Checklist Available: Understanding Go-To-Market Strategy

What Is a GTM (Go-To-Market) Strategy?

A GTM strategy is a systematic framework of steps and best practices required to ensure your services are accepted by the market. By formulating this strategy, companies can identify their ideal customer profile and determine the most effective approach for reaching them.

Whether your service is new or established, it should provide benefits to customers, such as operational efficiency or cost reduction. However, is this value easily understood by others? Simply preparing promotional materials that highlight your service's features and benefits will not necessarily heighten a customer's awareness of their own challenges.

By formulating a GTM strategy, companies can ensure that all departments—including sales, marketing, and development—can introduce the service with a shared understanding. By consolidating information such as where the customer's problems lie, what their pain points are, how the service solves them, and what the ideal operational method is, you can standardize the messaging your company communicates.

Furthermore, by executing a GTM strategy, it becomes easier to filter constructive customer feedback and further improve service quality. This allows for additional investment focused on the points highly valued by many customers and areas where you hold a competitive advantage, ultimately bringing continuous profitability to the company and increasing customer LTV.

Composition of a GTM Strategy

A GTM strategy for B2B companies enables the setting and measurement of success metrics for services introduced to the market. It is generally considered to consist of the following components:

Summary of Segmentation

• Specific behavioral trends of customers with high purchasing intent
• Characteristics of customers who have a positive impression of your company
• Comprehensive data regarding contact points
• Priority and affinity scores for target companies

Clear Service Features

• Value provided to the market and challenges solved
• Differences from competitors and existing third-party services
• Representative features
• Ideal usage scenarios

Implementation Plan

• Conditions for providing the service to customers
• Methods for providing the service to customers
• Technical specifications and considerations

KPIs

• Evaluation metrics for sales
• Evaluation metrics for marketing
• Division of responsibilities between sales and marketing
• Areas of collaboration between sales and marketing (future development potential)

Steps to Create a GTM Strategy

A GTM strategy is formulated by identifying potential customers and concretizing their needs.

Specifically, the following steps are taken to clarify demand and pain points, and to visualize the context in which your service can enter the market.

1. List Characteristics of Purchasing Companies

Group companies that may need your service based on "numerical data," "characteristics," and "scale."
This can be done more easily by using CRM tools and corporate databases.
This grouping leads to the formulation of targeting and approach methods in subsequent steps.

2. Define the Ideal Customer Profile

Extract which companies have the highest probability of purchasing in greater detail.
Establish criteria for company characteristics and quantitatively map how well they align with these criteria.
Since the previous step alone cannot strictly measure the purchasing intent for your service, it may include companies unsuitable for purchase. By taking this step, you can "sift" through companies to identify the targets that require your focus.

3. Determine Roles for Sales and Marketing

Generally, because sales teams are in direct contact with customers, they capture the characteristics of current customers more precisely. In contrast, marketing tends to capture a broader customer profile by attacking the market as a whole. By collaborating, sales and marketing organizations can enable sales representatives to devise ways to introduce the company's services as part of an approach strategy for the companies they are currently engaging with.

4. Create Sales and Marketing Scenarios Simultaneously

A "scenario" is essentially a script. To approach potential customers and increase their purchasing intent, it is important to organize the story. By preparing a set of effective timing and messaging within the journey map of how customers interact with your company, you can promote your services more efficiently.

After deciding how the sales and marketing organizations will collaborate in the previous steps, proceed with the following initiatives:

Lead Management

Reach a consensus on the following:

• Definition of lead generation
• Definition of conversion
• Definition of qualified leads (MQL, SAL, SQL)
• Content of lead nurturing
• Strategies for closing

Additionally, establish agreements regarding the tools and workflows to support the execution of the above.

Building a Sales Funnel

Formulate a diagram that includes the following items:

• Definition of lead-specific approach steps and customer status (stages)
• Budget execution timing and approach timing
• Fit and gap analysis with your service
• Stage management from lead generation to closing

This serves as a means to understand the customer situation and deepen relationships using appropriate approaches to increase the probability of closing.

Definition of SLA

Reach a consensus on the following:

• The "acceptable range" of how far support can be provided
• "Roles at each timing" regarding who does what and when
• Definition of "desired results" according to the lead stage

This makes the KPIs to be shared between the sales and marketing organizations more concrete.

5. Management of Lead Sources and Channels

To generate leads, you must first obtain information on company groups.

While measures vary depending on whether you are approaching customers with whom you have already had contact or acquiring entirely new company groups from external sources, what they have in common is clarifying where leads come from and determining the appropriate approach channels for those leads, both online and offline.

I have converted the above content into specific items and created a GTM strategy formulation checklist.
You can download it for free from the link below, so please feel free to download it if you are interested.

Key Takeaways: The Necessity of a GTM Strategy

As mentioned above, a GTM strategy serves many roles regardless of company size, as outlined below.

Application for New Services

Define the presentation strategy for offering new value or expanded feature sets to existing targets, and estimate the potential budget increase within known purchasing departments.

Application for New Markets

Consolidate the process of experimental entry into untapped markets and the improvement loop based on customer feedback, and identify untapped purchasing departments.

Application for Existing Services (Upselling and Cross-selling)

Quantify the continuity, revenue, and resources allocated to existing customers to visualize and re-evaluate their contribution through data.

Application for Existing Markets

Evaluate which features will lead to greater success for your services and which are unnecessary, thereby equipping your services with the ability to adapt to an evolving market.

By utilizing a GTM strategy, companies can efficiently manage limited resources and maximize the return on investment for time and capital.

A GTM strategy allows a company to clarify the direction of its services to all stakeholders, both internal and external.

By clearly understanding the points where customer needs align with your services, you can not only identify the factors driving revenue growth but also highlight unresolved customer pain points and discover new revenue structures to introduce to the market.
Internally, it enables the alignment of seemingly disparate ideas under a unified vision, creates a clear context for setting KBOs and KPIs, and ensures smooth corporate management. Furthermore, failures and disconnected ideas can serve as hints for creating new solutions.

While a GTM strategy is created for a single service, it also offers the benefit of creating a cycle where the seeds for new GTM strategies can be generated and formulated based on the original.