Go-To-Market Made Simple

Dear GTM Strategies, welcome to a very special edition of this podcast where I am going to have a solo episode. I'm very excited about this no framework that I invented. It's called GTM Power Hour for now. And the thing is that, you know, the book has 350 pages. And especially when I'm talking to Generation Z, they are like, "I don't really want to read this. Can you say it to me like long story short?" And that was a very interesting challenge that I faced twice in the last week. The first instance that was going on was when I was working in the region with Swiss entrepreneurial fund. And I had 32 mentorship sessions in a single week. That was very stressful for me because, of course, I had to study all the pitch decks. But I also had a very special task to provide really tangible added value in a single hour. And I was thinking really hard how to structure this vast knowledge of go-to-market into just like digestible chunks and present it in an hour. And the second instance was even more interesting. And the situation was that we were at art exhibition at University of Industrial Design. And there were people, there was a group of people that asked me, "Okay, so we read your book." Like we were trying to read it, but a lot of the things were just outside our domain knowledge. Could you say to us in a really simple terms, "What is go-to-market all about?" And this is how we played it out. The first question that I asked them is just like, "What is your business idea? What are you thinking about?" And they explained that they are thinking about portable surf. And I was like, "Wow, portable surf, how original does that exist already?" And they were like, "No, I don't think so." Which was interesting. And then, "Okay, if their idea is portable surf, what is their target audience?" So, whom are they trying to sell these to? And of course, naturally, the answer was to people just like us, to young people, students that love to travel, that are very eager to surf new beaches and are living on a budget. So, whenever they said on a budget, I was like, "Really wondering what is the existing alternative right now?" And I went ahead and asked them, "How is their target audience?" So, people just like them solving this problem right now. And they mentioned to me that they can either rent a surf, which is approximately a couple of tens of dollars a day, maybe 50, or that they can travel with their own surfboard, and that gets very complicated when it comes to logistics, so they are limited. And I dive deeper. So, I was like, "Okay, if renting the surfboard started at like 50 a day or something like that, what is the average budget per day? And how many times a year do you go and actually travel for your surfing exclusions?" And they were, "Okay, maybe we go three or two times a year, and we maybe surf three days out of the trips that we are having there." And I was wondering, "What is the price of a normal surf?" And they're explaining that it is very, very, very different, but it starts from $300 and goes, "Ap, ap, ap, ap." So, we have a pricing anchoring here, a typical pricing anchoring. Their audience is already solving this problem by renting these surfboards. And in the other hand, we have this physical product that they could be potentially dragging to the airports. And we came down to the conclusion that this problem could be valued to $100 to, let's say, $300, but that's a stretch, so maybe $200. That would be a approximate price point in which we would be thinking about. And they were quite happy with the discussion so far, so I went further. And I asked them, "Okay, you have this audience of students who like to surf and travel for surfing trips." So, where would we find them? Where would we start conversation with them? And immediately they said, "Tik Tok, then we had like Instagram, a couple of groups when they are coordinating and exchanging this information." Where they could be surfing about. And that was pretty much clear to them, so no zero complication whatsoever. Okay, then we have very little things to do still. They are very solid on their current understanding of a problem space. So, the only problem is how much would it cost them to develop this? And they were saying, "We have no idea, which is logical." But then I was diving deeper a little bit more and say, "Do you think that this problem of portable surfs is so interesting and so painful that people would prepare for this?" Where a little discount or just like to be part of a new movement to support you guys. And they were like, "Probably sure. There is Kickstarter, there are gazillion other platforms on which they could be pre-selling." So, there was kind of an inception of their go-to-market strategy, right? And I was thinking it doesn't have to be super complicated. You have to know basically just a couple of things. Product, you are already probably kind of centered on products, so we don't touch that a lot. And it comes to go-to-market strategy if the product is kind of semi-developed or ready. This is a different beast to tackle. So, the questions that are remaining is, "Who would be the best target audience? What is the price point and how would we charge for this?" Then where to find people that we can sell to and nevertheless, what has to be true in order to validate this market? So, for the group of students, pre-sales seems to be the bottleneck because otherwise they will not have the money to develop this. And that was pretty much it, right? Doesn't sound much complicated. Okay? Mission accomplished. Case solved. All right folks, I'm taking a quick breather. 