What’s a go-to-market strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a comprehensive plan for taking your product or service to the market. It covers the details of how you intend to attract, engage, and ultimately sell to the target audience.

Creating a killer go-to-market strategy is critical to the success of established SaaS companies as it is for new brands, and everything rises and falls on how robust your GTM team is.

Who is part of the GTM team?

For most companies, the go-to-market team includes the GTM Manager and product, marketing, and sales folks.

Below are the main positions and how they contribute to building a solid GTM strategy.

Go-to-market manager

A go-to-market manager exists to lead the process and make important decisions. This role requires a combination of strategic thinking, marketing expertise, and project management skills.

Responsibilities of a GTM manager:

• Oversee the entire GTM process.
• Strategy development with cross-functional teams across sales, product, marketing, etc.
• Customer research and generating useful information for creating a competitive advantage.
• Project planning and execution.
• Identify risks/problems and collaborate with teams to provide proactive solutions.
• Work with finance and leadership to manage the budget allocated for GTM activities and ensure cost-effectiveness.

Product marketer

A product marketer specializes in understanding and driving demand for products and services. Their primary role revolves around creating and executing strategies to effectively bring products to market and drive their adoption.

Product marketers are involved throughout the product lifecycle, but here are their responsibilities when as part of the GTM team:

• Plan a successful product launch.
• Market research and refining buyer personas and the buyer’s journey.
• Craft compelling messages across marketing channels (landing pages, ad campaigns, etc.).
• Ensure all marketing content is consistent with the product’s positioning and brand voice.

Product manager

Product managers are fondly called the CEO of the product. They’re in charge of driving the product’s vision, roadmap, and execution.

If you’re wondering, product managers focus on the “what” and “why” of the product, while product marketers focus on the “how” and “who” of taking the product to market.

The product manager’s responsibilities in the GTM process:

• Conduct market and user research.
• Create product vision and strategy.
• Make data-driven decisions for product/feature ideas based on customer needs and market requirements.
• Develop a product roadmap.

Marketing team

Led by a marketing manager, the marketing team comprises specialists in demand gen, copywriting, SEO, paid ads, and various other roles depending on company size.

The marketing team’s primary GTM responsibilities include:

• Producing strategic content.
• Running marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
• Generating leads for sales.
• Sales enablement—providing sales teams with the necessary tools, materials, and training to effectively position and sell the product.

Sales manager

A sales manager’s main focus is to lead and mentor the sales reps to meet sales targets while ensuring alignment with the company’s overall sales and business objectives.

They develop sales strategies and analyze data to make informed decisions.

The sales manager’s responsibilities on the go-to-market team include:

• Building and leading a team of salespeople to help drive revenue.
• Motivating their teams to generate leads, build client relationships, and set targets to hit or exceed revenue forecasts.
• Collaborating with other members of the GTM team to align the sales strategy with the overall GTM plan.
• Analyzing sales performance and KPIs to provide insights to the GTM team and company leadership.

How to build a go-to-market team to implement your GTM strategy

Now that you’ve seen the key roles and their functions, it’s time to start building. Follow these steps:

Set clear milestones for your team

Setting clear milestones gives the go-to-market team a sense of direction and purpose. It ensures everyone understands the specific objectives they need to achieve, fostering a more collaborative and efficient work environment.

Begin by deciding on your priorities, the stages from ideation to product launch, and the expected results for each stage. This makes the go-to-market process less daunting and helps you track success.

Use the SMART goal-setting framework:

Align your teams with clear communication channels

Communication is key when people are working together. It’s hard to keep up with project timelines if your team doesn’t have an efficient system for passing information. And you don’t need different random channels, or some people will miss vital details.

Slack is a good option to consider. Not only is it a central communication tool, the platform allows you to create different channels and chats for different teams.

As an added advantage, Slack integrates with many social media and project management tools that can be useful in your GTM process.

Create processes and train the team to follow them

Processes ensure the team works efficiently and everyone is aligned. Department heads should collaborate and create process docs covering everything from pre-sales to the buying process to customer onboarding and everything in between.

But, of course, don’t just have processes; ensure every member of your go-to-market team learns and follows them. Keep the documents/videos where people can access them as needed—if you use Slack, creating a channel for that sounds like a good idea.

Define and monitor key performance indicators

Metrics you should track for GTM teams:

• Customer Acquisition Cost: The average cost to get a new user aboard.
• Customer Lifetime Value: The estimated income you expect to generate from customers throughout their use of your product.
• Monthly Recurring Revenue: Predictable and regular revenue you generate from customers on a monthly basis.
• Retention rate: Percentage of customers that stick with you over a specific period.
• Organic search traffic: The number of visitors to your website without directly paying to appear on those search results.
• Return on Ad Spend: Revenue generated for every penny spent on advertising.

Create a productive environment with a project management tool

Your team will likely work remotely or implement a hybrid approach, so a reliable project management tool is non-negotiable.

If you do a Google search right now, you’ll find tens of tools, but the most popular ones GTM teams use include Trello, Jira, Asana, and ProductPlan.

Conclusion

Go-to-market strategies ensure you don’t launch products your audience doesn’t need, and a key step in making that happen is assembling the right team.

Have clear targets and deadlines from the onset so the project doesn’t consume more time and resources than necessary. It’s also important that your team has an efficient communication channel because a lot of collaboration and iterations are involved in the process.

As your user base grows, Userpilot can help with your GTM strategies. Book a demo now to learn more about how your go-to-market team can thrive better with our platform.