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

        - If you've built a product and you've got some revenues flowing but you're not quite at the point where you have predictable growth and scalable growth, where you know you can put a dollar in and you can earn $2. If you're not quite there yet, then it's time to actually build a scalable go-to-market plan. Now, I always thought I knew how to build a go-to-market plan but it wasn't until I worked with some really, really talented go-to-market leaders, some really, really talented marketers and sales leaders that are really understand, okay, here's how you actually do it. And I learned that through my journey at ToutApp and also my journey at Marketo, both different scale SAS businesses. So in this video, I'm gonna actually help you map out your go-to-market plan and follow the six steps, six steps that you actually need to follow to build out that plan, intro. (upbeat music) What's up everybody, welcome to unstoppable. I'm TK and on this channel, I help SAS founders Like you navigate the path to the next stage of growth faster with an unstoppable strategy. So if you are new to the channel, be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon because I drop a video every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday with the TK energy. Otherwise, if you're part of my go-to-market program, my coaching program, if you are a part of the community, welcome back, it's really great to see you here. Now, I've been part of different go-to-market organizations, I was CEO of ToutApp and I was responsible for driving growth overall for the company. When I joined Marketo, Marketo bought ToutApp, I was SVP of strategy but I did a quarter actually running Europe, I did a quarter running Australia and then I did a year of running alliances and I helped grow each of those regions and organizations. So I learned a lot about how to build a proper go-to-market plan. If you're in that stage, we actually had to build out a scalable go-to-market plan and drive growth for your SAS business, I'm gonna show you the six steps that I've used over and over and over and now I teach inside of my SAS go-to-market program so that you can actually start to drive growth for your SAS business and build out that go-to-market plan. So if you're excited to dig in, go and smash that like button and let's dig right into it. Okay, so the first thing that you're really gonna have to figure out is essentially you're playing in a box, right? And the first thing that you really gonna have to figure out is what is your market, right? What is the market, how do you define it? Is there a three letter acronym for it? Are you going into a new market or are you going into an existing market and you have to differentiate accordingly. So you essentially have to define what is the market that we're in and specifically what's the important and urgent and frequent problem that we are solving. So this is probably the most important thing and I know it sounds simple but I dare you to just write it down and articulated succinctly over five bullet points, you start to realize there are nuances to this, right. And so the first thing you really wanna do is to get alignment and to really understand it, you really wanna narrow down on, okay, what's the market that we are actually serving? Once you've done that, the second question you have to answer for yourself is why? The why is what are the big macro trends? What are the big changes in the landscape? What are the big problems that exist today that's driving this market? Meaning, there's a whole group of people that are waking up every morning and saying, I gotta go solve this problem. Why does that problem exist? What's the big macro trend that's creating this problem? What is the opportunity that they're after? What is the big macro trend that is creating this opportunity? So it's almost like why does the market exist? What's the reason the thing about the thing they really wanna dig into and understand? And the best way I know how to actually answer this is to actually dig into macro trends to actually answer why this market exists. Once you do that, then you gonna understand, okay, this is the market, here are the people in it and every morning they wake up because this big thing is happening. And because this big thing is happening as soon as I talk about this big thing, then they're gonna recognize like, oh my God, that's a thing and that's either an opportunity or a risk that they have to go solve for and therefore they're gonna be interested in buying your software, right. So these two things alone can really clarify what it is that you're doing and what problem you need to be solving. Once you've done this, the next thing you really wanna figure out is your positioning. So generally when you are in a certain market, it really breaks down, every single market breaks down essentially into, especially in SAS, right? Everything that I talk about is specific to SAS and that's why we can move a lot faster 'cause I don't wanna get into theory but generally speaking with SAS businesses, you're either gonna have be part of the SMB market or you gonna be in the mid market or you're gonna be in the enterprise. And there's some cases where there's like a little enterprise and there's like a lower mid market and there's an upper mid. But generally speaking, SMB mid and enterprise. And whenever you're actually building