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There were really so many different business models and my regular framework, which I use at my GTM bootcamp and with private mentorship sessions, is very centered in four different areas. The four comprehensive areas that we tackle are one ICP, how to choose your ideal customer market and oftentimes we have to go with early customers before we can reach ideal to just build the references and the traction and sometimes even financial background in order to tackle what is actually our ideal customers later on. The second thing is messaging and positioning and this is so problematic especially for technical founders that I work with because oftentimes we are just like features and this is this technology and this is how this backend works and I'm like what is in it for me why are you not telling me stuff which is actually relevant and makes me care. So I kind of started to think about this positioning and messaging model as first of all, it's our job to develop UVP meaning unique value proposition or in simple words, the promise that you deliver to your audience, so what can you promise based on your differentiated features. The second one is USB unique selling proposition, why you instead of somebody else and when it comes to positioning and messaging, it's really important that it's not done in isolation. We are always positioning against something or someone and this is where this type of market research really has to be on point and kicking and fit insights in order to come up with informed hypotheses of what your UVP and QSP will be instead of shooting blanks, yes we think we are all in one solution for distributed networks. The third model is pricing and offering and I very much like this definition in a way if a product is a medium that creates value to the target audience, then pricing is the mechanism how we capture part of this value and price is just attack the target audience. We put on it in order to have a fair exchange. Good enough. Okay. I like to center my pricing and offering work in Just like this concept of value metrics to start think about the value which is being exchanged between My product and the target audience and what would be fair not saying the most but fair amount to start with Value capturing and whenever it comes to this usually come and this top of the mind You know flow schools that are in go to market So one of them is that first of all you need to deliver at least 10x of added value in more saturated markets Often this number is even 100x but yeah, the product that is competing against established competitive alternatives Have to be really really really good to make our target audience care that they would consider the switch The other thing that we could do, and this is like me deviating a little bit from the pricing talk But whenever we have an established competitor, there is some sort of sub market, which is underserved For example, if we have big CRM such as Hapspot or sales force Then there must be a certain vertical such as outsourcing companies technology development companies which have certain needs But the large vendor is unable or unwilling to meet them because it just doesn't make sense for them Right, and that would be a very interesting entry point for us when it comes to Just like our go-to-market work and then okay with pricing and offering I could be going on forever forever forever forever Because it's one of my favorite subject But the same principle is apply you are always compared against how much an alternative would cause them right and Alternative sometimes is for them to do nothing. So you have to pitch the opportunity costs or just like loss benefits and Alternative can be to do something like DIY to do it manually with a spreadsheet and then you can pitch just like the time savings And these numbers are supremely important not only for pricing But also for positioning because we as a new player on market We have to have a very convincing use case to reduce this pre-purchase risk or even inertia to do something in the first place And let's but not least the fourth model that I take my people through our go-to-market motions Motions are often mistaken with channels, but channels are a little bit different because each motion for example Inbound can consist of multiple different channels For example if we say that we are doing inbound meaning content organic, we could be doing this on LinkedIn We can be doing this on Instagram. We can be doing this on substake. You know exactly what I mean, right? So the motion is a broader and deeper concepts and just to repeat I define seven go-to-market motions The first one is inbound as there's explain the second one is outbound So that we actually proactively outreach to people and write them DMs and emails That's nice. The third one that I'm very excited about as well is paid because if you have a bit to see or a really really really cheaper alternative like even in B2B that means that sometimes it just pays off to buy a couple of Google ads or Meta ads and do an A/B test of messaging or audiences and you will have very good and very very very fast feedback loops in order to make the go-to-market decisions with confidence Then we have Account-based marketing. Account-based marketing is very very very similar to outbound, but it's a little bit different because we focus on Less prospects. We have like smaller lead lists and we handle them in a little bit more of a long term, right? So if an outbound campaign would be like me doing the database of 500 companies that are potential fit and just like Leading them through a campaign that would preferably get me a meeting or just like warn them up to take my product for a