Well, well, well. If it isn’t another buzzword, catchphrase, or tech lingo to learn, it’s an acronym that has more meanings than a noun.
For some, GTM is Google Tag Manager, while for others GTM could mean Global Management System. However, the most significant GTM stands for Go-to-Market.
With that mind, it’s time to answer that one question in the back of your mind: What is a go-to-market strategy? What’s the difference between that and an overall market strategy?
From a quick Google search that leads to Reddit, most of the questions around “go-to-market” are something along the lines of this:
It’s okay if you don’t know the exact definition yet.
The tech world can’t help but use ambiguous words for business concepts.
However, you might want to know a thing or two about go-to-market strategies if you plan on executing a successful product launch.
Don’t know where to start?
Don’t sweat it. Use this guide to go-to-market strategy to learn:
- The go-to-market strategy definition
- Difference between go-to-market strategy and overall market strategy
- GTM strategy examples
- How to create a GTM strategy from scratch
Let’s catch you up to speed.
What is a go-to-market strategy?
As ambiguous as it sounds, it’s pretty straightforward.
A go-to-market strategy, or GTM strategy, is your plan to get a specific product to your target market.
There’s a lot of moving parts, but the plain definition of a GTM strategy is how you plan to “go-to-market” for a specific product.
A GTM strategy answers these questions:
- Who is your target market and ICP?
- What does the product-market fit look like?
- How will you market this new product to your ICP?
- What is your sales plan for this product?
- How will you distribute this product to your dream customers?
Go-to-market strategies are your blueprint to answering your investors’ FAQs of who, what, when, where, and how.
You can use a go-to-market strategy framework to help you define all the different processes you need to put in place to get your product to market.
The reality of a go-to-market strategy is that while it is a defined plan, we all know that things don’t always work out according to plan.
💡 The key to a solid go-to-market strategy is being able to invent strategies in the moment when things go “wrong” to get things back on track.
In other words, your GTM strategy should be flexible enough to bend with unexpected or potential changes.
Go-to-market strategy vs market strategy, explained
The difference between a go-to-market strategy and an overall market strategy is that a GTM strategy focuses on how to reach the target market for a specific product, while the latter deals with the broader market positioning of the company and its products.
A go-to-market strategy would involve plans for distributing the product, pricing it, setting up packaging and bundling options, and creating promotional activities for attracting customers.
An overall market strategy would include thinking about how the company should position itself in the market and how the company is differentiated from competitors.
Why do you need a go-to-market strategy?
In all honesty, it all boils down to being able to launch a new product and executing a successful product launch.
Here's a list of reasons why a GTM plan is important for businesses:
- Provides an outline for successful product launches
- Helps determine product-market fit
- Helps businesses tap into new markets
- Helps create a unified sales, product, and marketing plan
- Coordinates the distribution strategy of a new product or service
These plans also help to keep your goals, projects, and KPIs on track to make sure you’re hitting your business goals for a specific product or service.
Keep in mind: GTM strategies aren't set in stone. You should be periodically tweaking and improving your approach every now and then–even if you’re a huge company that’s already launched many successful products.
10 go-to-market strategy frameworks you should know
Whether you’re in sales, product, or marketing, each team has their own go-to-market strategies to help them achieve their goals.
GTM strategies can cover a wide range of topics and types, but we’ll list some of the most common and important ones–plus a few more not-so-obvious ones.
The top 10 go-to-market strategies you might encounter include:
- Scaled customer experience (CX)
- Product led growth (PLG)
- Sales-led growth (SLG)
- Account-based marketing (ABM)
- Content marketing
- Product research and analysis
- Customer success and advocacy
- Brand partnerships
- Referral programs
- Inbound marketing
While all of these are important, we’ll highlight and explain the top 3 GTM strategies you should know below.
Go-to-market strategy examples
Here are the top GTM examples you should know:
- Sales-led growth (SLG)
- Product-led growth (PLG)
- Scaled customer experience (CX)
You’ve probably heard of SLG vs PLG: The ongoing debate between these two business models for B2B SaaS companies. Folks like to argue which one is better.
There's no right or wrong answer here. There is, however, a third option: scaled CX.
Scaled customer experience (CX) is a concept created by a GTM lead at Miro.
It’s a hybrid business growth model that combines both SLG and PLG approaches. Think of it as a happy middle between the two.
The most interesting part of the scaled CX approach to GTM strategies is that it focuses on what’s most important to the customers–which is what companies should focus on anyways.
In the words of Erika Hall, Design Strategist and Co-Founder of Mule Design,
“If the most interesting thing about an organization is its private market valuation, that's not an organization working on anything interesting.”
What makes an organization, their products, and their brand “interesting” is how they make their customers feel.
Here are the differences between these GTM strategy examples:
Sales-led growth (SLG) focuses on sales-driven interactions and engagements.
