AMA: GitLab Vice President of Product Marketing, Dave Steer on Go-to-Market Strategy

See answer on core elements of a strong, repeatable GTM framework. These elements -- market adoption stage, positioning strategy, messaging, ideal customer profile, buyer and user personas, trusted customer journey, and use cases -- apply to every product type and create alignment throughout the go-to-market organization.

Great question - you'll see the answer is some of the my other answers. I'll add a few other steps here: First, be intentional about the core working group. Go-to-market can be vast, so it's important that you have key functions (sales, customer success, marketing, revenue operations, and more) represented. Second, align the team on the stage of the business. Sangram Varje and Bryan Brown recently published MOVE: The 4 Question Go-To-Market Framework which offers a maturity assessment of where your company is in its evolution from defining problem-market fit, product-market fit, and platform-market fit. Third, make sure that your go-to-market strategy is aligned. I recently worked with a coach who helped us develop our market vision (our sense of where the market was headed) and then the company, product, GTM, and operational strategy to respond to the changes that we saw in the market. It was an exercise that helped me sync GTM with the broader company strategy.

There are, of course, several elements so I’m just going to touch on the foundational pieces that product marketers must have in place. But before I do, I have one pro-tip: develop your GTM framework as a narrative. I've found that the activity of writing it out in narrative form helps to create clarity of thought and to socialize it with stakeholders so that everyone can contribute. This narrative should include: * Market adoption stage – Your goal is to understand where you are in the classic technology adoption lifecycle. Pinpoint whether your technology speaks to Innovator, Early Adopter, Early Majority, Late Majority, or Laggard. * Positioning strategy – Your goal is differentiated value. Over the years, I’ve seen so many different fill-in-the-blanks positioning frameworks, but I’ve come to love April Dunford’s positioning canvas approach in her seminal book Obviously Awesome. She defines positioning strategy as how a company’s offering is uniquely qualified to be a leader at providing some kind of value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. There’s a lot there – read the book! * Messaging – Your goal is to strengthen your positioning with messages that resonate with the target audience. The biggest growth opportunities that I’ve seen in many organizations are message discipline and how to speak with one voice. * Ideal Customer Profile – Your goal is to define what the ideal customer (at the organization level) looks like. This should include firmographic, geographic, and technographic information. * Buyer and User Personas – Your goal is to define the people (B2B is still marketing to humans). Look at job titles, roles and responsibilities, sequences of participation (in the buying process), and roles in the decision-making unit. Note: Job titles in rapidly changing categories can be elusive – if that’s the case, look more at their roles and responsibilities. At GitLab, we do so in our Handbook here. * A Trusted Customer Journey – Your goal is to define the key steps in the purchase decision process and to surface the messages and actions that will move people through the journey. A key part of this is to build and reinforce trust along the way by understanding their job to be done (what social and functional progress is the customer trying to make and hiring you to do) and empathizing with any anxieties in the purchase that may arise. * Prioritized Use Cases – Your goal is to spell out how the primary buyer & user can use the product for the most significant value and success Again, this is just a start, but if you can gain consensus on this across the entire go-to-market organization, you’ll be in a strong position to execute and repeat the process.

A colleague once told me that Product Marketing is a team sport. I couldn't agree more, and gaining alignment and getting buy-in with stakeholders is a critical success factor in the role. The questioner asks about senior stakeholders, but I think it’s important for product marketers to think about all stakeholders, regardless of the level or title. The first -- and most important -- part of buy-in is listening. Great product marketing leaders listen very well. If I’m starting in a new role or building a new program, I start by listening to stakeholders so that I understand their perspectives and viewpoints. Listening leads to understanding and insight, but it doesn’t mean taking orders. The next step in getting buy-in is to formulate your own opinion. This is an area where I see product marketers stumble - they translate their listening tours directly into action without forming their own opinion. Stakeholders – especially executive stakeholders – are rarely looking for ‘yes people’. They want thought partners who have strong conviction (even if loosely held) and a POV. Another tool in the buy-in-toolkit is to establish ground rules for decision-making at the outset. I’m a big big fan of the RASCI model (see this post) as a way to build trust and make decisions. What if you’ve done all of the above and you still don’t have buy-in? What else can you do? There are more actions you can take. Try getting everyone in the same room to debate and mine for conflict and, if there still isn’t alignment, strive for a ‘disagree and commit’ agreement. That approach is effective most of the time because you’ve created an environment where everyone is heard. Finally, one of the most important ways to gain buy in, especially with executive stakeholders, is to root your recommendations in the business. Understand the metrics that drive the business and levers that drive those metrics -- with that approach, you'll rarely be misaligned. 

Product Marketers should, as they say, measure what matters...and what matters is heavily dependent on the stage of the business and product. If you are earlier stage, focus on assessing whether the problem your product is solving is real and important. Good metrics for this stage: Funnel conversion, win rate, marketing tactical effectiveness (traffic, leads). For later stage, your GTM strategy should be measured by more sophisticated indicators, such as pipeline coverage, deal velocity, net expansion, overall category penetration, and customer time-to-value. The most important part is to understand which metrics drive the business and which levers drive those metrics.