free spin Then in ABM I would be acting a little bit differently. I would select a very narrow list of decision-makers and I would either comment on their posts I would connect with them on the events. I would just like develop their relationship over a longer period of time In order to then one day be eligible to have a sales ask. Cool. Then when it comes to go-to-market motions We have of course product-led growth favorite Favorite channel of many technical people that I work with. That means that there is a free Or just like inexpensive version of product to test first to be delivered the value and then afterwards people upgrade to Let's say more advanced packages and a lot of virality. A lot of very good scalability can happen if you nail this notion But the whole concept is just like try it before you buy it or just like ask small until you expand on a bigger ask This is the logic that we are pursuing here. Then we have partner shapes. If somebody else already owns your audience and have good relationship with them That means that you can team up with them and actually promote your product or service in partnerships with them There are many types of partnerships like the most no-brainer one is affiliate so when the sales happens Partner gets a chunk of these sales and there are even like broader technology comp partnerships when you are co-developing a product Did we forget something? I don't think we did. I think that we were comprehensive. Oh, there is one more. Sorry. There are some community And communities are super important especially with tech products And also if you recall our surfing example, right? There were communities in which people were actively talking about the problem space that we are solving With this portable surf and yeah, this is where the very very very deep attention of people is But whenever you are considering communities just like don't go into them and spam your link because that won't get you far It can even get you blocked try to add value before you make these Commercial attempts into the group or pre-arrange it with admins in the group in order to have a successfully campaign there Then when it comes to communities, of course, you can build your own ones But the thing is that it's much faster to penetrate into the existing communities If you are just starting out because people are already there and it's not a cold star problem Cool, that was for the GTM motions whenever we are selecting them there usually two to three that work best for each company And in order to figure it out which one are they we either need to talk with a target audience or and Do competition research, but also rely on your strengths a little bit For example, if I am very good at video production for example, I would More likely being climbed towards doing either video selling or video ads or something like that Then doing some sort of growth motions that are complete question mark to me for example productlets Which is something that I might not have in the firm as an internal competence If I don't hire any developers this simple like this Okay Then when it comes to go-to-market motions, there is another fallacy to it It's fear of missing out there is always another channel there are YouTube shorts There is something new and shiny and people are posting that it's working very well for them But you have to quote yourself very accountable all the time by just like saying go where the audience is Give it a shot stay with it for at least like two to three months Till you get better and then only then can you really validate if a certain growth market motion was a success for you Or if you should continue to search for the one that will be a perfect match for you Okay, and then when it comes to just like the new template you kind of grasp that this Initial framework those four elements are a little lengthy and you cannot grasp them in an hour So yeah, I went ahead and I developed a new template in Miro Which is let's say a snapshot of a business and most important assumptions that we need to test Immediately on our go-to-market journey What I love about this personally is that I try to avoid buzzwords as much as I could Whenever there is something which is more difficult to understand I put a comprehensive subset clicking there because by now we have a little library of explanations What is going on and what is like very interesting about this as well is that people can south on board on to that because Prior to that not only did I help people go for the concepts, but I also recorded the onboarding sessions for this And there was homeworks, but with this one I feel very confident that people just like do it after watching one of our tutorials and again it's very good for our science because we are on the mission to change at least 10,000 growth trajectories of growth market companies this year and we are only 65% there so far so we definitely need new tools, better tools in order to make it happen and exceed the target. And the other thing that I found very fascinating about the new go-to-market framework so just like this power hour, one hour snapshot of the business it that it makes you really state the objective and develop a plan which is comprehensive yet it has stages because oftentimes when we discuss go-to-market people get a little bit overwhelmed meaning that wow there are so many things to do how can I get 5,000 paying customers I have like only five at the moment I don't know the journey everything is burning and I'm trying to be okay so I created this five stages framework of what you need to do what you need to demonstrate in business I always say confidence is evidence and whenever we are talking