What should your go-to-market plan include and how will we help you build or refine it?

Your go-to-market strategy should address how your customers will be acquired, on-boarded, retained and up-sold. It should also address how each client can be leveraged to penetrate other users, departments, functions and business units as well as referrals.

Your specific go to market strategies will provide a framework to guide the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly activities required to achieve your best sales strategies and fulfill the business objectives you seek. Your final go to market strategy should be constructed to meet or exceed your company’s goals and objectives. A well-constructed go-to-market strategy provides (ultimately) a blueprint for delivering a product or service to market and will force your organization to think through sales, marketing, business development practices, marketing materials, branding and your communication strategy.

Of course, the best go-to-market strategy is useless unless it produces your desired business outcomes. And unless you have most of the pieces of your strategy tested before you sit down and write it out, chances are pretty great that your plan will not work as created and result in the loss of a significant amount of time and money. Considering there is always the constant requirement to do more with less, meaning every resource must be optimized all the time, it’s a lot easier to work through a go-to-market plan for the first time in real time incrementally.

While it’s nice to believe if you write down a series of steps and act on them, your process will miraculously work and transform your situation, it’s far more likely to be incremental change based on the actions taken and evaluating their impact and continuing to refine and pivot until it falls into place. At Sales Maven, this is what we help you do. And equally, as a result, it is almost impossible to predict how much it will cost and how long will it take. What we can promise you is that we will work as both a strategist and hands-on-partner to realize your best judgment and ours into action that we together will measure and evaluate until we get it right.

As such, the best way to think about a go-to-market strategy is that it will only be useful to the extent you implement against it and evaluate its effectiveness and continue to implement against it and revise it into the actual plan that works. If you think about it as a work in progress, with weekly ‘highest purpose and best approach’ choices made, and then executed upon and evaluated from week to week, the likelihood is much greater that significant progress will be made and begin to become a solid road-map for less of an investment of both your money and time.

This is also why we intentionally work with you for a small number of hours initially per week. So that like a scientist, we can revise/ tweak your process from week to week at the lowest possible cost to you.

So where do we begin efficiently?

The best place to start is right where you are which the following questions will answer:

1. What is the current state of your business?
2. What are your current channels to market and tactics to reach them? What is working and what isn’t?
3. Where do you want to be? What is the desired state for the business in 3,6 or 12 months?
4. What has to happen in-between to get you there?

This is all the ‘big picture’ you really need to create a starting framework to measure against.

The most basic first question we need to ask is, are we fishing or selecting our targets? Which approach is best to start and why?

Creating a reliable sales acquisition process evolves from a series of actions, that when executed in the ‘right order’, result in a predictable quantifiable number of leads which turn into a definable number of sales.

While the essence of a go-to-market plan begins with identifying the right leads and scripting out what you believe is the right approach to hook them with your pitch, efficient and effective go-to-market plans connect the organization’s strategy to the social-emotional needs of your customers.

People buy because they need something that is often not initially rationalized into your (intellectual/logical) value proposition despite it in-the-end being the reason they buy. Your go-to-market strategy and tactics must address first the pain point for the customer to hook them, and then show them the value it provides to justify the financial decision to buy.

The keys to a successful go-to-market strategy include:

Identifying target customers with a high propensity to purchase.  This requires more than just identifying the type of buyer. Who is actively in pain and why? At what stage in their development are they in? Are they well poised to purchase your product now or is it just nice to have? What is the mindset of your buyer? People buy from those they know like and trust. Trust can be built quickly but the desire to purchase or engage often isn’t a rational choice.

Only when you have connected socially-emotionally with your potential buyer are they likely to be interested in learning more about the value proposition your product or service offers which will help them justify the purchase throughout your sales process.

This is the most direct approach to building a solid foundation for a winning selling strategy and ultimately a ‘go to market’ recipe you can deliver to your selling team and measure their success and ingenuity against.

Read more relevant blog post:  How to Launch a Startup and Keep the Cash Flowing in 5 Easy Steps