The Fundamentals of an Effective Go-To-Market Strategy Improved

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Go-To-Market ensures that what you’re selling is what you’re delivering and that it always works for you. It focuses on brand experience from prospects through repeat clients and processes between marketing, sales, and client experience. Go-To-Market is about the entire revenue stream and creating high-performance revenue teams or RevOps.

Ok, now that you know what Go-To-Market is about and the results it seeks to achieve, let’s talk about how it accomplishes this. A successful Go-To-Market Strategy comes down to four questions:

  • Whom should we market to?
  • What do we need to operate effectively?
  • When can we scale our business?
  • Where can we grow the most?

In the book, MOVE: The 4-Question Go-To-Market Framework by Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown, the authors shorten these questions into Move, Operations, Velocity, and Expansion. While I highly recommend the book, personally, I prefer the acronym Market Operations Scale Thrive—either way, the idea is the same: this is a modern approach for a Go-To-Market strategy that puts your clients at the center.

MARKET | Whom Should We Market To?

It’s easy to be seduced by numbers. For many, they see the total addressable market (TAM) and multiply that by the price of their product or service—it's HUGE!! And it’s not reality. The TAM is simply intended to show the potential for the size of the market—which includes you, your competitors, and similar solutions to the problem that you’re solving. It’s not the size of your business.

This is also contrary to how search engines and social media algorithms work. Bigger is not better, anymore. Small is the new big. This smaller audience is called the total relevant market (TRM). Its focus is on the client that is most relevant for the product or service you have in the market for you today—or to put it in simple terms, the focused audience that is most likely to buy from you today, your client avatar

I know, it can seem soul-crushing to watch that number dwindle from a few hundred million down to a few hundred thousand or less. Just remember, this is the audience size for today. The long-term goal of your company is to be able to expand that with more relevant offerings to other areas of that larger market in the future.

It also gives you the best chance of success with your marketing. The more niche your audience, the better results you are going to have. It will cost you less to advertise, give you better conversion rates, and increase your chances of building a loyal client base that generates referrals as you’ll be speaking to a highly targeted audience.

The metric you want to focus on here is customer lifetime value (CLV), instead of topline growth because it can be as much as five times more expensive to acquire a new client than to retain one.

OPERATIONS | What Do We Need To Operate Effectively?

This is where the rubber meets the road and businesses often love to remain in theory mode. Yes, that is a contradiction. It’s easy for a business to SAY we do this, offer that, we are this, and so on. It’s another thing to actually deliver. Remember, just because you say it doesn’t mean it’s true, even if you believe it to your core.

Operations are the how-to and the technology you use to effectively execute on marketing, sales, and managing the client experience. It’s a logical and direct link between all the activities in the business and the business strategy—you could say it’s the brain of this methodology. Operations need to be streamlined, monitored, and adjusted as needed. What works for a business in startup mode, won’t work when it scales and, just because it is “working” doesn’t mean it is efficient or providing the best brand experience for your prospects or clients. Your operations help you compete in the market.

A common example of where this goes horribly wrong is with social media management. I once worked with a company where it took 3-7 hours to create a single social media post. Yes, you read that correctly. They were using the wrong tools, didn’t have an efficient process or marketing plan in place. Everything was done shotgun-gun style and their only focus was on pushing 2-5 posts per day. They had less than fifty engagements per post, an almost zero clickthrough rate, and even less than zero conversion rate. The average social media post has an average lifespan of three seconds. Let’s do the math. If you are paying that person to manage your social media 50k/year, that’s $24.04/hour. By the way, that doesn’t include anyone else involved in the approval process, any advertising fees, software subscriptions, engaging with followers, or anything else. So that means each social media post was costing them an estimate of $120-280 with no return (I added in $15 per hour to cover some of the other estimated costs).

Operations is really the new RevOps. Its goal is to create high-performing revenue-generating teams and to discern the truth of the numbers over opinions of individuals so accurate decisions can be made. The operations of your business should:

  • make it easy for your prospects and clients to do business with you.
  • enable your team to track the progress of and accomplish organizational goals.
  • provide current and consistent data and facilitate cooperation across different teams.

SCALE | When Can We Scale Our Business?

This is the million-dollar question. And the universal answer is “it depends”. One thing to keep in mind is that revenue is not the indicator of when to scale.

Let’s dive a little deeper.

This is where we focus on answering almost all of your ‘when’ questions around enabling your team to achieve high-performance levels, when to hire, and when your clients see the ROI of working with you. The focus is on questions like:

  • How effective are your marketing, sales, and client experience teams?
  • Are they regularly achieving their goals?
  • Do you have repeatable processes in place that would allow a new team member to get up to speed quickly?
  • How quickly do your clients see an ROI from doing business with you?
  • When do they see value in doing more business with you?

The focus here is on how to produce success more effectively and consistently. It’s about scaling what you have first before you introduce anyone or anything new. When you do this right, every person in your RevOps team—marketing, sales, and client experience will use the same messaging and language at every touchpoint with your prospective, current, and repeat clients because they will have become your brand ambassadors delivering the company’s mission and vision as if it is their own.

THRIVE | Where Can We Grow the Most?

This is all about taking everything you’ve learned, implemented, and built and determining your next best opportunity because no company wants to stop growing.

Should you target a new vertical, go after a new market?
Should you launch a new product or service?
Or, should you merge or acquire another company?

The most common way to expand your business is through sales. This is usually done by adding various partners, so you don’t have to keep adding more salespeople to your team. It gives you a wider distribution and is successful for many businesses.

Another way to expand your business is through location or verticals. If you were successful in one location or vertical, you may consider expanding to another. This can also include going upmarket to reach potential clients with bigger budgets and needs or down-market to reach potential clients with smaller budgets and simpler needs.

Another common way to expand your business is by increasing the number of products or services that you offer. This creates variety and keeps a client interested in the different ways that you can help them. It also can create a point of differentiation from your competitors. The challenge with this is in figuring out what products or services you should offer that will be well received by your market or that you will be viewed as a trusted brand because you choose an adjacent or emerging market.

Each of these can be done by creating your own products or services, specifically targeting the new region or vertical, or through the merger or acquisition of another business. Regardless of the direction that you choose, you’ll want to make sure that you go through the Go-To-Market process again.

The RevOps model that leverages a Go-To-Market strategy is intended to be an ongoing, iterative process in that you consistently are improving what you do and how you serve your clients along the way. It’s to ensure that you are always aiming at the right target in the right way. Remember, as your business grows, your answers to these four questions will change. What won’t change is the questions, they will always remain the same. 

Omicle delivers brand clarity, marketing strategy, and operational efficiency to prepare leaders to scale their business. If you are ready to scale your business, contact us today to get started.

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