A great GTM strategy optimizes market pull (buying) instead of focusing JUST on sales push (selling). Our Go to Market strategy framework has been designed with that goal in mind to introduce new products or accelerate revenue with existing ones.

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In case you just need a list of steps, here's what you're looking for:

1. Assess and prioritize growth opportunities (potential segments and applications).
2. Profile the target segments by understanding their motivations to buy.
3. Define the complete solution that will help you win (product).
4. identify potential partners and allies.
5. Create, select or prepare marketing and sales channels.
6. Incentivize your channels & find the right the pricing.
7. Analyze your most formidable competitor. Differentiate.
8. Align product, sales, and marketing teams.
9. Create positioning and messaging platforms.
10. Build industry-wide awareness, influence, and optimize market pull -- aka launch or position in the market.

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Let's dig deeper into those steps.

1. Assess and prioritize growth opportunities

Assess the market opportunities, validate and prioritize use cases and market segments to focus your Go to Market strategy, sales, and marketing efforts. Decide which opportunity to focus on before developing your Ideal Customer Profile.

Unlike popular beliefs, we have observed that market size is not the most profitable way to assess opportunities. There are other nine more critical factors to evaluate the success of product commercialization. The top opportunities are located in the middle of 3 fundamental dimensions:

• Ease of buying factors — how willing is the market to purchase from you now?
• Ease of selling factors — how ready is your selling side to win the opportunity?
• Organizational effectiveness factors — how ready is your organization to build a strong market position by starting with this opportunity?

Other Key questions to answer:

• What customer segments or use case is more accessible through the existing sales channels?
• What customer segments fit best with the solution you provide? Which ones have a compelling reason to buy?
• What segment allows us to build a market leadership position?
• What segment has the most straightforward buying decision process?
• What segment leverages your company's strengths and differentiators?
• In what segment can we expect fewer competitors in the short term? Why?
• What is the customer segment or application in which you can develop a complete product offering attributes more quickly?
• What are the barriers to the success of the different opportunities?

2. Profile target segment, Jobs-To-Be-Done, and motivations

Once you have assessed and prioritized the market opportunities, describe the identifiable economic group of potential customers within that top growth opportunity. Ensure that the target customer has a compelling reason to buy the new product as soon as possible and describe the specific motivation that will drive your product to succeed with them. Here's where you define the so-known as Ideal Customer Profile.

Design the scenarios of the most promising opportunities by aggregating patterns of step 1. Each scenario or segment must answer most of the following questions:

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Questions to answer:

• What are the industry, size, and geographical boundaries of your target markets?
• What is the market maturity phase of the market category of your product? Why?
• Who are the target end-users? Who is the buying Decision-Making Unit? Who influences the decision? Who triggers the decision?
• What motivates the target customers (or buyer persona) and economic decision to buy your product? What do they want to achieve? What is their Job-To-Be-Done?
• What are the target customers struggling with (pains)? What is making to act on this now? What outcomes are they looking for?
• What is your buyer's journey?
• How and why your product helps potential customers to reduce pain, perform the job to be done and achieve the desired outcomes? What is the transformation that your product provides?
• How is your core solution better suited for the target market than the competitive alternatives or the compensating behaviors?

2.1 Select the next target markets

Identify an adjacent niche market or use case that extends your growth after the initial target segment.

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Questions to answer:

• What is the adjacent niche market or use case that extends the growth you make in the initial customer segment?
• What adjacent niche market should we prioritize? Why? How does it fit with your strengths and weaknesses?

3. Define the complete product offering [whole product offering] to win

Determine what makes the product offering "complete and compelling" in the eyes of the target audience. The complete product is the comprehensive set of attributes and core services/products the target audience requires to achieve their compelling reason to buy. Your core product/technology must be augmented with a variety of services, intangible attributes, and complimentary products to become complete depending on the stage of the market your product is in. Feel free to use our Low-Risk Recipe™ framework with the 12 key elements that drive low-risk perception and encourage buying of technology products:

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Questions to answer:

• What do the prospective customers ask about offering that your company doesn't have or can't provide?
• Who or what else needs to be involved in a project to deliver total value for the end-user (e.g., a sales consulting service, predefined visualizations, integration with other tools, support service...)?
• What does the user or decision-maker complain about? What are the hesitation points we heard from prospective customers?
• What kind of organizational and business model adjustments are needed to accomplish product completeness?
• How would sales approach a proposal of a complete solution?  What should be included in the Total Cost of Ownership in your proposals?
• Is now the right time to build a complete and low-risk solution regarding market maturity, or should we focus on building core product features?
• What other tools do the target customer use that complement your product?
• What offering attributes should we add to your solution and offering to improve your competitive advantage?

