What are the key building blocks in GTM? Which buildings blocks do you prioritize?

If by "building blocks" we mean the main stages or elements of a successful GTM, here are some of the most important I like to think about. (I should note that I am a B2B PMM so my answers are framed as such.)

• Identify: What is the customer problem you're trying to solve? How large is the market opportunity? What share of that market can you realistically capture?

• Validation: Leveraging "voice of customer" interviews, surveys, competitive intel, UX design walk-throughs, etc., validate that your idea has product-market fit, assess willingness to pay, and begin to do some customer discovery where you narrow down who your target customer(s) might be (if your product is B2B, note that your target customer is likely a buyer group of several people within a company, not a single person. If B2B, validation is also useful to learn the buying process or journey to make sure you know how you will need to do business with your customers for this specific product.)

• Test: Run a limited pilot of your new product with a group of your prospective target customers, ensuring diversity across traits like geography if you're planning to go to market globally. For testing, your goal is to ensure the product is market ready by hitting certain "exit criteria" to move from test to launch. These criteria should be oriented around customer value as well as demand/commercial upside. Try to limit yourself to three. Testing can also be a chance to presell to secure/forecast initial demand, validate your core messaging and positioning, generate proof points you can cite in your launch materials as "reasons to buy" or "reasons to believe", and line up a few reference customers or case studies for big release.

• Launch: As a B2B PMM, I tend to think of launch in terms of internal, external, and partners. First, though, the most important step you can take as a PMM is to create a single source of truth for your product positioning and messaging, and the overarching narrative you want to tell about this product. The various marketing, sales, support and partner teams who will support your launch and create content for it will use this SoT to guide all of the assets they create, ensuring consistent messaging points, voice/tone, etc.

  • Internal mostly focuses on enabling and equipping your sales org and customer support teams on the product (how to pitch, best practices, objection handling, competitive selling, product use cases, etc.).

  • External should focus on driving awareness, consideration, and demand. Channels and tactics can range from PR, blog, web, content and organic social at the top of the funnel; to events, case studies, paid demand gen, eBooks, webinars, and email marketing toward the middle/bottom. (And more; this list is just a sample). Each channel and tactic should serve a purpose and have a quantifiable target or goal. This means you don't necessarily have to include every one of these items in your GTM. Be strategic, and include/exclude certain tactics based on level of expected impact and feasibility.

  • Partners are often essential to reach your customer and can help you co-market and co-sell, so I always think of them as their own GTM channel.

  • The big launch day: While your launch plan articulates your GTM strategy, for the big launch day itself, it's helpful to have a "run of show" checklist that line by line says what each cross-functional member of your launch team is supposed to do at specific times. For example, "Person A schedules our launch blog post to go live at 6am EDT", "Person B schedules customer launch email for 7:00am EDT", etc. As your launch tiger team completes each task, check it off your list.

• Scale: Launching is only part of the battle. How will you grow adoption of your product in the months post-launch? What sales targets and customer-value goals are you trying to deliver on? Are you on track to hit them? (If not, how can you improve your marketing plan or the product itself to hit your goals?). Often, scaling a product means REPEATING THE GTM CYCLE AGAIN, starting with validation. For example, if adoption is starting to plateau, you may need to do more customer discovery to figure out why demand is decelerating, if there are unmet customer needs you should account for in future product enhancements, if your sales org needs some additional proof points or cases studies to fill the opportunity pipeline, etc.