AMA: Attentive Director of Product Marketing, Candice Sparks on Go-To-Market Strategy

In my previous role at a real-estate investing marketplace we were doing just that as we were working with private money loans and lenders, an investment vehicle unknown to many. The biggest element to a GTM strategy when you're defining a category is extensive market education on the problem space and need for a new solution. This could be done through customer testimonials, press and media, thought leadership and content based on research. It will be super critical that you understand your ideal customer profile, their pain points and the way they consume content. Then all of your efforts should be educating this ICP through the channels they learn and with data-backed content. This will be an exercise in patience as you will continuously need to iterate your GTM strategy as you learn.

Usually lack of alignment is due to lack of information. To drive forward a GTM strategy a lot of pre-work needs to occur so that when you are ready to broadly share your plan to the marketing team it shouldn't be new information. For example, when you're creating your messaging matrix you should be consulting with your marketing stakeholders to get their feedback on how this launch intertwines with your overall company positioning. Presenting the plan also shouldn't be the first time a marketing team member heres they are signed up for an action item. All of your pre-GTM planning should be vetted with your marketing stakeholders as they are also responsible for executing on various different tactics (email comms, press announcements, content strategy, etc.) Here are some steps I'd recommend for getting buy-in and driving execution of a go-to-market strategy within your marketing team: 1. Clearly connect goals to business outcomes. Tie the strategy back to hard revenue targets, customer acquisition costs, or brand KPIs to ground it in tangible objectives. 2. Socialize strategy early for feedback vs. presenting fully baked. Getting input and ideas from key marketing leaders helps drive greater ownership. 3. Establish clear accountability across teams. Assign ownership for each program area driven by the strategy. 4. Have a full-team launch kick-off meeting. Here's where you can define interconnected programs of work cross-functionally. 5. Conduct regular check-ins to assess progress, risks, blockers across implementation plans. Course correct quickly if needed. 6. Convey urgency around competitive dynamics. Leverage real examples of competitors executing aggressively. It is hard to disagree with a plan that is based on data and customer feedback.

Usually the most risky parts of the GTM plan are actually in the foundation: the why we're building this, the who we're building this for and the what the product value prop is. These three things are critical to your messaging/positioning, who you're targeting, your channels you're going to leverage, and what the expectations for this launch are. If you don't get early buy-in on the foundational elements of your GTM plan you may run the risk of building a plan based on misaligned ideas.

Every GTM plan should have different KPIs tailored to the product launch and dependent on the launch objectives - whether driving direct revenue, user adoption, or engagement (or a combination of all three)! * Revenue-focused launches centrally track pipeline growth, new customer acquisition, contract bookings generated, and sales team utilization of launch enablement resources. * Adoption-driven releases monitor number of new users, account signups, product trials started, feature activation rates, and customer success milestone achievement. * Engagement launches quantify traffic to launch content, campaign email open/clickthrough rates, time spent on key pages, gated asset downloads, press announcements, and ratings/feedback scores on content. You also can incorporate more qualitative KPIs into your GTM plan like sales satisfaction with launch materials,, perception of competitive differentiation, confidence communicating value prop, access to customer stories, and effectiveness responding to questions. I believe the most important part of KPIs and ensuring alignment on them from the very early stages of the GTM launch plan. Every meeting you should be discussing your KPIs and how you're tracking leading up to a launch and then even more importantly once in market.

I use a framework that is based on launch tiers! Minor releases would normally fall under a tier 3 or tier 4 launch and could be defined as: Tier 1 - Evolves the companies narrative in the marketplace Tier 2 - Gets us to feature parity or enables us to compete in the marketplace and win new customers Tier 3 - An improvement or enhancement to an existing feature Tier 4 - An update to the UI, superuser flag, etc. No visible impact to the customer For tier 3/4 (minor) releases I usually include it in our monthly newsletter, release notes, internal product enablement and a UI announcement (when applicable). Also, with minor releases there's also an opportunity to bundle a bunch of smaller releases into a greater theme and release it in a larger way! For example, if you have a bunch of small releases in regards to your reporting, you could release these together externally for a bigger splash.