4. Identify potential partners and strategic alliances

It is rare for a single organization to deliver every element of a complete solution. Usually, the only way to satisfy this market requirement is to identify and then recruit the necessary partners and allies. It includes finding the right partners to act as familiar selling channels.

Questions to answer:

• What partners and allies would help make your technology/product more appealing to customers? What partners and allies would help make the solution more complete by adding offering attributes your company can't provide?
• Why should existing or new partners support your product introduction and selling? What would be a compelling, unique value proposition for partners?
• What partner and allies would help amplify reach?
• What other partnerships should we leverage to complete your solution, support a product introduction or reintroduction process, improve competitive advantage and drive more revenue?

5. Create, select and prepare sales + marketing channels

Identify and prepare the best distribution channels to drive awareness to the market and sell the complete solution. This step could somehow overlap with the last one because you may have identified channel partners.

Questions to answer:

• What channels, teams, and individuals should be involved and ready for the launch? (in case of launches)
• Who else should be involved in launching the solution to the infrastructure and maintaining those relationships?
• What marketing channels should we leverage?
• What should be the sales strategy and sales organization approach to fit the customer needs? How does it affect the direct sales team?
• How should your sales team approach sales enablement to sell a complete solution?
• How should your sales process be adapted to fit your target audience's motivations and risk perception?
• What enablement collaterals do your sales team and partners need to introduce the solution?

6. Incentivize your distribution channels

Help your customer perceive the high value of your product and pay what it's worth. The suppliers, the partners, and the sales channel need to be rewarded appropriately for selling to the target customer. Your pricing strategy needs to reflect these requirements.

Questions to answer:

• What is the economic impact and time to value of your product?
• What is the value driver for the customer? What would be a good pricing strategy approach?
• What is the Total Cost of Ownership of implementing your complete solution?
• What would be a good incentive for partners? How should we structure the pricing details and incentives for the different channels to drive more deals through partnerships?
• What would be the right incentive plan for sales to sell your new product or improve your existing product sales? What is the right balance of current product sales versus new products?
• How to structure the channel and sales team to balance new products and existing product sales? What would be the P&L impact?
• How to maximize the customer's lifetime value? What other revenue streams can we attach to the new product to maximize the customer's lifetime value?

7. Analyze the most formidable competitor. Differentiate

Assess the competitive market and identify the "most dangerous" competitive solution. Analyze their capabilities and look for ways (in addition to trademarks and patents) to develop and maintain a competitive advantage.

Questions to answer:

• What is the economic impact and time to value of your product?
• What is the value driver for the customer? What would be a good pricing strategy approach?
• What is the Total Cost of Ownership of implementing your complete solution?
• What would be a good incentive for partners? How should we structure the pricing details and incentives for the different channels to drive more deals through partnerships?
• What would be the right incentive plan for sales to sell your new product or improve your existing product sales? What is the right balance of current product sales versus new products?
• How to structure the channel and sales team to balance new products and existing product sales? What would be the P&L impact?
• How to maximize the customer's lifetime value? What other revenue streams can we attach to the new product to maximize the customer's lifetime value?

8. Create positioning + messaging platforms

Proper messaging allows your product and company to be seen as a credible provider of products and services to the target market by addressing the concerns of the different kinds of technology adopters with a set of 4 different messages: technology messages, product messages, market messages, and company messages. It is critical to communicate the right combination of messages to each layer in the market infrastructure to help them position your product.

Questions to answer:

• What are your competitive strengths and differentiators according to the market perception?
• How do the existing customers and potential customers refer to your product's benefits when they talk about them? What words do customers or prospective customers use to describe the struggles your product is intended to solve?
• What would be a compelling value proposition for our target market?
• Why do you win or lose deals? What should you improve in your positioning and messaging to increase conversions and win more?
• What is the right balance regarding positioning messages (technology, product, market, or company messages)? What kind of messages does the market demand according to the phase of technology adoption?

