Go To Market Strategy
It was yet another successful event organized by WIP South Bay chapter leads Surbhi Kaul, Vidya Venkatesh, and Hitashi Dhawan at PayPal with an excellent line of speakers Smita Hashim, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud, Lisa Sellers, VP of Marketing at 10x Genomics and Sharadindu Ramarao, Group Product Manager at Paypal. The panelists shared their expert advice and learnings on how to hone Go to Market (GTM) strategy for a product.
What Is Go To Market Strategy?
Go to Market (GTM) is an action plan that specifies how a company will reach the target customers and achieve competitive advantage. It is tightly weaved into the entire product lifecycle and it’s about tying it all together. GTM strategy starts with identifying the business opportunity by uncovering the unmet needs of the customers, understanding how solving for those customer needs will fit into the overall business model, and how this can feed into creating the robust financial model for an organization.
Identify The Real Problem And Product-Market Fit
GTM is about understanding the problem through customer discovery and finding the product market fit. To do so, stay really close to the customer and understand the problem and pain points by stepping into the shoes of the customers. Meet real customers, carefully observe them while they perform the activity, take notes. These notes would be about delightful moments, friction points and any other possible details you can capture from the interaction. Feed the understanding of the customer pain point into the big picture and look at different factors like geography, socio-economic factors, political influence, cultural differences, etc. This will create a holistic view of the entire landscape which is the foundation of brainstorming ideas and designing the solution.
Hypothesis And Experiment
What is the best approach to implement a solution? Formulate a HYPOTHESIS and EXPERIMENT!!! State what you believe will happen when you do something to create the hypothesis and experiment to test the hypothesis. This will confirm to you if customers will like the solution or not. Experiment with multiple variants and measure customer response.
Inclusion For Success
Product success is synonymous with customers knowing that the product exists and that they are convinced that it is solving a problem for them. To make it happen, partner with marketing, sales, pricing, customer support, etc. Get their help in putting the product in front of customers to see what it can do while you are building the product. Help them understand the customer, the market, the problem, the whats, and whys. This enables them to strategize the crucial success elements like right pricing, right messaging, right positioning, etc., so when the product is finally ready, it’s embraced by the customers. Simultaneously connect with sales and customer support to get feedback from real customers.
Ultimately, it’s about keeping your mind open and having the feedback continuously pouring in. This will create a feedback loop of BUILD ==> MEASURE== > LEARN, a great approach to iterate and innovate any product in an existing or a new market.
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