Saas Go To Market Strategy – At a high level, your go-to-market strategy is designed to create awareness and interest in your product and/or brand within a target group of people who are most likely to buy and find value in your product or service.
Every go-to-market strategy is unique and has many different angles to consider. Don’t be fooled by people who claim to have the perfect recipe. Nobody can hit a home run every time. The only guarantee, and this applies to all sales and marketing, is that focusing on your customer will produce the best results. The better you understand your customer, the more likely you are to build a go-to-market strategy that delivers results.
Saas Go To Market Strategy
However, I use this go-to-market template as a starting point to guide the process. I don’t always use every section and often the company has already completed some sections. The latter can simply be included in the plan, easily. Remember this is a template, for best results it should be modified to fit each specific use case.
Go To Market Strategy For Saas Startups
This guide takes you through the process I use when planning marketing initiatives for the companies I work with. These are typically early-stage companies that are bringing their first product offering to the world for the first time.
Before you start creating a winning go-to-market strategy, you need to become crystal clear about why your business exists.
This is the first slide in Guy Kawasaki’s The Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch. The reason I mention this is that your go-to-market strategy will in many ways reflect the pitch you used to validate your business idea and raise funding.
The pitch deck is incredibly valuable and is often the first thing I ask founders about when I start working with them.
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In my experience the field is clean. It represents the company’s core vision, usually has a lot of aggregated market data, and when done well, tells a short story about how the business will be successful. This is a good foundation to build on.
Market research includes any activity used to better understand your target market and/or consumers. Conducting surveys is, for example, a form of market research. The motivation behind market research is to gather information that can help you build a better business, a more useful product, a more productive user experience… a better long-term relationship with your customer.
There are 3 specific types of market research that I focus on when gathering information to inform a go-to-market strategy:
This is about focus and refinement. Collect data that you think will help you create a more valuable product, craft more compelling messages, and target more precisely.
Creating A Go To Market Strategy For Entering A New Market [checklist Included]
People buy products and in particular your product is for a specific person. At least that’s how it should be. Hopefully, you defined your key customers a long time ago and have been reaching out to them regularly as you build and develop your product. If you haven’t stopped what you’re doing and go, do so immediately.
Combine this profile data with your firmographic data to create a more complete picture of your ideal market and your customers.
A little side note – if you’re already “in market” or have a large number of beta customers who are getting value from your product, that’s a good place to start when building personas.
Profile your existing customer base (those who get the most value) and keep building and refining from there as you learn.
Pitch Deck Go To Market Slide
Your competitors play an important role in your company’s success. Understanding them will help you differentiate and position your business to win. It will also help you strategize to make sure you stay ahead of them.
In a healthy market there will always be competition. Your job as an entrepreneur or strategist is to position
Business to win. To do this, I suggest you focus on understanding your competitors in these key areas:
Once you have a good understanding of your competitors’ marketing strategy, focus on strategies to elevate your brand story above the competition.
Free Trial Or Freemium? Decide Your Go To Market Strategy First
You don’t want to spread it over the same messaging and positioning. One copies the other in a boxing match that goes to the final round every time.
You want to develop a narrative that positions your brand in a way that makes your competitors obsolete. Cut them right out of the conversation. Easier said than done.
For the record. I am not affiliated with Vowel and have not worked on their go-to-market strategy. I approach this from a competitive perspective by reverse engineering their public website and making some assumptions to illustrate how to proceed to create the various components that make up a marketing strategy.
Vowel is an early-stage B2B company that has built meeting technology that enables businesses to record meetings, transcribe meetings, search for meetings, comment on meetings, share meeting excerpts, and more.
Create A Go To Market Strategy For Your Saas Startup By Suzanmiqdadi
“As a designated note-taker, I often feel like I’m missing out on the meeting. It would be nice not to have that burden.”
“As the only remote worker on the team, it’s often hard to be heard in team meetings. It would be nice to level the playing field.”
“As a manager, I spend a large part of my day in back-to-back meetings, it would be good to have meeting records to refer back to important decisions.”
Taking notes is painful and no one wants the task. You’re also less present in the meeting when you’re taking notes.
How To Build A Superb Go To Market Strategy For Saas Startups [with Use Cases]
Stop worrying about missing an important meeting. The entire meeting + notes and key takeaways await you.
Here’s the thing about messaging…the person reading your copy will interpret it based on their specific experience. The person who wrote them may have had me in mind when creating the message, or I may have changed each one slightly to fit my personal experience as I interpreted it.
That’s why developing these user stories is so important. This is not a product exercise. This is a business exercise, and for user stories to be most effective, the entire business needs to be on the same page and telling the same story.
Your positioning statement is generally not a public document. Its purpose within your go-to-market strategy is to keep your company aligned with your brand and value proposition.
Go To Market Strategy Checklist
HubSpot has created a very detailed guide to creating a positioning statement, which you can check out here if you’re interested in more details.
I shared some valuable messages from Vowel’s site earlier in the article, below are the higher level marketing messages that Vowel uses to position itself as a “Great Teams” tool that … captures the meetings of your team.
Vokal lets you host, record, share and transcribe meetings. But… what it really does is allow your team to be awesome.
For SaaS, your marketing website should be designed to get potential customers excited about your product AND help them understand how to use it and how it will help them.
Free Go To Market Strategy Templates
Remember that your messaging is more than your website. There are many other customer-facing touchpoints to consider:
Everything public facing should be aligned with your brand and positioning and designed specifically with your target market in mind.
Your customer journey is unique to your product or service, but there are components that are similar and the basic steps should translate pretty well across most products. It’s important to consider the customer journey when designing your go-to-market strategy.
Your customer journey will include different touch points that occur at different stages of the process. I created the illustration below to show the relationship between the stages, steps, touchpoints and teams that are part of your customer journey.
Saas Go To Market Strategy
In the awareness stage, your customer realizes the need for your product or service and eventually becomes aware of your product. This is a two-step process. This means you need to take proactive steps to ensure you are in the places where your customer is likely to do research
The review stage is critical. You should expect your buyer to do extensive research before entering your funnel. For this reason, your go-to-market strategy should include content, messaging, case studies, thought leadership, and everything else necessary to answer all of your customers’ questions before they come to you.
Your customers will research your product and compare it to all your competitors. From there, they will narrow down their choices to the top 2 or 3 choices to really dig into. How you present your product here will make or break you.
When your customer reaches the decision stage, you should assume that they have almost completely decided which product they prefer. Whether your model requires a free trial, a demo/POC, or some other process, your goal here is to provide value.
The Ultimate Blueprint For A Winning Saas Go To Market Strategy🤯
This part of your journey