Operationalizing a go-to-market strategy is not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot that happens between writing the doc (see narrative above) or slides and executing the strategy in the market. Here’s my list of the riskiest elements and how I solve for them. First, team alignment. In my experience, aligning the team is the trickiest element because the amount of stakeholder voices expands seemingly exponentially the closer you are to launching your GTM activities. This is just as true for the early stage pre-product market fit startup as it is for the hyper-growth, more mature company. My solution for this is constant cascading communications. The job of the Product Marketer is often to ensure that everyone is rowing in the same direction, so make sure that you are communicating often and bringing people into the process early. Like the above question about GTM plan fundamentals, I find that writing out the GTM plan in narrative form is extremely helpful, both for clarity of thought and as a handbook for new people joining the GTM process. I also find that consistent adoption of OKRs is a great way to help ensure the alignment of activities. Like many companies, we use OKRs at GitLab as a way to align our team activities with the company strategy and with each other. The process of creating, debating, calling out dependencies, and tracking progress is, itself, a way to create clarity on both what we are trying to achieve in our GTM strategy, how we will accomplish it, and who will take ownership of which roles and responsibilities. Second, data data data. A key success factor is ensuring that everyone on the go-to-market team (marketing, sales, customer success…everyone) is using the same data, is following the same KPIs, and is looking at the same dashboards. Third, the market is not a constant – just as you are evolving and operationalizing your GTM, so are your competitors. It’s like when you look at a star in the sky, you are really seeing the light that emanated in the past. So too is the case with your GTM plan that was based on where your competition was at a previous point in time. My solution: tight feedback loops throughout the GTM team. This is an area that small companies have an advantage - since their teams are small, they can more easily have all the people in the room or zoom giving feedback on every aspect of the GTM process. While easier in a small company, tight feedback loops can work at scale if they are engineered into the process. I once rolled out a new positioning strategy in the market and learned that it was ineffective (see metrics answer above). While it was a bummer that the original positioning wasn’t effective, I was proud of the team for developing this insight quickly, rapidly rolling it back, and then iterating based on what we learned.

This is such an important question since, especially for product marketers, we can find ourselves adopting a tactical cookie-cutter approach, making our marketing bland. Blech. Yes, checklists aligned with tiered products are important in creating a consistent, repeatable workflow (imagine the chaos without them). Still, while checklists provide order, they can also drain the creativity out of marketing and hamper our ability to tell compelling stories. With all of that aside, I do think there are some foundational elements that all good product launches should incorporate, such as awareness building and education activities. The best launches I’ve been a part of also create a sense of anticipation and excitement. When we launched 1.1.1.1 at Cloudflare, we announced the product and created a waitlist for people to get early access. The effect was heightened interest, a sense of FOMO, and excitement (which translated into word of mouth) when people got access. I try to leverage the bigger launches to reinforce a broader story and strengthen our position in the market. An effective way to do this is to pull together all of your tactics into what a lot of people call a 'lightning strike', which can grab the attention of all of your stakeholders -- this is the complete opposite of a peanut butter-like approach where you spread your marketing over a longer span of time (and, fingers crossed, something sticks). Check out these books for more inspiration: Made to Stick and Play Bigger. Another important element, especially in B2B, is to have a set of tactics that prepare your external and internal stakeholders before the launch so they can be supporters and amplifiers during and after your launch. For example, I try to give industry analysts enough of a heads up before launch to provide feedback on the GTM plan, as well as to serve as references for press and bloggers who want an analyst's take on how the new product fits into a broader context. The same lesson is true for internal audiences. If sales is a key part of your GTM motions, then you need to make sure your sales team is well enabled to effectively sell the product once you generate demand. Beyond these examples, the most important thing is to root your tactics in the GTM plan (see answer above) and strategy, and to be creative as you do so. I keep a running inspiration journal for good marketing I see in the wild.

I believe that market insights are the #1 core product marketing capability. Literally everything – from positioning and messaging to the products and capabilities you deliver to the market – flows from insights that you generate via smart, well-run market research. I’ve worked on dozens of products at every stage of maturity and, while most of these can be applied horizontally across several industries, it has been helpful to leverage market research to identify which verticals to target and how to tailor my positioning strategy. This type of insight has been beneficial as I move a product beyond early adopters and traverse the dangerous chasm to an early majority audience. Of course, market research can come in many forms. In my early days as a marketer, I leaned on traditional in-person focus groups (the ones with the double-paned glasses and the unlimited jelly beans for clients) for depth of insight and quantitative survey-based research to validate insights at scale. More recently, I’ve looked to other research techniques to help fine-tune my vertical strategy. One area to look at is your sales data to answer specific questions related to verticals. Are you seeing accentuated adoption, a faster deal cycle, and improved win rates in specific verticals? I also prioritize talking to my sales teammates to get deeper and richer insights. One cautionary note: make sure you are supplementing existing customer information with prospective customer insights. After all, if you only look at your existing customer base, you’re looking in the rearview mirror. Another market research area to inform verticalization and all of GTM is the competitive landscape. Are you seeing competitors gravitate to a specific set of verticals? Or are they listing out verticals on their website, but the messaging is pretty much the same. (I call this fake verticalization). I also look at characteristics of the vertical, such as TAM or macro economic indicators of vertical health and appeal for the product. For example, at the outset of the pandemic, it was clear that certain industries such as Internet infrastructure were seeing a boom in adoption and other industries had the bottom fall out. In short, I make it a point to ensure that if I’m targeting a vertical, the addressable market is sizable enough and the vertical is poised to purchase. The end result of these market insights doesn’t just help me with a vertical strategy; it helps me formulate the Ideal Customer Profile and sets in motion a set of coordinated actions across the go-to-market and product organizations.