9. Align product, sales and marketing teams

The best Go to Market strategy plans fail because of a lack of leadership, organizational and corporate strategy alignment. The bigger your organization, the more complex to drive alignment. Make sure to set up cross-organizational systems and a Go to Market strategy committee to ensure alignment, manage expectations, and follow up on the success factors.

Questions to answer:

• Who should we get involved in the process to make this plan successful across all the Go to Market functions?
• How do we define "success"? What key performance indicators (or OKRs) will you measure in the short and long-term? Are these objectives cross-organizational and committed by all your Go to Market leaders?
• How do we get everyone involved and ensure that all the different Go to Market functions are represented in this plan and agree to pursue it?
• What follow-up process and cadence should we set up to ensure to meet the expected deadlines and drive organizational alignment toward this Go to Market plan objectives?
• How do we ensure that this Go to Market strategy aligns with the corporate-level strategy? Who should we talk to? What are other corporate-level growth efforts?
• What needs to be in place regarding marketing strategy, sales, and product readiness to launch the solution or accelerate revenue?
• What other business model tweaks should we implement to accelerate the acquisition of new customers and expand the revenue in existing customers? How does it impact the business plan?

10. Amplify your reach by enabling market infrastructure communications

Every market has a set of ecosystem or infrastructure players between your product/brand and your prospective customers. 10% of the market players in the ecosystem influence the other 90%.

The next pyramid represents a part of the market infrastructure in the Incident Management software space in the USA:

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You don't position your product, the market does it — influenced by your market ecosystem of players.

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The best way to help the market position your product in a way that highlights your strengths is by leveraging your market ecosystem or infrastructure. Build relationships with the top 10% of players in the ecosystem, address their concerns about your product and nurture them with custom marketing assets that they can share with the rest of the market.

Understanding the market ecosystem forces and building relations with the top 10% ecosystem influencers is critical to increasing Word-Of-Mouth to position your product, optimize market pull, drive influence and accelerate your revenue.

Once you have your go-to-market strategy, follow these steps to introduce your product:

1. Map your market infrastructure of players. Follow the pyramid and define the layers and individuals that compose your market infrastructure. Use Linked, Google and Sparktoro as your tools for this step.
2. Research each player.
3. Create an outreach and content strategy for each layer in the pyramid. Use this Miro board to facilitate a team working session.
4. Assign and owner to develop a relationship.
5. Ask for feedback from the players. Fix their concerns and get back with your fixes in terms of product and messaging.
6. Keep the relationship warm. As you develop the relationship you may want to: co-author papers / posts, co-speak in events, go live with them, contribute in industry reports...

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By building relationships with your market infrastructure or ecosystem you can expect the next benefits:

• Amplify reach by incentivizing WOM communications through these influencing players.
• Build brand and product credibility by having these 3rd party players communicating your positioning messages.
• Reduce CAC with a market that knows when to buy from you and why.
• Reduce sales-cycles through well-known references.
• Build a lasting advantage with the network effect your market infrastructure creates.
• Validate and improve product and go-to-market strategy.
• With the support of market infrastructure, a market leadership position is easier to achieve.

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Questions to answer:

• What are the layers (types of organizations and individuals) that influence the market of your target segment?
• Who are the top 10% of organizations and individuals within each layer of your ecosystem?
• What are their perceptions about your company, your market, your technology, and your products?
• How can you best serve their interests in a way that sets up a win-win relationship to support each other's goals? (You give them insider information to support their "influencer" position, and they help you by sharing the information you provide and giving you valuable feedback).
• What kind of collaterals do you need to build to provide the market ecosystem with the different needs of information they have?
• Who will be in charge of keeping alive a market-relations program with all the layers of the ecosystem?
• How else can you leverage the relationships with them? (e.g. statement of support, joining press releases, joint events, building formal partnerships...)

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(*) This 10-point GTM framework and the images attached are the property of Predictable Innovation™ (StartupBuilder, Inc.) and are protected under the copyright laws of Delaware.

Bonus: The Customer Alignment Lifecycle™ interactive tool

Drag your mouse cursor over the left legend to get instant strategic advice on what you need to pay attention to depending on the stage of your target market.