What is the Go-to-Market Strategy for AI Products? by Maja Voje

How do you ensure your AI product not only survives but thrives in this competitive market? A well-crafted go-to-market strategy could be your secret weapon.

Best-selling author and go-to-market advisor Maja Voje has helped hundreds of companies, including Google and Rocket Internet, build and grow successful products.

In an upcoming talk, she’ll take a deep dive into the specifics of launching AI-first products.

Key highlights include:

Selecting the ideal customer profile (ICP).
Defining the value proposition.
Deciding on pricing and positioning.
Choosing the right GTM motion.

In this article, we’ll take a quick look at Maja’s journey and discuss the steps to build a GTM strategy.

TL;DR

Maja Voje is a best-selling author and go-to-market practitioner who has mentored numerous Fortune 500 companies.
In an upcoming talk, Maja Voje will share insights into the go-to-market strategy for AI-first products.
A go-to-market strategy is a comprehensive plan for bringing a new product to the market. It outlines the target audience, competition, value proposition, messaging, pricing, and marketing and sales channels.
A GTM strategy offers several benefits, including clear positioning, targeted marketing, and efficient resource allocation.
Building a go-to-market plan involves several steps, such as conducting market research, defining the unique value proposition and messaging, and selecting a pricing strategy and marketing and sales channels.
Collecting user feedback and measuring the effectiveness of your GTM strategy helps you understand its impact. A product adoption platform like Userpilot can help you collect feedback through in-app surveys and track metrics like conversion rates and NPS.

Who is Maja Voje?

Maja Voje is a globally recognized growth and go-to-market advisor. She is the founder of Growth Lab and author of the best-selling book Go-to-Market Strategist.

In a career spanning more than a decade, Maja Voje has worked with several high-profile tech companies, including Google and Rocket Internet. A graduate of Said Business School, Oxford University, she has mentored over 400 Fortune 500 and Inc. companies.

Through her guidance, Maja has helped several companies scale their yearly revenues from $20 million to $60-100 million.

Go-to-market strategy for AI products

Incorporating AI capabilities into new and existing products can be an excellent way to offer more value to users and stand out in a competitive market.

But adding and promoting AI features isn’t enough. You must ensure that they address user needs and pain points. In her upcoming talk on October 8th, Maja Voje will present a case study and talk about the nuances of launching AI-first products.

Whether you’re launching a new AI product or scaling an existing product with AI features, Maja Voje’s insights will come in handy. But first, let’s go over the basics of a GTM strategy.

What is a go-to-market strategy?

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is an extensive plan businesses use to launch new products in the market. It typically outlines business objectives, buyer personas, competitors, a unique value proposition (UVP), pricing, a marketing strategy, and sales and distribution channels.

Go-to-market strategies: Benefits

Designing a go-to-market strategy takes your product one step closer to a successful product launch. It offers these benefits:

Clear market positioning – Sales and marketing teams gain a clear idea of where your product stands in the market. It helps them tailor their messaging and communicate the UVP effectively.
Targeted marketing efforts – A GTM strategy provides marketing teams with a thorough understanding of target users. With it, they can create highly personalized campaigns for different customer segments and improve the cost-effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Competitive advantage – Through a GTM strategy, you’ll know exactly what sets your product apart from its competitors.
Efficient resource allocation – It helps you identify and double down on the most effective marketing and sales channels. The result? Reduced risk of wasting your budget and time on tasks that don’t align with your goals.
Aligned marketing and sales team – A GTM strategy ensures that cross-functional teams work toward a common goal and deliver a consistent message to target users.

How to create a go-to-market strategy for AI products

If you’re looking to build a go-to-market strategy to launch an AI product, here are the steps you should follow. You can also consider these GTM examples for inspiration when you develop your strategy.

Perform market research and define your target audience

From adding the right product features to tailoring your marketing and sales messaging, knowing your target audience helps you remain relevant to them at each step of their journey.

To do this, conduct market research. You can use focus groups, user interviews, and in-app surveys to dig deeper into user needs and expectations.

Use the information collected through these methods to segment your target customers based on shared characteristics or preferences. Next, create detailed user personas for each group, outlining their needs and wants, pain points, etc.

Craft your value proposition and messaging

You need a UVP to communicate your product’s value or how your product’s features will help your users. It helps your audience understand why they should choose your product over similar options available in the market.

If you’re looking to craft your product’s UVP, start by identifying your target audience’s key pain point. Also, analyze your competitors’ products to understand where they fall short. Next, list the benefits of your product, identify what differentiates it from the competition, and explain how it’s helpful to users.

Once you’ve zeroed in on the UVP, the next step is to ensure that your marketing and sales messaging aligns with it. A tool like Wynter can help you test different messages and understand what resonates with your target users.

Wynter-message-test — Wynter message test.

You can also use A/B testing software like Userpilot to check which in-app messaging yields better results.

