AMA: Eventbrite Head of Creator Marketplace Product Marketing, Yify Zhang on Go-To-Market Strategy

Generally, GTMs accomplish one or of more of the following goals: * Increase market share in a new, strategic market * Increase market share in an existing market * Increase revenue through updated pricing or add-on adjacent products * Increase conversion through features that capture customers' interest more quickly * Increase retention through features that keep customers engaged * Shift the brand perception of your target customers You should orient KPIs around each goal. * Typically, large product releases that fundamentally shift the value proposition of your company have ramifications on brand perception, market share, and revenue. * Small to medium product enhancements are more about increasing the ratio of conversion or retention of your existing base of traffic or customers Aim to have 1-2 primary metrics, and a few secondary metrics. Depending on the strategic magnitude of the GTM, you can focus primary metrics on goals such as brand perception, market share, revenue, versus ratio oriented optimizations (e.g., conversion, retention).

A GTM typically includes risks around how certain groups of customers may react to the change in experience, be it the product, service, or pricing. Generally, these negative reactions manifest into risks across these business areas: * Revenue Drop: churn in existing customers, erosion of conversion in new customers. * Operational Overwhelm: customer backlash or confusion, inundating internal support teams' capacity to deal with the amount of inquiries incoming. * Negative Press: customer backlash escalating to negative press via social or media platforms. To mitigate revenue related risks you'll need to clearly understand: * how you'll be monitoring upside versus downside. * what metrics will you use, and plan out scenarios that would require a different set of actions - e.g., launching added messaging via email, offering special discounts to select groups of customers, or in the worst case scenario, rolling back the change. To mitigate operational overwhelm, you'll need to: * develop reactive talking points for customer teams on commonly asked questions. * ensure support teams are appropriately staffed, especially if the GTM launches just before a holiday or weekend. * work with the team leads to develop scenario planning, where there is flexibility to scale resources up/down quickly. To mitigate negative press, you'll need to develop: * reactive talking points for social and press teams * it's generally good to have the option of getting positive affiliates or influencer stories. You can activate these as a component of the GTM, or lean into them if significant backlash happens

GTMs at earlier stage organizations are more about creating moments of virality and making strategic use of limited resources. Whereas at later stage organizations it is more about thoroughly sequencing resources across audiences, and mitigating risks. If you’re launching a new app or company for the first time, you’ll need to: * identify one customer group who will love your product, and evangelize it on your behalf to create moments of virality * identify the most effective channels to use your limited budget in that will reach customers with the highest intent to take the action you need them to take * find low cost ways to get research insights that helps inform how you take the product to market - asking customers through word of mouth, using low cost tools like survey monkey, low cost A/B tests on social media platforms, etc. This is a very different exercise from GTMs for mature companies, it's more about being thorough - prioritizing audiences to target, identifying distinctions in messaging and risk mitigation for each, and sequencing the messaging and channels to reach audiences.

A strong GTM framework should include: * Product strategy: why are we doing this - is it helping the company enter an untapped market or increase share in an existing market that is strategic to its success. * Goals and metrics to show whether or not you've achieved them. * Target audience: who is it for / not for - structure this by segments / personas, or geographies. * Positioning/messaging: what are the value propositions that would help convince a customer to take the desired action. * Channels * marketing: paid media (SEM, paid social), SEO, organic social, email, blog, press * sales/enterprise: sales enablement via leave behinds and talking points * customer support: reactive talking points, help center article, FAQs that go live on a landing page * In-product: surfaces within the logged out or logged in experience to talk about benefits of the feature(s) to new and existing customers at key points in their journey * Milestones, timing, roles/responsibility.

The key with getting buy-in with senior stakeholders is to engage them at the right time, with the right level of detail, so that you’re able to understand what matters most to each stakeholder and how to best incorporate their input. There are a few components to doing this well: * Clearly outline the DACI (driver, approver, contributor, informed) for the GTM. Understand whether each senior stakeholder is an approver, contributor, or informed. Just because a stakeholder is senior does mean they are an approver. You should aim to have no more than 3 approvers. Everyone else will be a contributor or informed, which means that you and the approvers can choose to accept or reject their input. * Communicate this DACI and ensure that they understand how they and their teams will be expected to contribute to this GTM. * Develop an executive summary version of your GTM and share it with these stakeholders. * Share this GTM with each senior stakeholder, preferably first in a 1:1 or small group setting. This ensures that you’re not bombarded with feedback. If there is anyone not aligned with the strategy, or the launch provokes controversy, there is a safer feeling space for both that person to express their concerns, and you to make them feel heard. Once you’ve gotten initial alignment, you can kick off the GTM with a large group of stakeholders across levels of seniority. It is also a good idea to keep an open channel and communicate any changes to the plan based on how it is unfolding with frontline stakeholders.

For feature updates that are minor in terms of its impact to an organization and or the customer experience, my advice would be to get Product teams to work as directly with channel leads as possible. * Product marketing should focus its time and energy on GTMs that have a certain size of organizational impact. * The more you and your team lead can define what this threshold is upfront, and develop tiers of product launches that would warrant various levels of PMM support, the more successful the team will be.

It's important to identify the components of the GTM that aren't working (as well as those that are) and figure out the root cause. Then, craft a path forward that has the highest impact with relatively low resistance. * In many cases, positioning/messaging (or the design of your creatives) doesn't resonate with your target audience. It's important to identify why - is it that it's working for certain audiences, but not the one you really want to go after? In this case, maybe it's possible to create different versions for different audiences. * Sometimes, the channels may be wrong, in which case you'll need to identify the specific audiences you're not reaching in current channels to find out where they may be instead. * When pivoting, you'll need to look for paths of least resistance - meaning they don't take a long time or a ton of budget to stand up. * Last bit of advice is to crowdsource these solutions. You'll be surprised how much faster this moves rather than coming up with answers in a silo.

The size of your target customers influences the types of channels you lean into with your communications and the motion of each. The question to ask yourself is: where are your customers showing up, what does it take to convince them to use your product (or take the action you want). GTMs targeting enterprise customers would require: * more thorough Sales enablement, one that is perhaps segmented for each persona at an enterprise who are decision makers versus influencers versus users. * potentially showing up at industry events, where your target enterprise people are attending. Or throwing events to celebrate the launch of the product itself, and invite these enterprise people. * white papers demonstrating the thought leadership of your organization on topics related to the product that is launching. Using these to supplement your paid social or search ads, and email. These are far more effective in driving adoption with enterprise customers. The list of example channels and motion goes on. For small businesses, you would simply tailor the channels and motion based on where these folks are showing up, and what their decision making criteria looks like.

It depends on the size of the GTM and its impact on the organization, both positively and in terms of its potential negative risk impact. * In the case of a major, value proposition shifting, launch with significant revenue impact, this generally warrants a thorough risk & mitigation plan as there will inevitably be possibility for risk of customer confusion, backlash, and churn. * You'll want to develop this plan methodically, based on a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive set of risks (see my answer to an earlier question around common areas of risks).