out your product, you're essentially gonna be deciding whether you're going to be the low cost player or you are gonna be the premium player? So for example, take the CRM market. Salesforce is by no means the low cost player, there are ton of low cost CRMs that you can go into. They are the premium player, they also happen to be number one. So you're gonna have to decide depending on the market you're going into, how you actually position yourself. Do you wanna go service the small business market, the mid market or the enterprise? Do you wanna be the low cost player or the premium player? Now mind you, there's a natural flow with this, the more you go upper market and the more premium you go, the more complex the sale is gonna be. And the more low market you go and the more SMB you go, the more simple the sale is gonna be and rather self service. Now there's a catch to this, if you go really premium and you go into the enterprise, you have a complex sale but the chance is gonna be really low just by nature. If you go low cost and go into SMB, you're gonna get a bunch of people that probably go out of business a year later and therefore they're gonna churn like crazy so you're gonna have a high churn market. So there's natural trade-offs here. So you really wanna figure out how you think about the positioning and you're thinking about segment and in a way, you're thinking about how you're going to be pricing as well, right. Because that will determine a lot that you do around you go-to-market, we'll talk about that a little bit later. So those are the first three steps you're gonna have to go through to actually build out your go-to-market plan. Let me pause here for a second before I go into the final three steps. If you're starting to get this, if you're starting to see, okay, if we answer these strategic questions, we can have a much more defined go-to-marketing machine and therefore we can actually scale it faster, we can be more purposeful about it. Go and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm, also hit me with a yes in the comments below and share your thoughts on how you're gonna apply just these three steps so far into your go-to-market machine. If you have questions around this, also post them there, I'm pretty active on those common threads, I'll answer there as well. Okay, so with these first three steps, number four is not that you're looking at this market, looking at the segmentation and you're starting to understand how you're gonna differentiate, how are you gonna price it. The fourth thing that you're really gonna look at is competition. So let's type that. Now, generally speaking in each of these segments, whether it's SMB mid-market enterprise, there always tends to be a big competitor. So you'll wanna understand where the competitors lie in each of these segments. When you do that, you'll also start to understand who you can actually compete against and how you can differentiate against them effectively. So for example, if there's really well entrenched enterprise players, it's gonna be really hard as a startup to really catch up with them. So you may be better off in the SMB or the mid market but at the same time, if there's really low cost players that are servicing the market and there's like thousands of them and there's no way you're gonna differentiate yourself right over here so you may have to go into the mid market. This is the kinda decision making and strategic planning that you can do and you can ask yourself and map out like, all right, where are the competitors in the different segments, where is there an underserved segment where maybe the people that are willing to pay a little bit more and get white glove service but doesn't need all the bells and whistles, maybe there's like, there's an area here where it's underserved and there's no competitors and therefore we can go into that. That's what you really gonna be looking for. So that's number four, competition, you wanna dig more into that. Once you've actually mapped out the competition, you start to make some decisions around your positioning and your pricing and you start to say, all right. We know why this market exists, it's a big enough market, there's also a segment in the market where there's a gap so we can go into that. Then the next thing you're gonna really dig into is how to think about your messaging. What you're really gonna have develop is like, okay, let's just say, we're going after this pocket where there's an underserved market, right. The thing you've been really gonna have to answer is what is our value proposition, right. You're gonna have to answer what is our messaging, you're gonna have to answer and this kind of ties together like what is our strategic narrative? Now a lot of times I see founders skipping this step and just jumping right into the next step which I'll talk about in a second which is running ads, going inbound, going outbound, a lot of times I see founders, I ask them like, hey, what's your go-to-market strategy? They are like, we're gonna hire a content person who gonna do a lot of blogs. And I'm like that is not a strategy because what they haven't done, what they really haven't done is really thought through, what is the market? Why do we exist? What are the macro trends? What is the competition and what is our value prop? Like literally what are the words we're going to say to the person sitting across from me that is a potential buyer