about go-to-market strategy I believe that we need five pieces of evidence the first one is just like proof of concept if your product works meaning that we are either getting free users or beta testers or something like that to just like get some data in our product analytics that we have preset before because we are smart decision makers the second one is proof of monetization so not only will people use it but we are looking for first inception of a business model so can we capture some of the value which is being created for the product is the next question to tackle the third one is just like the proof we are searching for a proof if we can arrange at least one scalable go-to-market motion so that we are not searching for the next customer all the time with testing five different things that we could be doing but that we have for example an outbound process an advertising process a partnership process or organic demand generation process that predictably brings lead to our business so that we can really focus and structure our growth better okay the next one the fourth one is proof of sustainable business model that means that we can create sufficient demand and capture enough value in order to create a healthy baseline for our business to grow and I'm very very very big on this one because I come from Europe and here the majority of companies are bootstrapping or they have very limited investment opportunities that's why this profitability this break even and not burning money for 15 years like over it which is nothing wrong with this I mean it's a sound business model for them but yeah not everybody has this opportunity so proof of sustainable business model I think definitely has to be there and less but not least after you have let's say dominated a certain market which is important to you so the one that you chose your beachhead segment that we can talk about later on the other thing is that you need to prove that you can open new markets as well and you will gradually grow and evolve and reach all these customers that you had to say no focus mission critical focus only before and create even bigger and sounder business cool talking about the beachhead strategy I think it's one of the most important concepts which are often misunderstood in go to market everybody's thinking like okay I build this cool email marketing software and especially if you are working in a very saturated landscape it is very unlikely that you can just go and compete against the big ones just because you're cheaper right instead you should be focused on a market which has a burning pain point relatively high or just like decent willingness to pay high probability that they will recommend each other this solution that you can rely on some recommendations and referral growth then what else is cool if the market is actually healthy and growing it's growing and less but not least the proximity your proximity to the process and we were talking about just like this surf example before and I really like how these group of students just like told me to people like us because that means that they know the problem inside out and they also have a little bit of network that they can sell those couple of first prototypes that will probably not work just perfectly yet but nevertheless this proximity cannot be stressed enough it's really important that you understand and have access to the customer segments that we are addressing first so that we can have faster sales cycles as well as good feedback loops so that we can learn for them okay cool from this first segment which is KAKA early adopters of our solution we go to the next one and it's very important to realize that we are searching for an adjacent segment what does that mean that there is an overlap between the first and the second segment and that we can actually use references that we created in the first wave of go to market to create good solid sales and marketing materials for the second one and also account on some natural recommendations that will happen from one segment to another then we are stronger and we can play a little bit more on our go to market journey with segments that are right now a little bit further away but for most companies it's very very very difficult to focus right to just like say no from now on my target market are going to be 40 I don't know universities in the UK and I'm gonna send IoT devices for smart universities for them because visions are bigger and there is fear of missing out and we feel every day that competitors are beating us and you know how it is but hey always remember that some best of class companies such as Facebook, Figma and even HubSpot grew segment per segment right there were these early adopters beachhead strategy that was very crucial in the beginning for example if you watch any sort of Facebook related movies you know that this was in Facebook's case just like Harvard and then other Ivy colleges the next thing that you probably don't know for Figma is that their beachhead segment were gaming development studios this is what I learned from interviewing their ex-head of growth asus and yeah when we are talking about beachhead strategies I mean trade-offs are always painful but we have to make them and we have to be focused in the beginning because otherwise we can spread ourselves to team and we won't go as far especially if we are competing with much bigger companies okay if you have any questions about beachhead you probably realize that this is another subject that I love to talk about for years so what else is really really really important and kind of undervalued on your go-to-market journey beachhead strategy we mentioned