Product-led growth (PLG) focuses on the product itself as the main growth driver.
Scaled CX, on the other hand, focuses on educating and empowering users to simply do their jobs and achieve their business goals.
You can follow Miro’s example of doing scaled CX as their go-to-market strategy through:
- Scaling customer education: Build a team that’s dedicated to educating customers on everything about your new product.
- Scaled content production: Empower users with various types of educational content, like help articles, in-app learning centers, brand-owned courses, etc.
- Scaled customer success: Have a team dedicated to automating success milestones for customers at every step of their journey with your product.
How to build a go-to-market strategy, step-by-step
1. ALWAYS start with your ICP.
Every great sales, marketing, or overall go-to-market strategy starts with your ICP and market segmentation.
“Yes, even at a $450 million ARR company, you do an ICP exercise.”
We’re talking about Marketo.
This marketing automation software is a great example of upleveling their GTM strategy by doing their research on their ICP despite how big they are.
No matter how big or small your company is, identifying your dream customers will help you identify your current standing in the market–plus the steps you need to take to upgrade your offerings.
Everyone thinks they already have their ICP.
Think again. Your target audience isn’t a group of customers that is set in stone.
Customers change, and your GTM strategy should continue to evolve accordingly to your growing ICP over time.
Related: How to Track Job Changes
Let’s say you’re a mid-sized company in the project management software industry.
Your current main customer base is largely SMBs and mid-sized businesses, meaning your current products or offerings are at a certain price point to cater to those customers.
If your go-to-market goal is to start hitting higher ARR or MRR numbers, you want to start tapping into enterprise-grade customers.
That means upleveling your product and offerings to reel in more enterprise customers, growing your business revenue, and moving up and to the right in the project management industry.
Even in a crowded industry, the more you customize your offerings and continue defining your ICP, the bigger the market space gets.
Every company’s go-to-market strategy should help them play into their strengths. This will help grow the market space over time.
2. Innovate or recreate.
So you know where your current standing in the market is relative to your competitors.
Now, it’s time to identify gaps or opportunities in your industry that aren’t being addressed.
This means you can either “innovate or recreate.”
To innovate, you might strive to introduce something entirely new to the industry. Maybe it’s a new AI tool for your industry, or maybe it’s creating something totally new.
The good news is, you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel.
You can also recreate offerings or products that already exist in your market–as long as there’s a need and low competition for it.
This all depends on what your product does, what problem you’re looking to solve, and what the competitive dynamics are for that area in the market.
Our suggestion? Make sure you do your research on your ICP, your competitors, the current market, and your current offerings.
3. Get your messaging right.
Your amazing new idea or product isn't for everyone, and that’s okay.
Start being more strategic about your messaging. In practice, this means to craft a narrative and messaging that resonates specifically with your ICP.
Don’t try to appeal to everyone with stuffy and boring “PR-like” messaging. That won’t help you stand out from the crowd.
What is the most important value you're delivering with this new product or service? Figure out your value proposition.
4. Build your GTM strategy on data, not guesswork.
This one’s a no-brainer. The higher stakes that are involved, the more important it is to have data to back up your go-to-market strategy.
Always strive to make data-backed decisions, which should be a mix of both qualitative and quantitative research, but don’t bite more than you can chew.
If you don’t have a good system in place to organize or communicate your data, you might find yourself stuck with a huge archive of data points that doesn’t make any sense.
Don’t do useless work.
Make your data meaningful by having a structure in place to organize, find, and pull insights as needed from your data repository, whether that’s your CRM, your B2B contact database, or even your scrappy Google spreadsheets.
Another tip (mostly for your GTM sales team) is to turn your qualitative observations into qualitative data.
Keep track of all your observations, trends, and customer feedback in your sales CRM in the most objective way possible.
Qualitative insights can be turned into quantitative data i.e. quantifying several customer complaints about a specific feature into a metric that indicates what your product teams need to pivot their focus to.
5. Get everyone on the same page for the GTM strategy.
Avoid siloes like the plague.
You’re bound to have multiple teams or people working in different departments to help make the go-to-market dream come true.
It’s easy to get lost and sidetracked when you’re all working on different things. The key is to keep your GTM teams aligned through constant, open lines of communications.
Maintaining alignment between different teams doesn’t mean slapping together a few slides about what each team is working on.
It’s about having a great leadership team who knows how to direct and delegate priorities to each team or team member, while keeping every team on track with a singular, shared vision.
Work towards the same goals, not against each other.
6. Democratize your teams.
On the topic of miserable and annoying silos, decentralization is key to keeping everyone on the same page for your go-to-market strategy.
You want to avoid teams having different processes and methods of doing things; this just creates more work and unnecessary strain between teams.
The best way to keep your GTM teams in alignment is through enablement and playbooks.