Ah, the elusive product-market fit…what Mark Andreesen once called ‘the only thing that matters’. Broadly, there are two components that I look at: a defined and interesting market with a clear problem to be solved; and a capability (or product) that meets the need in the market. With this in mind, the first metrics I look at are associated with the market. These metrics include Total Addressable Market – TAM, for short – and the competitive landscape. I find these two areas are good proxies that signal the market opportunity. For example, if the TAM is small or if the landscape is littered with competitors that have commoditized, undifferentiated offerings, then that is a signal that achieving product-market fit will be challenging and will require a disruptive product to reshape the category. Next comes the capability that the company is offering the market. When I launch new products, I look at metrics associated with my messaging and how it is resonating with audiences. My former PayPal teammate, Matt Lerner, who is now the CEO of Startup Core Strengths, wrote a compelling article on finding language/market fit as a first step in achieving product/market fit – I refer to this piece often. At this stage, I’ll also look at demand metrics such as cost per acquisition. Of course, I know I’ve reached product-market fit when the product is flying off the shelf, so sales metrics are critical: pipeline coverage, deal velocity, win rates, and customer acquisition costs. Finally, I know I’ve achieved product-market fit when customers are satisfied and they are expanding usage of the product. So, I look at Net Dollar Retention as well as Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction scores.

Part of what makes Product Marketing such an exciting (and sometimes complicated) function is that it can have a wide array of capabilities. The exact capabilities will vary by team and company size, as well as the stage of the company and the business, product, and GTM strategy. Still, I’ve found it helpful to have a foundational set of capabilities that I build product marketing teams towards. On my team, we talk about the fact that we don’t expect everyone to be expert in all of these capabilities, but as a team, we strive toward delivering on all of these capabilities. Finally, having these capabilities outlined enables people on the team to choose which capabilities to ‘major’ in and which to ‘minor’ in, similar to the idea of a T-Shaped Marketer. So, on to the capabilities, which have been heavily informed by a lot of content from the Sharebird community and other marketing leaders. They are: 1. Target Market & Audience Definition 2. Positioning, Messaging, Narrative, and Content 3. Launch Planning & Execution 4. Pricing & Packaging 5. External Evangelism 6. Customer Advocacy 7. Analyst Relations 8. Competitive Marketing 9. Sales Enablement For even more depth, I highly recommend Naman Khan’s (CMO of Zeplin) podcast and talking to as many other Product Marketing leaders about how they've organized their teams.

Let me start by saying this: I’m hiring! Check out the GitLab careers page or HMU directly. When I’m hiring a product marketer, I’m looking for a set of experiences that will add to the capabilities of the team – see my answer on capabilities – so the specifics are highly dependent on the context of the team and the company. For some roles, I look for domain experience since the team is trying to accelerate its understanding and entry into a specific category. For others, I’m looking for more generally applied skills and experiences. Still, there are a few qualities that I look for in every product marketer. First, I look for a level of understanding of positioning, messaging, and narrative development. PMMs are frequently at the center of messaging development, so this foundational capability is critical to delivering on virtually every other part of the function. In interviews, I’ll frequently ask ‘What is an example of messaging that you’ve developed that you are proud of. How did you develop it? Why did it work’. I'll also ask candidates to critique messaging or offer up who they think is world-class in positioning and messaging. Second, as product marketing sits at the intersection of marketing, sales, customer success, and product (just to name a few), it requires people who thrive in cross-functional collaborative settings. People who can lead by influence and have high degrees of empathy (towards teammates and towards customers) tend to be happier and more successful in product marketing roles. Since product launches are frequently the events that bring out this quality, I’ll frequently ask ‘what is an example of a product launch that you are particularly proud of? How did you work with your cross-functional team to bring the product to market?’. Again, this question differs by specific capability in product marketing, but the general idea is to understand their proclivity to and experience with collaboration. Finally, I look for people who have an innate sense of curiosity and a growth mindset – after all, product marketing is a relatively new function and we are always learning about our market, our products, our customers...and ourselves. As part of this, I’m also looking for people who can thrive in ambiguity and who can tackle multiple challenges. I’ll frequently append each of the questions above with ‘...and what did you learn in the process’. PS: Like I said...I'm hiring :)