Go-to-market strategy can be so broad and different by company/market. How do you define it and get alignment across the team?

Before we start working on a Go-To-Market strategy, we work with cross-functional teams to align on the value props and priority level of the launch. For example, a P0 launch gets a different strategy than a P2 launch. To communicate this clearly and concisely, you can do the following:

• Create a GTM document that outlines your strategy in detail. Share this document with all team members and update it regularly as your strategy evolves.

• Hold regular team meetings to discuss the GTM strategy and review progress. These meetings should be a forum for team members to ask questions and provide feedback on the strategy.

• Empower team members to make decisions about how to execute the GTM strategy. This will help to ensure that everyone feels invested in the success of the strategy.

• Celebrate successes and learn from failures. Celebrating successes and learning from failures can create a culture of continuous improvement for your GTM strategy.

In short, communicate clearly, collaborate often, and empower your team.

A go-to-market strategy is at its heart, an exercise in alignment.

A good B2B GTM plan maximizes your exposure to growth by drawing a through-line across your market and its needs, your company, and its offerings in the most efficient way possible. It is built around 3 pillars:

• Market Opportunity: Expressed as TAM/SAM/SOM, outlining where the fertile areas of opportunity exist where you can make money (Segments, industry verticals, buying centers/Line of Business)

• Positioning: Your company's products / Solutions, expressed through value propositions that align with your buyer/user's most important needs and problem areas.

• Distribution & Campaign: Outlining Route-to-market, channels, and investment/returns, as well as the competitive, messaging, and positioning needed to build compelling content and creative.

As for alignment internally, this comes down to good teamwork and hygiene, starting with:

• Many fingerprints: bringing in your cross-functional contributors, from GTM, as well as Product early and often will ensure you're building a strategy that everyone not only understands but believes in and is committed to.

• Define what "done" looks like Establishing a shared understanding of success should be your number one goal in executing a new strategy. Clearly defined, shared goals keep everyone focussed on the money. As a general rule, I want my marketers to feel a level of discomfort in owning a big goal, such as a business's growth rate, revenue goal, or other indicators of business health. Vanity metrics that feel comfortable to marketing such as pipeline, or satisfaction rates can be helpful for measuring certain activities, but the measure of whether a GTM strategy is successful MUST be expressed in business outcomes - usually $$$

• Do the extra work to ensure understanding: Folks often recommend offering training sessions or resources to help team members understand the GTM strategy and their role in its execution. This is a good idea, but too often people misunderstand and seek to justify the quality of a strategy through too much detail. A folder of decks, or lengthy documents will remain unread, and poorly understood. Instead, take the time to craft your articulation of the strategy the way you would work customer-facing content and messaging. Shipping a 5-minute loom, supported by a well-crafted document will be infinitely more impactful in driving a shared understanding than the world's best essay or PowerPoint.

I think it’s less important to worry about consensus seeking on every step (there should be dozens for every launch regardless of size), and most important to align on

1) what constitutes a really big launch, a medium launch, and a small launch

2) align on roles that you hope/expect your peers in product, sales, marketing, and engineering to assume

3) align on the understanding that launch planning is significantly more than just the launch blog—that it includes PMMs involvement in research before the PRD is ever written.

The go-to-market (GTM) strategy defines how you will bring your product to your target audience. Once defined, you use the GTM strategy to align on the marketing and sales activities. Sales and marketing use the GTM strategy to impact revenue. A GTM strategy can be used for a single product or an entire portfolio. Most GTM strategies I’ve built have been at the portfolio level. 

In my experience, Product Marketing, Product Management, and Sales work together to define the GTM strategy. Here are a few activities that work really well to align on GTM strategy: 

• GTM Internal Roadshow: This is a series of meetings where the PMM presents the GTM strategy to key stakeholders across product, engineering, sales, and marketing. This meeting series should happen immediately after the GTM strategy is finalized. The goal is to socialize the strategy with anyone who relies on it for their role. All of these stakeholders should have a heads up that you’re establishing the GTM strategy ahead of time. The GTM strategy should not be a surprise when they see it. 

• Quarterly Business Reviews: If your organization or business unit holds a Quarterly Business Review (QBR), this is a great opportunity to share metrics against your GTM strategy. The goal is to share what’s working and what’s not, and illustrate how you are pivoting based on quarterly results. However, keep in mind that you may not see revenue-related results that quickly. It can take many quarters to see results. The metrics you share may not be financial outputs at all, and that’s ok. The goal is to track the strength of your GTM strategy so that you can pivot as needed. 

• Annual GTM review: On an annual basis, you should evaluate your GTM strategy to determine if it’s still working. You and the GTM team (typically PMM, PM, and Sales leaders) should come together to discuss each component of the GTM strategy. Are you seeing the results you expected? Why or why not? Is there any new information that would change your strategy? Results of this meeting should be shared with your stakeholders. 
  

Pro-tip: The GTM strategy should be on a shared document that is accessible to all of your stakeholders. Consider finding a place on an intranet for it to live, with a short, 30-sec video recording of yourself walking through the GTM strategy at a high level to accompany the video. This video can live at the top of a Google Doc / Shared Word Doc or on the web page of an internal intranet or SharePoint page. 

GTM strategy really needs to be tailored to the specifics of the company, product, and market conditions. While you will need to apply strategy in the way that makes sense for your organization, here’s a general approach to defining and executing on GTM strategy

1. Develop a deep understanding of the market and company context: It’s important to understand what’s working or not today. I like to conduct interviews with customers, potential buyers, and internal teams, comparing this information with competitor & market research and the products and services offered by the company.

2. Conduct a SWOT analysis: Armed with this information, I then take a first pass at a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). This is a great way to lay out where the company is today and what needs to change to be successful. While Product Marketing often takes the first pass at the SWOT, it’s equally as important to circulate this for feedback and input to capture different perspectives from key internal stakeholders across sales, product, customer success, operations, etc.

3. Prioritize and make decisions: After laying out where things stand and what needs to change, I then try to pick out 1-3 guiding principles for our GTM strategy. Less is more when it comes to strategy, and it’s equally as important what you chose not to do as what you chose to do. Great strategy should be simple to explain (as if talking to a 5 year old), yet powerful enough to give every person in the organization a quick litmus test to understand if their decisions and behaviors are consistent with the strategy. This step needs to be done collaboratively to ensure buy-in and alignment. I usually conduct a workshop with all key players to lay out the benefits and trade offs of each strategic direction and give everyone a chance to provide input and discuss before we finalize anything.

4. Create the communication and execution plan: Now that the strategy is clear, each team that’s impacted needs to start executing. This is where you need to have a detailed set of next steps, goals, roles and responsibilities, deadlines, and accountability mechanisms, such as KPIs and check-in cadences. If you can provide these and assuming you got buy-in throughout the prior steps, then the organization should start to execute on the strategy.

5. Remember to revisit and revise: The market and the organization will change and some strategies will not work. Make sure to keep yourself and the organization honest about whether your strategy is working as intended and where you need to adapt or revisit. This is where having clear goals and a cadence of check-ins really helps. Make sure to give your strategy enough time to see if it’s really working or not (many organizations fail to realize their strategy since they give up too early, before it has time to start working), and if you’re still not achieving the outcomes you hoped for, that’s when you should update your understanding of they market and company context and go back though the above steps to adjust your strategy.