What is your personal process for GTM readiness?

It sounds like by “GTM readiness” the questioner might mean “marketing launch readiness”, so I’ll answer within that framing.

I touch on this in another answer, but briefly, there are two aspects of GTM or marketing launch readiness: deciding whether your product should be a Go for launch at all, and then ensuring your day-of launch “run of show” is all set.

WHETHER TO LAUNCH…

The first aspect is all about whether you should launch at this time. To know that, you need to know if your product has hit its success criteria, or exit criteria to go from beta to full launch (sometimes called “general availability” or GA). In our business, our head of marketing decides if a product is truly market- (or launch-) ready. How do you know if it is? It’s all about whether you’ve hit your success criteria that PMM, Product, Product Ops, and maybe even Sales have previously aligned on. These criteria can include a handful of customer- and business-relevant targets. Ideally you use a mix of survey-based or quantitative approaches like a scorecard to track progress against these criteria, alongside qualitative customer and rep feedback you gather from interviews with pilot testers. Some success or exit criteria examples:

• Customer readiness … Are your customers finding measurable (ideally quantifiable) value in the new product during testing? For example, in LinkedIn Ads, we typically track some metric tied to advertiser/customer ROI or advertiser productivity as our true north. Or, what’s the CSAT or NPS for the new product (as measured during beta) compared to your goal?

• Product readiness … have we taken care of all critical bugs? Have we built must-have or critical features that pilot customers confirmed they need to use the product successfully in GA?

• Marketing readiness … Do you have 2-3 customers who will go on record to provide testimonials? Do you have your required number of case studies? Does your Comms team have a couple of press placements lined up?

• Sales readiness: has Sales completed the trainings and indicated (ie: via a test or quiz) that they understand how to pitch to and support customers? Has Sales’s most important product feature feedback been acted on or at least scheduled for future evaluation or assessment?

I’m not saying the criteria above are always the right ones. They’re just examples.

LAUNCH “RUN OF SHOW”

Ok, so assuming your product is a Go for launch, another main component to GTM readiness is your “run of show”, which is essentially your launch day checklist of all the content that needs to go live, the emails that need to go out to the market, the press embargo that gets lifted, the webpage that needs to light up, the product that needs to officially ramp to all users or customers, etc, etc — at specific times with specific individual owners responsible for each step of the launch.

One final twist: Sometimes you can release a product to customers and schedule the big marketing launch moment for a later date. Why would you do this? If your company schedules one predictable marketing moment each quarter where you announce all your big launches all at once — a strategy that has the advantage of capturing more mindshare in market — then you might ramp the product a few weeks or so before your big launch day. Marketing launch and product release don’t have to be simultaneous, and my view is you don’t want marketing’s GTM calendar to hold back a great product from customer use (assuming the product is clearly delivering customer value in your beta and is truly ready for general availability).