early customer profile we mentioned value pricing definitely go where the audience is as a general rule of thumb we mentioned and five stages of GTM that Rome wasn't built in a day and so will not be your company is kind of true so it's good time to just like transition into a couple of let's say misconceptions a couple of mistakes that go to market companies do on a frequent basis go to market companies I mean companies that are engaged in go-to-market journey it's not a specific type of companies anyways anyways whether the common mistakes when we are going to market first one is just like mistakenly thinking that launch is go-to-market and including your marketing sales and product people way too late after the product is overdeveloped already don't start thinking about go-to-market when you are launching do it before because everything in go-to-market evolves and revolves around your target audience selection and you really have to do research here validate it like sometimes you will have to do wait list other times you can co-create with a client and they pay you for value delivery in the forum of service or productize service even and it's just so important to make these decisions with confidence and the sooner you start generating evidence the more likely it is that you are going to have a very good and informed decision instead of leap of fate lucky guess if that specific target audience idea is the right one. Cool, the second one is just like scatter attentions that we are acting as golden retrievers who are chasing the squirrel that every time that we hear another idea, another channel, we just get incredibly hyped (laughs) and we go chase another shiny object. Instead we should really, really, really be focused on what we have already committed and do the necessarily amount of reps before we get better. Talking about this, I also noticed that a lot of companies are kind of half-assing go-to-market strategy, meaning that they are doing it as a pet project as something that is done by somebody or a group of people when if they have time. So instead of going all in and following structure set of steps that they are just like, "Oh, next week we launch. "We really have to make some social media posts. "Let's go, go, go, and do some copywriting. "Maybe AI can help us." And I mean, it can work, but I rather wouldn't bet my business on that. So yeah, just like lazy execution is definitely not something that I'm keen on when it comes to go-to-market. I prefer to have a solid plan understood by everybody done at the peace of mind state, really when you can think clearly instead of reacting to some panic sequences of events. That's important and the fourth one is just like this. How does it not inability, but I would literally say mindset of scarcity, right? Because if you feel that you might be missing up an opportunity on another segment on that there is some money to be grabbed if you cater like additional segment with that more feature, then you are not really following your product vision and roadmap, right? You are just like randomly chasing some opportunities and your overall product over a longer period of time might end up being a Frankenstein of certain features that were partially pleasing to some people, but as a whole, they don't really work. So it's very important to just like stay on top, stay in charge and make sure that you are moving towards certain directions, certain visions, certain objectives instead of complying with every opportunity that comes your way. Because the bigger you get, the more learning, the more frequent these opportunities will get and again, focus is all about saying no and saying no has to have a common nominator and that, for me, is your vision of how this business, how this product, how this industry really evolves. And whenever we are in this dilemma, if we optimize short-term or long-term, of course, sometimes there is panic mode and we have to do something, we have to be realistic in thinking about this, but whenever possible, try to just like envision how this influences the overall, the long-term development of the product or a service that you have. So is it mission critical or not? And I'm saying mission, meaning the objective that you have set in your go-to-market journey. Opa, that was really, really, really intriguing conversation with myself, let's just like hop on another section which I like very much and when it comes to this simple template and simplification of this process that I have recently done in order to be able to help even more people without like going on the course myself with them. The question, the logical question, the critical question is like, do these things work? Do you have like any evidence, any results of people who have been DIYing this? And yes, I have a bunch of launch stories, how people got thousands of registrations, but then you must be thinking, show me the money. And that I can do too. So I just like recently was working with a company in a very complex industrial software space, their average deal size is 50k. And we did narrow down this spectrum of go-to-market motions that they had in mind that they could be working on into outbound alone for now with just like using personal profiles and a PDF presentation of the product, not even full-fetched landing page. So we did a little list of 200 targets. We booked 36 meetings out of this. We converted 16 clients and that was an 800k project by narrowing things down and doing what's mission-critical, very focused, very, very, very intentionally. The second thing, which was brilliant and kind of immediate tweak, was just like this technology AI product that shifted their target