Go To Market Plan - 6 Steps to Creating a Go-to-Market Plan

        **Core Topic:** The six-step framework for building a scalable go-to-market plan for SaaS businesses—moving from "some revenue flowing" to predictable, scalable growth where you can put $1 in and get $2 out.

**Main Speaking Points:**

1. **Step 1: Define Your Market** — What is the market? Is there a three-letter acronym for it? Are you entering a new market or an existing one? Most importantly: What is the important, urgent, and frequent problem you're solving? Write it down in five bullet points—you'll find nuances you hadn't considered.

2. **Step 2: Understand the "Why" (Macro Trends)** — Why does this market exist? What big changes in the landscape are driving this problem or opportunity? When you can articulate the macro trend, prospects immediately recognize it as a risk or opportunity they need to address.

3. **Step 3: Positioning (Segment + Pricing)** — Are you going after SMB, mid-market, or enterprise? Are you the low-cost player or the premium player? Trade-offs exist: Enterprise = complex sales but low churn; SMB = simple/self-service sales but high churn. Your positioning determines much of your go-to-market execution.

4. **Step 4: Competition** — Map where competitors sit across segments. Look for underserved segments where you can differentiate—maybe customers willing to pay more for white-glove service but who don't need all the bells and whistles.

5. **Step 5: Messaging, Value Prop, and Strategic Narrative** — This is where most founders skip ahead and fail. "We're going to hire a content person to do blogs" is not a strategy. You must develop the actual words you'll say to a potential buyer: why you're different, the value you bring, why they should pay attention.

6. **Step 6: Go-to-Market Motion** — Based on your segment, positioning, and messaging, decide: Inbound? Outbound? Channels? Ads? This is how you mobilize the narrative through different channels to build a go-to-market machine.

---

If you've built a product and you've got some revenue flowing, but you're not quite at the point where you have predictable, scalable growth—where you know you can put a dollar in and earn two dollars out—then it's time to build a scalable go-to-market plan.

I always thought I knew how to build a go-to-market plan. But it wasn't until I worked with some really talented go-to-market leaders—marketers and sales leaders who truly understood how to do this—that I learned the right way.

I learned it through my journey at ToutApp, where I was CEO responsible for driving overall growth, and then at Marketo after they acquired us. At Marketo, I was SVP of Strategy, but I also did a quarter running Europe, a quarter running Australia, and a year running alliances. I helped grow each of those regions and organizations.

So I've learned a lot about how to build a proper go-to-market plan. Let me show you the six steps I've used over and over again.

---

### Step 1: Define Your Market

The first thing you have to figure out is: What is your market?

How do you define it? Is there a three-letter acronym for it? Are you going into a new market, or are you entering an existing market where you need to differentiate?

Specifically, you need to answer: **What is the important, urgent, and frequent problem we're solving?**

This sounds simple, but I dare you to write it down and articulate it succinctly in five bullet points. You'll start to realize there are nuances you hadn't considered.

The first thing you want to do is get alignment and truly understand: What is the market we're actually serving?

---

### Step 2: The "Why" — Macro Trends

Once you've defined the market, the second question is: **Why?**

What are the big macro trends? What are the big changes in the landscape? What big problems exist today that are driving this market?

There's a whole group of people waking up every morning saying, "I've got to go solve this problem." Why does that problem exist? What's the macro trend creating it? What's the opportunity they're after, and what macro trend is creating that opportunity?

It's almost like: Why does the market exist? What's the reason behind the thing?

The best way I know to answer this is to dig into macro trends.

Once you do that, you understand: "This is the market. Here are the people in it. Every morning they wake up because this big thing is happening. And because this big thing is happening, as soon as I talk about it, they'll recognize it as either an opportunity or a risk they have to solve—and therefore they'll be interested in buying our software."

These two steps alone can really clarify what you're doing and what problem you need to be solving.

---

### Step 3: Positioning — Segment and Pricing

Once you've done that, the next thing is figuring out your positioning.