Develop a pricing strategy

If your product isn’t competitively priced, it’ll struggle to find its footing, even with the best AI features. Here are the most common pricing strategies Wes Bush talks about in his book Product-Led Growth:

Best-judgment pricing – It involves relying on your team’s collective experience and calculated guesses. For instance, you offer a discount when sales dry up and crank up prices when you have more new customers than your team can handle.
Cost-plus pricing – You calculate the cost of selling and delivering the product and add a profit margin to arrive at the final price.
Competitor-based pricing – It involves using your competitor’s pricing data as a benchmark. The challenge with this method is that you’re assuming your competitor has done adequate research, which may not always be true.
Value-based pricing – With this value-based growth strategy, you price your product depending on the value it delivers to users. You can create tailored packages that cater to user segments with different needs and budgets.

Most common pricing strategies by Wes Bush.

Wes Bush says value-based pricing is the only viable option for SaaS businesses and advises caution with one of the common pricing mistakes—usage-based pricing.

Select your sales channels

The next step is to identify the right sales channels to acquire customers. Depending on your product offering, target market, sales process stage, and pricing, you can choose one or more of the following sales techniques:

Direct sales – You have a dedicated sales team that identifies and reaches out to potential customers and attempts to build long-term relationships with them.
Product-led sales – You opt for self-serve motions to acquire and engage prospective customers and then drive conversions through a sales-assisted approach.
Referrals and affiliates – Referrals involve incentivizing customers to recommend your product, whereas affiliates include having an agreement with individuals or businesses to promote your product in exchange for a commission.
Marketplaces – Online platforms like AWS Marketplace and Salesforce AppExchange let you list your product and attract new users by giving you access to a wider audience base.
Partnerships – You can collaborate with other organizations through tech integrations or joint ventures to benefit from each other’s existing customers.

Choose your go-to-market motions

The next step is to select the right GTM motions, i.e., the techniques you’ll use to take your product to target users. In her book, Maja Voje highlights the following GTM motions:

Inbound – This approach relies on creating value-driven content to attract prospects and generate leads.
Outbound – This involves reaching out to prospects via cold calls, email campaigns, direct messages on social media, etc.
Paid digital – You use targeted ads on search engines, social media, and other platforms to reach target users.
Community – It involves engaging your existing community of users through exclusive content and other perks.
Partners – You collaborate with businesses that target similar market segments to gain mutual marketing and sales benefits.
Account-based marketing – You identify high-value accounts and engage them with hyper-personalized marketing campaigns. This is primarily an enterprise marketing strategy as it involves communicating with multiple stakeholders from a single organization.
Product-led growth – A PLG strategy involves using your product as the primary driver of customer acquisition, activation, and retention. The idea is to use the value your product provides to generate sales.

Create a customer experience funnel

A seamless customer experience throughout the user journey across multiple channels helps you win over your customers. In other words, you must outline a lead nurturing strategy that covers the following stages:

Awareness – Use various channels, including emails and social media, to reach prospects.
Consideration – Use personalized emails, retargeting ads, and educational content to help leads understand how your product stands out.
Decision – Offer a free trial or discount to nudge leads to sign up.
Onboarding – Walk new users through your platform with personalized in-app flows and checklists to drive product adoption.
Retention – Implement secondary onboarding flows, provide seamless support, and collect feedback through customer experience software to retain new users.
Advocacy – Offer referral codes and other freebies to encourage existing users to recommend your product.

Implement your GTM strategy and gather feedback

So, you’ve started rolling out your GTM strategy and launched your product. You even have a handful of users.

Next, create customer feedback systems to collect feedback from these users to assess the effectiveness of your GTM strategy.

For instance, you can create in-app surveys asking new users how they discovered your product. You can also inquire about their overall experience of using your product and things that could be improved.

Measure the effectiveness of your GTM strategy

The final step is to track relevant customer and product KPIs to determine whether your GTM strategy is delivering the desired results and identify areas of improvement.

Depending on your goals and target audience, you can choose to track one or more of the following GTM metrics:

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) – The amount you spend to acquire a new customer, including marketing and sales expenses.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) – The total revenue you expect to generate from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your product.
Conversion rate – The percentage of new leads who take a desired action, such as booking a free demo or signing up for a paid plan. You can then implement conversion rate optimization techniques to drive this rate up.
Time to convert – The time it takes a user to purchase a paid plan after the first interaction with your business.
Monthly or annual recurring revenue – The revenue you expect to earn from your existing customers every month or year. You can track the ARR or MRR growth.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) – A measure of how likely a user is to recommend your product to others.

Want to learn more about the go-to-market strategy for AI products?

Whether you’re building a brand-new AI product or adding those features to an existing SaaS application, you need a winning go-to-market strategy. And Maja Voje, a best-selling author and GTM veteran, is here to present the specifics of marketing AI-first products. So, tune in as she spills all the beans on October 8th, 2024.