audience, right? So the initial version of the product was that we would offer this as a builder's platform where people can create their own AI solution, no code, but the thing is that the company was not in the best financial state to actually pull off the strategy of just like going and investing in the acquisition without geoportizing that people who are working there would have to also work on other projects. So the development will not be fast enough. So we just like did this mini pivot and we catered a couple of enterprise clients with a similar solution that actually fed their product roadmap so that they have some more runway and they can focus on product development full time now. I'm very happy whenever it comes to this intercepts of personal stories and live visions as well as go to market journey because at the end of the day, I feel that this is not only business, these are people's lives and quality of people's lives that we are talking about. And the third one is just like enterprise-y as well. And there was a company who does something which is not very exciting to share. Podcasts not because it would be a shady industry but just like because it's a very super niche product in a very old industry and they were selling it through resellers, right? They collected leads and then they only were selling these through local partners. Instead, as the generations are shifting and not everybody's like super capy to have sales meeting with a sales rep or even like company visit to have something done which will cause them 10K maybe. They converted to let's say a hybrid product lead growth and a little bit more of a direct channel and they like reduced customer acquisition costs for. I cannot say you how much exactly in monetary terms but let's say that it caused them five times less to acquire a customer now with a similar LTV, practically the same one. So we are very happy about this direct channel in their business. We have to test how scalability is. But yeah, when we were talking go-to-market motions with them, they were very fixed and they were very afraid what will happen with resellers with partners, right? But instead, we went and selected an underserved segment again. So the beachhead segment of somebody who was not okay with current resellers on boarding, we focused the direct campaign exclusively to them and we managed to pull this off which was super cool. Okay, so that was it. Is there anything else that we forgot to mention? I don't think so. Oh, I got a cool, cool, cool question from like the guy who was helping me prep for this podcast by just like suggesting me a couple of questions. So as a cool down, I shall answer the question. If I had to choose a song that best represents your approach to go-to-market strategies, what would it be and why? Okay, every time I'm set or like nervous in the rant of business presentations or something like that, I have this horrible song which is win-win-win-win. I think it's from Kanye West or some other rapper. I have no idea, but it's intriguing. It just hypes me so much. And I feel in go-to-market, we are always winning, right? We are winning, we are learning, we are getting better. And I just wanna keep this mindset, you know? Because, you know, you get a lot of things wrong because they are assumptions before they are testing. And I just like to keep this mentality, this curiosity that we are one step closer to the right decision that we are making. And that's very good for, that's a self-management. And nevertheless, I don't know, it just makes the world more fun if you feel like a detective or just like a space cowboy on a mission to figure something out. Because at the end of the day, we are tackling unstructured challenges, right? And unstructured challenges are super interesting because chat GPT doesn't have the answer for them yet and neither can you find it on the internet. Sure, you can go and copy a couple of other videos. companies but that's not proprietary winning strategy. So every winning strategy has this inception of an element that makes it unique. So play on your strengths, find out what the enemies weaknesses are. I try to dress them as well. And nevertheless, just like keep the mentality that you are never losing, you are always winning because you're learning and you are closer to product market fit than with the less decision that you are making. And that's it from my side. Please take this template for a spin. I think you'll enjoy it. I even recorded a one hour demo. I thought it's gonna be five minutes but then I got very into this. So I will show you around how I'm using it on a real example and hopefully you will find it as valuable and as enjoyable as people did at my mentorship session. Take care and good luck going to market. Hey, I very much appreciate that you listened to this episode. If you liked it definitely let me know on LinkedIn, hit like, subscribe and whatever platforms you are using. But more importantly, if you are hungry for more go-to-market, tangible go-to-market secrets, you are welcome to subscribe to my sub-stack. I send it out every first day. It's for free and usually it consists of three or four different pieces. The first one is always the example. So what was actually going on in the real world. Then we have a couple of like mental models, tools, frameworks, mood boards, mirror boards, whatever in order to provide you some tangible value and less but not least I am so looking forward to hearing from you and just like make sure that we are producing content which is resonating with you and answering the questions that you have. If you want definitely connect on LinkedIn and as I always say, let's go to market.