By Lauren Dichter, Sr. Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing
A solid go-to-market strategy breaks big ideas into bite-sized, actionable steps so team members can more easily achieve a common goal. When drafting a go-to-market strategy, it’s helpful to start with guiding questions, like:
- What does an effective go-to-market strategy look like for our company?
- What are the key foundational elements that need to be established for our go-to-market strategy to be successful?
- How are we going to deliver our unique value proposition to our target market?
Share these questions with your peers in marketing, and even sales leaders! Ask them to jot down their answers and send them back over; it’s a great way to gather the team’s thoughts around demand generation, messaging, lead follow-up, and more. Then, you can distill the answers down to a few guiding principles, and everyone feels like they’ve had their say in the upcoming go-to-market strategy.
Sales and Marketing Alignment as a GTM Superpower
Collaboration between sales and marketing—which an effective go-to-market strategy requires—contributes to better lead follow-up. For go-to-market success, sales and marketing teams need to have the same data and insights at their disposal. That way:
- Everyone is on the same page about which accounts and contacts are most valuable, why they are so valuable, and how/when they’ve engaged with the brand.
- Everyone has a shared interest in achieving pre-set metrics. Common goals, transparency, and quality data are key elements of a high-functioning relationship between sales and marketing.
Moreover, buying journeys are more complex now than ever before because more buyers are involved in the purchase. Therefore, the time it takes to make a buying decision is extended. This modern buying journey requires seamless alignment between sales and marketing teams, where every action is coordinated around prospect and customer engagement goals that both teams agreed to.
Challenges and Barriers to an Effective GTM Strategy
While it’s crucial to plan what you are going to do with your go-to-market strategy, it’s equally crucial to prepare for bumps and barriers along the way. The challenges to developing and executing an effective go-to-market strategy include, but are not limited to:
- Getting everyone on the same page, or “goal alignment”
- Gaining a clear understanding of and agreement on who makes up the target audience, which accounts to pursue, and how to pursue them
- Resource prioritization
- Ensuring time, money, and talent is spent in the most beneficial way for maximum GTM success
- Poor quality data
- Data that can’t be trusted
- Inability to support the hypothesis—or achieve sales-marketing alignment—around a campaign’s target account criteria, resource allocation, and more
- A disconnect in the go-to-market campaign’s lead follow-up strategy
If you are aware of these hiccups that professionals with failed GTM strategies and campaigns have reported experiencing, you can avoid them altogether. Pre-emptively solve these problems before they appear so you can focus on the task at hand—overseeing a go-to-market strategy that makes a splash.
Please comment below or reach out to us with GTM success and failure stories. Is there a barrier that’s been hard to get around? We’re eager to listen, learn, and provide advice on how to overcome any obstacles you face when developing and launching go-to-market campaigns!