Do you have systems in place to guide your cross-functional teams? Do you have these systems documented somewhere for your team members to plug ‘n play as needed?
That’s where enablement and playbooks come in handy.
Where do you start?
Start by creating structure where there is confusion.
Create playbooks, instructions, master documents, whatever you need, to set up your teams for success.
Here are a few examples of democratizing and enabling different GTM teams:
- Creating master messaging documents for the content marketing team
- Developing research plan templates or scripts for the product research team
- Building an organized data insights repository for all teams to access and use
The point is to set up structure in the form of ready-to-use templates or plans that cross-functional teams can all use.
If you’re building a GTM strategy for an SMB, you probably don’t have a proper UX research team, or a huge content marketing team.
In that case, having a master messaging guide, UX research templates, and even a data insights repository is super helpful to allow other cross-functional teams to do things from scratch.
💡 Democratizing resources and functionality across the organization might be scrappy work, but never crappy.
7. Create a flexible strategy.
We all know that things don’t always go according to plan.
Let’s be real, these fancy strategies and plans all start in the same place: Google Docs.
The beauty of GTM strategies is that they can continuously evolve over time–nothing is set in stone.
Even if you’re a huge enterprise company, there’s always room to uplevel and scale your GTM strategy as your TAM, customer base, ARR, etc. grows.
There’s no such thing as a foolproof, 100% guaranteed successful go-to-market strategy. There will always be challenges, or what we like to call “resistance” in your GTM plan.
There are two types of resistance you might encounter: good resistance and tough resistance.
💡 Good resistance in your go-to-market strategy feels challenging but it’s fun to solve problems. Tough resistance, or bad resistance, is when life just feels so much more difficult than it should.
You want to experience good resistance in your GTM strategy, and being flexible plays a huge part in facilitating good resistance over the bad kind.
If you’re in a spot where you’re feeling bad resistance, take a step back out of the weeds.
What are the things that are currently blocking your go-to-market success, and what can you realistically do to change that?
Be flexible enough to expect change and challenges, but don’t let those challenges derail your entire go-to-market plan. Instead, plan to make room for a change of direction as a guardrail.
Free Go-To-Market Plan Templates
Need a little help setting up your master plan for a successful product launch?
Here are a few go-to-market strategy templates to help you get started.
1. Go-to-market strategy template by Miro
This GTM strategy template by Miro is helpful because you can start your planning process here.
The beauty of using Miro for product launches is that you can collaborate with other team members in this collaborative online whiteboard asynchronously. Plus, it’s free to make a Miro account.
🔗 Get this GTM template here.
2. Complete go-to-market strategy canvas in Figjam
Working out of multiple spreadsheets is tedious and boring to be frank.
This Figjam canvas by a Figma creator named Turtle is great because it includes sections for:
- Product value proposition
- Product launch goals
- Product positioning
- Launch and post-launch plans
You can adapt this template for various scenarios, like launching and MVP or a first release of a product.
The Figjam canvas also includes an example of a completed GTM strategy for your reference if you need some inspiration.
🔗 Get the GTM template here.
3. Product roadmap template for GTM planning by Monday.com
If you’re a PLG organization, staying organized with your product roadmap is crucial.
This product roadmap template by Monday.com is a great way to simplify and organize your product roadmap planning process from Q1-Q4.
🔗Get the GTM template here.
Go-to-market strategy FAQs
Who owns a go-to-market strategy?
So who is the mastermind behind the GTM plan?
There’s no single person solely responsible for the go-to-market plan.
GTM strategies are usually created by a pool of senior leaders from cross-functional teams like sales, marketing, and product.
But whether you’re an SDR, a technical product manager, a marketing brand designer, or even a customer success manager, your work contributes to the same GTM strategy.
A great GTM plan is like a symphony orchestra that defines which instruments to play when.
Every team has their own forte, and the GTM plan helps orchestrate when and how each team plays into those strengths toward a unified goal.
What is pricing strategy in GTM?
There are many different types of pricing strategies in GTM, such as PLG, SLG, and more recently- Scaled CX.
SaaS customers care more about flexibility with pricing. They want fair price tags, transparent costs, with high-quality products or perceived value.
Read more in this article about Scaled CX by Growth Unhinged.
How to communicate your go-to-market strategy?
Set up regular meetings with the right stakeholders involved with the GTM plan. We recommend sharing insights and ideas in "snackable" bits of information to avoid overwhelming others with too much data.
Focus on the "why" behind all of the plan tactics and strategies to quickly communicate the value that each strategy will deliver.
Don't forget to include metrics and data. It's always a plus to back up your decisions with quantifiable goals.
What is a channel strategy in GTM?
A GTM channel strategy is choosing which channels you will use to distribute your new product to the market.
It's about how your target audience will know or learn about your product. A few common channel strategies include content marketing, account-based marketing, direct sales, referrals and partnerships, and more.
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