at you, Segway and Newton!) Building a fantastic product is only part of the equation. The other key component is driving adoption. That’s what we call your go-to-market strategy, and this post will describe a basic process for discovering repeatable market patterns that form the basis of a go-to-market funnel for customer acquisition.

Building a go-to-market strategy isn’t easy. First of all, it requires that you truly listen to the market. Customers will tell you things that you aren’t prepared for. You must be willing to adapt. After all, they are the ones who will ultimately be paying you.

Second, it’s easy to get tripped up by early customers who, despite loving your product, don’t serve as a model for attracting other customers. Following the wrong patterns can be disastrous for a company that needs repeatable usage and sales.

Cautionary Tales

Case in point: let me share a couple of conversations I’ve had with entrepreneurs who were headed down the wrong path to a repeatable market strategy. This first story demonstrates how easy it is to lock oneself in an ivory tower, especially today when code can be produced so rapidly. Without direct customer feedback, you have no idea if anyone wants what you are building.

Next is a story that reveals a real lack of understanding about how expensive it is to find the right customer and sell, especially in the SMB market. For those interested, check out David Skok’s excellent graph that describes the relationship between sales model and the cost of customer acquisition (which is directly related to the average selling price).

Both of these stories demonstrate one of the most dangerous false conclusions that a product team can make: that the existence of a value proposition means you automatically have a feasible route to market.

Your Value Proposition Alone Isn’t Enough

Just because your product is valuable to somebody, doesn’t mean you can build a business around it. On top of value, you must also establish that:

1. Enough people have the problem you are solving (i.e., there is demand)
2. You can reach those people in a scalable, economically viable way, and
3. You can monetize your solution for more money than it costs to produce, sell, and deliver it.

When you start building your go-to-market strategy, your initial objective is to quickly answer the questions above and establish repeatability in the process. Think of this as writing a “rough draft” of a novel. It’s more important to establish the contours of the story from beginning to end than it is to perfect any one chapter.

Once you have validated all of the criteria above, and you can proceed to optimize your customer acquisition funnel and grow your business. (Read: Profit Margin!)

Building Your Go-To-Market Engine

Whether you’re a large-company launching a new product, or small entrepreneur with a great idea, you’ve got to find a way to create momentum for a successful go-to-market engine. That means you must establish a foothold, use that as a base for driving more success, and ultimately set up a positive feedback loop of success that drives your product into the hands of an eager audience.

Here are the steps for how to do that:

Step One: Identify an audience. You need to define who your likely users or buyers are in a way that makes them easy to identify. Look for common characteristics that they share, or a place where they all gather, or a simple question you can ask them to quickly qualify them in or out. One way or another, you must be able to easily draw a proverbial circle around your target audience. Otherwise, you will be wasting too much time (and money) speaking to people that have no chance of buying.

Let’s take an example: say you are building a product for tax accountants, and you think that one out of every hundred tax accountants out there would find your product valuable. But if the only way to know that any random tax accountant is “qualified” is by having a deep conversation with them, you’re never going to build momentum. However, if you know that your target tax accountant runs their business using Apple products, it becomes much easier to find those one in a hundred with whom you want to speak.

I can’t overstate the importance of finding a tight, identifiable target market to launch into. Spend the time up front to understand your ideal users, who they are, what they do, and where they gather. When you figure out how to quickly identify and qualify your likely buyers, the rest of the job is many times easier.

Step Two: Talk to them about their problems. One you’ve established a steady way of reaching and qualifying your ideal buyer, you have to get out of the building, (as Steve Blank says). Your next job is to identify what is known as “problem-solution fit.”

The thing is, you probably have all sorts of ideas about what problems your product can solve. And you are probably right about many of them. But some of those problems are going to be more important to your prospective customers than others. What you need to do is identify the problems that your target audience cares about most solving.

You don’t need to “pitch” them. This doesn’t need to turn into a sales call. In fact, the best way to know that they do have a problem worth solving is to get them to take another meeting with you at a later time. It may seem counter-intuitive (why on earth would you intentionally not tell them how to solve their problem?), but their willingness to commit time to you is actually a strong indication of their need to solve a problem. And that’s what you need most in building a go-to-market strategy – a strong signal about a problem that needs solving.

Step Three: Find a Hook. Now that you know who you’re targeting, how to qualify them, how to reach them, and what problems they care most about, you’ve got to figure out how to hook them. It’s time to move your qualified target customer into an active conversation.

Engagement can take many forms. Certainly it would be great if a prospect would sign up for your product on the spot. But let’s face it, that’s probably not to happen. Often, especially in B2B, you have to take one step at a time.

The real goal at this stage is to provide your prospect with a way for them to envision using your product. That way, they can understand the value to be derived from it. This step could take the form of anything from a testimonial to a video demonstration to a trial to a proof of concept. To figure out what step they are willing to take, be flexible, listen to them, and be willing to adapt.

Remember – your customers’ time is scarce. If you get the balance right between what you’re asking them to do and what value you are offering, you’ll get them to take an action. Actions lead to trust. Trust leads to momentum. Momentum leads to a repeatable go-to-market program. And it all starts with getting them to take a step.

Your Prototype Funnel: Mission Accomplished

At this point, you’ve successfully prototyped an engine to find leads and feed your sales and marketing funnel. Specifically you have:

• Identified your target customer and found a way to qualify them
• Established a way to reach your target customer
• Associated your product with a validated pain point
• Created a call-to-action that will pull customers into your funnel

Congratulations! Accessing a reliable source of demand is not an easy task, and the part of building a business that is most outside of your control. The tasks that follow are much easier to wrap your arms around: closing deals, ensuring happy customer experiences, optimizing funnel performance, and finding more targets.

Your go-to-market engine is very powerful. Use it wisely.