A Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is your product sales, marketing, and revenue roadmap. It's your action plan detailing how your company will launch a product to market, drive customer awareness, and ultimately generate sales. Although it seems simple, creating an effective GTM strategy is one of the most challenging tasks a company will face.
Committing to a path for your product(s) and sticking with it is not easy in the best of economies. Coming out of 2020/2021 and the coronavirus pandemic, 2022 represents an even more challenging time for CEOs and revenue leaders to implement a sales and marketing success plan. They must ensure seamless execution across multiple departments and stay aligned on the vision while navigating unprecedented economic circumstances in this new normal.
It's more critical than ever to ensure your GTM strategy is built on a solid foundation with a clear vision to ensure you target the right channels, market to the right customers, and emphasize holistic revenue generation.
Why Is A GTM Strategy Critical In Today's Economy?
Without a solid GTM strategy, you risk focusing on the wrong channels, targeting the wrong audience or customer, or, even worse, not creating a defined value proposition for your products while trying to penetrate a saturated or overly competitive market.
Getting to market isn't simply selling your product — it is ensuring seamless integration and collaboration between sales, marketing, and all other revenue-centric departments of your business. No matter how solid your product or plan may be, you face diminishing returns, overspending on marketing, or missed revenue opportunities without this departmental alignment.
Here Are The 3 Components of A Successful GTM Strategy
Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Persona
Understanding your target market is the most critical component of your GTM strategy. Buyer personas are fictional profiles of people representing your ideal customers and to who your sales and marketing strategies should solely focus. Buyer personas are used during your prospecting and lead-generation stages and facilitate sales and marketing efficiency by ensuring you are getting your message in front of prospective customers at the exact right time.
Choose Your Channel Strategy
Not every retailer is a fit for your product. It may seem that the more retail shelves your product is on the better, but that is not always the case.
Defining what channels are a good fit for your product will save countless hours in sales meetings, minimize frustrated sales reps not closing deals, and, ultimately, save you substantial costs by pursuing channels that were never the right fit in the first place.
Using your ICPs and buyer personas are the perfect way to identify which channels resonate with your customer and where they predominantly shop. This not only creates a clear path for sales and revenue generation but also allows your marketing team to create channel-specific (and retail-specific) activations that are curated for that ICP and buyer persona—ultimately proving to be highly effective in terms of ROAs and winning deals.
Align Your Sales & Marketing Plans
Creating a cohesive sales and marketing plan may seem obvious, but it is extremely common for a company's sales and marketing teams to operate in silos. You can have a very comprehensive and defined sales plan. But, if your marketing team targets a different audience or tells a contradicting message to the marketplace, you risk catastrophic consequences.
Marketing and sales must collaborate throughout the entire GTM process, ensuring messaging, channel strategy, timing, and correct targeting are in line at all times. It's not out of the ordinary to have daily sales and marketing meetings. This time will provide an opportunity to bring together departments in a collaborative planning session to ensure marketing knows what avenues sales are pursuing and sales understands what support tools they have in their arsenal from their marketing department.
Develop your GTM strategy with sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps at the forefront. This will ensure complete departmental alignment from the start and pave the most straightforward path to revenue scale.
Optimizing Your GTM Strategy in 2022
2020 reshaped the retail landscape, and all companies must revisit their GTM strategy if they haven't already. With many in-person retail meetings still done over Zoom, channel strategy focusing on e-commerce sales plans, and in-store marketing budgets traded for digital budgets, there are dozens of factors to consider in refreshing your GTM. What the next 12, 24, and 36 months look like for your sales and marketing teams depend on your GTM strategy.
House of Revenue's teams are at the forefront of this change, using technology, automation, and cutting-edge sales training and methodologies to quickly pivot existing GTM strategies into ones poised for what the new retail landscape requires.
Revisiting and refreshing your GTM strategy does not have to be a daunting or scary task. By engaging user-friendly technologies, expert CPG consulting, and fractional leadership to help guide your teams, this can be done in parallel with your current sales and marketing plans to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the retail landscape is changing rapidly. Companies must continue focusing on sales now more than ever, and it is challenging to imagine a complete strategy refresh in these times of uncertainty. But this challenge does not have to be conquered alone.
Our team at House of Revenue® is ready to get into the weeds to help you redefine what sales and marketing success looks like for your company. We will audit your current GTM, tech stack, and resources to create a comprehensive roadmap to revamp your revenue engine holistically.
With the infrastructure in place, we work alongside you and execute this plan with your team, ensuring we achieve the desired outcome at every step. Contact us to discuss how we can help you recharge your revenue engine.
