So...what is go-to-market strategy, really?

All companies are going to market, if they have a product that they are trying to sell. But not all companies have a cohesive go-to-market strategy that ensures the product hits the success criteria it was built to achieve e.g. a KPI measuring the number of trial signups to hit the critical business goal of a certain customer acquisition cost.

The coordination and completion of cross-functional tasks necessary only when launching a new product or entering a new market

Put simply, go-to-market strategy is the guide that coordinates across a business to ensure the direct value from a product sale exceeds the cost to make that sale. Further, a strategy can focus on how to drive up the lifetime value of each customer - impacting retention rates, and cross-sell or up-sell rates. For the ambitious, a go-to-market strategy can guide companies to capture indirect value from a product sale as well, e.g. referrals from that customer that turn into further sales.

You are correct in interpreting from this that building and executing on a go-to-market strategy does not fall on any one team. It is the sum of all its parts. Dare I say it - the synergy that comes from Product, Marketing, Sales, and any central Strategy team working seamlessly together. That is because the key go-to-market activities employ the strengths of all these teams:

(1) definitively understanding who the customer is and their need you are meeting, preparing to be evaluated against direct or indirect competitors (yes - you have them. Any lost sale is because there was an alternative), and decreasing the time it takes for them to find value from the product. Setting them up to be champions of your product, driving referrals. tag: sales, marketing, product, maybe corporate strategy

(2) building a revenue model that drives value for you, your customer, and any other participating external stakeholders. Ensuring you don't leave opportunity untapped while creating an ecosystem where your product plays a critical role. tag: corporate strategy, sales, marketing, product

(3) generating awareness and distributing the product across the most effective channels, leveraging industry dynamics to provide the tail winds for successful sales. Shortening sales cycles and customer acquisition costs.

This article from Hubspot explains the components of a go-to-market plan in more detail. It showcases some useful templates to get started on a plan, though the best plans fall out of a thoughtful strategy. A lot of the inputs to inform a plan come from unique insights into the market and your potential customers.

Simply to get your product out there, or maybe to hit strategic corporate goals

A go-to-market strategy can extend as far as helping craft a company's business model. What is a business model? It is how a company turns its inputs into profitable outputs. This can look like moving from license based revenue to subscription based revenue (a Salesforce innovation in '99). But this can also mean moving to just-in-time inventory for slow-moving products and drop-shipping them, while holding inventory only for fast-moving products (it doesn't sound cool now, but it was a cool innovation from Toyota in the 70s). Both these examples impacted how the companies went to market.

Typically, a go-to-market strategy is needed intermittently by companies and they can't afford to hire a full-time role to coordinate teams that have "keep-the-lights-on" work as well as ad-hoc responsibilities to launch a new product. Bamboo Growth was founded to turn "we have a go-to-market strategy" into "our go-to-market strategy will impact the metrics that matter to our business".

If you'd like to discuss your company's go-to-market needs, reach out to me at natasha@grobamboo.com