Go-To-Market Strategy

The more alignment there is across departments, the better your go-to-market strategy can be.  Seems easy, right?  It's tough to get everyone to agree on everything, but it can be done!  At the Mass TLC Unconference on November 16th, I attended some very useful sessions.  Here's my take on one of them: Go-to-Market Strategy.  (Keep in mind, this is just an overview of what we talked about - each of these can be broken down and discussed in full detail!)

Alignment and agility is important - the process of creating and launching your product needs to be iterative.  I recommend having a group of beta testers in order to do this.  (More on this in the coming weeks...)

There are 5 areas you need to focus on when going to market:

• Product
• Marketing
• Sales
• Operations
• Community

By focusing on (and aligning) these areas, we can break down what we need to think about in order to launch a successful product.  

• What is the best user experience?  This should be defined by the first round of workflows and wire-frames for the product or service you're offering
• Financial strategy - do you have the budget to create and launch the product?
• Adoption and On-boarding process for your new customers
• Target customer (Channel), Vale proposition, and Pricing and sales model should be identified
• What's your method of delivery (platform), and can you do this with a partner or reseller?
• How do people find you?  And once they find you, what's the incentive to get someone to actually purchase?  Do you find your users or do they find you?
• Should you use a "freemium" model? (I'll do a post on this in the next few weeks!) 
• How are you connecting with your users?  Blogging, tweeting... are you creating buzz around the product?  Are you considered a though leader in the community?  

Some of the ways you can accomplish or answer some of the questions are...

• Incentivize your team to help - what do the customers they know about want?  What have they heard in the market?
• Ask your users if they want the feature, test the market -ask for feedback!
• Monitor usage patterns, engagement and feedback - the customer is King!
• Focus on the feedback loop - who's responsible to for closing the loop? This is a big one - we tend to gather feedback, but we never close the loop.  Make sure that you're creating products that your users want.  Ask them for help before and after you release!

And finally, focus on customer experience - particularly in SAAS/cloud markets where this is a key indicator for the success of your product.


What do your go-to-market plans look like?  How frequently are you talking to your customers?  What are your biggest pitfalls?  As product managers, we tend to have our hands in every aspect of go-to-market strategies - how do we keep focus?