to say why we're different, the value we're gonna bring and why they should pay attention, right. These are all things that go into the value prop, the messaging, the strategic narrative. And you have to do this step ,you can't skip over this step 'cause if you go into the next step which is mobilizing all of this, without doing this, you can be firing blanks, you're not gonna have real bullets, you're not gonna have a real target. Step number five is actually developing your value prop, your messaging, your strategic narrative, that's what you absolutely must do. Once you've done that, the final thing that's really gonna come together is your go-to-market motion, right. Based on the segment of the market you're going after, based on where that stands based on what your messaging is, you're then gonna figure out, do we do inbound, right. Do we do outbound, do we do channels, do we do ads. You're gonna start to figure out how do we actually mobilize this narrative through these different channels and strategies that exist to actually mobilize a go-to-market machine. And that's gonna be your go-to-market motion, that's your step number six. So when you do all these things, in step one, you figure out the market, what is the important urgent frequent problem that you're solving for? Number two, what are the macro trends that's creating this problem? So we can communicate that effectively. Number three, where do we position, do we go into a certain segment of the market, are we the low price guys, are we the premium players. Number four, what is the competition based on that, number three and number four, you can kinda go back and forth and see where you fit and where is the opportunity to differentiate and serve an underserved part of the market? Number five, what is the messaging? How do you actually communicate this value, this differentiated value you're gonna bring to this underserved set of the market? And the number six, what is the actual go-to-market motion that you can follow to actually deploy all of this. You do these six things, do these things well. If you're gonna have an unstoppable go-to-market machine, you're gonna actually be able to drive scalable growth for your SAS business. So if you're seeing that, smash like button so that the YouTube algorithm knows that you got value from this video and also comment below with what thoughts you got. If you have some questions about each of these steps. Now, if you're watching this video to this point, then chances are you're building a SAS business and you need to actually build a scalable go-to-market machine. And one thing that may be happening is as you seeing these six steps, you're probably getting more questions, right. Like, well, how do we actually create our value prop or what does a great messaging look like or how should an inbound machine work and why would blogging just work and solve it for me, right. You maybe thinking about these things or even like, how do you find macro trends? So this is why I created my SAS go-to-market coaching program. Inside of this program, I give you one framework to follow that helps you actually build out a go-to-market machine step by step. The way it works is you get the training to actually deploy that all these pieces, right, and I give you a blueprint to follow. Every Wednesday, I host a CEO and founder call where we actually work through this together. And you also get strategy sessions with me where we work together to go deep dive into the some of the hardest strategic questions that you have to answer. You got all the support that you need to actually build out a scalable go-to-market machine and accelerate your growth. So if you're interested in learning more about that, go to tkkader.com/gtm or just follow the link below and link to it down below as well. When you go there and you'll learn more about this program and this program is specifically designed to help you incorporate these steps that I talked through here in a step by step process, you don't get overwhelmed so you don't have to waste time trial and erroring it, so you can actually execute as fast as possible. If you'd like what you see, all you need to do is fill out a little form that will get us on a strategy call. Now, the better the fit that you are to this program, the more success you're gonna get which is why I do a strategy call. Inside of the strategy call, I'll actually talk to you, it's just you and me, one-on-one. On a Zoom call, we'll actually talk about where your SAS business is, where you're looking to take it, what are the gaps, what your go-to-market machine looks like right now and based on that, I'll honestly tell you, we can help you grow faster. If we can, then you can join the program, that's how it works, it's a paid coaching program and we give you everything you need to build a scalable go-to-market machine. Now, if you got value from this video, be sure to smash that like button. If you are new and you haven't subscribed yet, be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon 'cause I bring you video like this every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday with the TK energy. And lastly remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK, I'll see you in the next episode or in strategy call, whichever one comes first. (mellow music) This is segment of the market where you don't have to cut that call so let me do that. We know, where do I? Let's go into--