AMA: Amplitude Director of Product Marketing, Hien Phan on Go-To-Market Strategy

This question is a great one. First, you don't build the GTM strategy in a vacuum. It's not an exercise of a product marketer where she goes into a dark room for ten days and comes out with a brilliant strategy. You must co-build this with your stakeholders—marketing, and sales. Otherwise, you will have a more challenging time convincing people. In the past, I've set up checkpoints and collaboration time with key contributors and stakeholders. This approach allowed me to evolve and build my strategy with them, and when the so-called final product is done, most stakeholders are on board. However, if you have already built it, then position your strategy as the solution each marketing department or the team would care about. For example, if the brand team has an initiative they care about, how can your strategy help them, or how does their initiative support your strategy? It's about understanding their goals and strategy and scaffold and aligning over. 

(1) It's a strategy, not a goal. You're diagnosing the problem and focused on how you should go to market. (2) There is an operationalization aspect for your marketing team. Marketers need the audience, message, and channels/communities these people live in. (3) There is an operationalization aspect for your field teams. (4) Stakeholder alignment, buy-ins, and they have a role to play. 

Tbh—this is very hard since most of us sit in North America, and we think the world ends in North America. The key here is to listen to their priorities. They are on the ground and might have different needs. Start with your internal customers before you push for a global GTM strategy. Make sure the diagnosis of the problem in your strategy includes their issues. If their issues are addressed, the rest is more about alignment and ensuring they have a stake in the game, meaning they have to do something to make this strategy come to life. 

ICP is a funny topic. First, it's not about persona. I think there is confusion around ICP and persona. ICP is about the propensity to buy, which involves firmographic (what kind of company are they from), technographic (what kind of tech stack is favorable for you and your team), compelling event (usually people buy your product because of some pain or unmet needs), persona (title, background, etc..), and last the channels and community that they live in. Usually, you will need both qualitative and quantitative research, so a combination of interviewing current and prospective customers. You will need rev ops, or you can do it yourself, and analyze last year's wins and losses to get a sense of the common patterns. Once you established all the above, it's about alignment first, make sure GTM and product leadership agree and align with your findings. I would advise a regular check-in where you deliver updates on your efforts, so it's not a total surprise for everyone. Plus you will need their buy-in to operationalize your efforts. The operationalization of your findings will require cross-functional work. Marketing has to see how they can use your research for targeting, your sales can see if they can leverage your work for prospecting or playbooks, and your CSM team will see if they can incorporate your findings into their motions. The point is operationalizing your ICP Work isn't you alone. It's a team sport, and PMM should be a big advisor in the effort. 

So I have three principles framework for strategy: the diagnosis, the guiding principles, and the coherent action. This framework has guided me in three careers, including tech. You can read about it in a famous book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. So if your strategy isn't working. How do you go about redesigning it? Well, first, you need to diagnose the opportunity or the problem. This first part is where you should spend the majority of your time. Why did it fail? What does your crucial buyer want? What is the opportunity in the market? Then the next part is the hardest part of your job—aligning leadership on the diagnosis. Once you have aligned teams around the core problem, you'll proceed with the guiding principles. The guiding principles aren't tactics. They are meant as guidelines for any solution. So any solution to this problem or opportunity has to adhere to said guidelines. For example, if your market is partner-driven, then your guiding principle could be that any solution needs to be partner-led. Again the next part is the hardest, aligning teams to the guiding principles. Then your coherent actions or your tactics to solve the problem. They key here is alignment, alignment, alignment. 

I think this depends on the material and your audience. If it is customer-facing, the rule of thumb is less is more. Get to the point. The details can go in the appendix. Suppose your execs aren't into detailed, same as the above. However, if your execs are like those at Amazon, then do the lengthy brief. Again audience matters. 

KPIs are hard for PMMs. (1) we don't directly influence everything. (2) we have a lot of indirect influence. But my rule of thumb is figuring out your North Star Metric, meaning what is that one metric you can influence that drives say, pipeline, and what are those input metrics? For example, if you're doing a sales play, your input metric might be how often they have used your messaging (Gong is a great tool for this) or your assets (Highspot). In this simplistic example, your North Star Metric might be deal velocity, influencing the ultimate metric: win rates. You get the idea. Here are some of mine. North Star Metrics: Deal velocity Input Metrics: Use of messaging/and content at different buying stages, product adoption Lagging Metrics: Win rates, increase in ARR, expansion 

I'm biased. I'm a former consultant and market researcher— market research always follows priority verticals and market efforts. Depending on the stage of your organization, you might not have the luxury of full fledge research, but you need to at least talk to customers. Get some contextual awareness or directionally where you're going, then continue to validate and optimize over time. 

Whether a brief or a presentation, you should always have a core internal doc outlining your strategy and roadmap. I am religious about this exercise—given that it will evolve. Otherwise, you're doing something that someone might not agree with, which will screw up your GTM efforts. Within that presentation, you should have documented your core persona and ICP, competitive landscape, positioning, messaging, differentiated value, and capabilities. Alignment shouldn't just be the broader GTM team and your product team. The list includes a pitch deck, battle cards, demo guides, and data sheets (competitive, industry, solutions) for external customer-facing documents.

1. Diagnosis - what's my opportunity? What's the pain I'm solving? What's the problem? 2. Guiding Principles - given the above. How should I address this problem? This section arent' tactics. 3. Coherent Actions - your tactics. Remember, if #1#1 isn't clear, focused, and concise, then #2#2 isn't either, which means #3#3 isn't as effective. I highly recommend a book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt.

When I think of GTM, it's from demand to advocacy. You aren't responsible for every step of this journey but are a significant contributor to enabling and owning the customer buying journey. Questions I always ask myself when I join as a GTM PMM are as follows: 1. Do my fellow marketers have what they need to create demand, growth, and brand campaigns? Do they have the strategy, positioning, and message to do their job? Do they understand the persona/ICP segments? What's missing? How can I enable and support them for success? Do they have the content? 2. Do my sales team have what they need to be successful? Can they talk about the value of my product or platform? Can they show it? Do they have assets or content? Do they know who they are targeting? 3. How can I help with expansion? How can I help market services? 4. Who are my partners and stakeholders in these areas? 5. Which area is most important for the company right now? Where should I prioritize my time? These questions will help formulate what to do. Now you aren't responsible for all the activities but for strategy, positioning, messaging, content, and asset development (to a certain extent) — you will be the lead. Being best friends with your enablement org and your sales engineering org will help you far, especially for #2 and #3. The one area I didn't cover is the partner organization. For some org, GTM PMM has a say, other orgs you enable your partner marketer to do the job.