Every market—especially in SaaS—breaks down essentially into:
- **SMB** (small business)
- **Mid-market**
- **Enterprise**

(Sometimes there's lower mid-market, upper mid-market, etc., but generally it's these three.)

When you're building your product, you're deciding: Are you going to be the **low-cost player** or the **premium player**?

Take the CRM market. Salesforce is by no means the low-cost player—there are tons of low-cost CRMs. They're the premium player, and they also happen to be number one.

You have to decide: Do you want to service small business, mid-market, or enterprise? Do you want to be low-cost or premium?

There's a natural flow here:
- The more you go upmarket and premium, the more complex the sale becomes.
- The more you go downmarket and SMB, the more simple and self-service the sale becomes.

But there are trade-offs:
- **Enterprise + Premium:** Complex sale, but typically low churn.
- **SMB + Low-cost:** Simple sale, but those businesses might go out of business a year later, so you'll have high churn.

You really want to figure out how you think about positioning, segmentation, and—in a way—pricing. Because that will determine a lot of your go-to-market execution.

---

### Step 4: Competition

The fourth thing is looking at **competition**.

In each segment—SMB, mid-market, enterprise—there tends to be a big competitor. You'll want to understand where the competitors lie in each segment.

When you do that, you'll start to understand:
- Who you can actually compete against
- How you can differentiate effectively

For example:
- If there are well-entrenched enterprise players, it's going to be really hard as a startup to catch up. You may be better off in SMB or mid-market.
- But if there are thousands of low-cost players servicing the market with no way to differentiate, you may have to go mid-market.

This is the strategic planning you can do: Map out where the competitors are in different segments. Where is there an underserved segment? Maybe there are people willing to pay a little more for white-glove service but who don't need all the bells and whistles. Maybe there's an area that's underserved with no competitors—that's where you can go.

That's step four: **Competition.**

---

### Step 5: Messaging, Value Prop, and Strategic Narrative

Once you've mapped out competition, you start making decisions around positioning and pricing. You know why this market exists, that it's big enough, and that there's a segment with a gap you can fill.

Now you dig into **messaging**.

You have to answer:
- What is our value proposition?
- What is our messaging?
- What is our strategic narrative?

**A lot of times I see founders skipping this step** and jumping right into the next one—running ads, going inbound, going outbound.

I'll ask them, "Hey, what's your go-to-market strategy?" And they'll say, "We're going to hire a content person who's going to do a lot of blogs."

That is not a strategy.

What they haven't done is really thought through:
- What is the market?
- Why do we exist?
- What are the macro trends?
- What is the competition?
- What is our value prop?

Literally: What are the words we're going to say to the person sitting across from us—a potential buyer—to explain why we're different, the value we're going to bring, and why they should pay attention?

These all go into your value prop, your messaging, your strategic narrative. **You cannot skip this step.**

If you go into the next step without doing this, you'll be firing blanks. You won't have real bullets. You won't have a real target.

Step five: **Develop your value prop, messaging, and strategic narrative.** You absolutely must do this.

---

### Step 6: Go-to-Market Motion

Once you've done all that, the final thing that comes together is your **go-to-market motion**.

Based on the segment you're going after, where that stands competitively, and what your messaging is, you figure out:
- Do we do inbound?
- Do we do outbound?
- Do we do channels?
- Do we do ads?

You start to figure out: How do we actually mobilize this narrative through different channels and strategies to build a go-to-market machine?

That's your go-to-market motion. That's step six.

---

### Putting It All Together

When you do all these things:

1. **Market:** What is the important, urgent, frequent problem you're solving?
2. **Macro Trends:** What's creating this problem so you can communicate it effectively?
3. **Positioning:** What segment are you in? Are you low-cost or premium?
4. **Competition:** Where are the competitors? Where's the opportunity to differentiate and serve an underserved part of the market? (Steps 3 and 4 can go back and forth.)
5. **Messaging:** How do you communicate the differentiated value you're bringing to this underserved segment?
6. **Go-to-Market Motion:** What channels and strategies will you use to deploy all of this?

Do these six things well, and you're going to have an unstoppable go-to-market machine. You're going to be able to drive scalable growth for your SaaS business.