Are you looking to launch a new product or service?
Then you need a go-to-market strategy!
But what does go-to-market mean, and how can you use it to maximise sales and ensure customer satisfaction?
We explore all this and more below!
What is a go-to-market strategy?
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a plan used by businesses to launch a new product or service to market.
It typically includes target market profiles, a marketing plan, and a sales and distribution strategy. GTM’s goal is to reduce the risks associated with product launches.
Who needs a go-to-market strategy?
Anyone who finds themselves in the following three situations needs a GTM strategy:
- Launching a new product in an existing market.
- Launching an existing product in a new market.
- Testing a new product’s market for growth.
Why is this relevant for individuals and companies in the B2B space?
GTM strategies provide the information companies need to effectively position themselves against competitors, create scalable inbound and outbound models, and leverage appropriate tactics to achieve their goals.
Product launches usually fail when businesses assume a market need, investing in development without gathering this critical information.
What are the benefits of a go-to-market plan?
A good B2B go-to-market strategy helps business owners and their sales and marketing teams quickly and efficiently launch a product or service into the right markets.
It helps teams define target customers, develop an effective marketing plan, and create a scalable sales distribution model.
Here are the other important benefits of good GTM:
1. Increased revenue
A comprehensive plan boosts B2B sales over time.
By understanding your target customers and their needs, you can create products that they’ll value; the better products you create, the more revenue you’ll make.
2. Improved brand recognition
An effective GTM plan should include marketing tactics to increase brand recognition.
A strong brand means that customers can quickly identify your product or service. This helps to build trust in the market.
3. Reduced costs
GTM planning is a great way to reduce the costs associated with a product or service launch.
By planning and having a clear strategy for success, you can avoid wasting time and money on tactics that don’t work.
4. Increased efficiency
A GTM plan sets clear business goals and outlines the steps needed to reach them.
It helps your team work more efficiently, resulting in better use of resources, improved customer experiences, and a faster time to market.
5. Improved customer relationships
A GTM plan will help you establish customer relationships and build trust in the marketplace.
When you understand your customers’ needs, you can provide quality products that create a positive brand image.
Plus, the more trusted your brand is, the more loyal your customers will be.
6. Competitive edge
An effective GTM strategy can give you a competitive edge over other businesses in the market as you’ll be better prepared to launch new products and services.
Additionally, it can help your team identify potential opportunities and set a clear path towards growth.
What are the different types of go-to-market strategies?
The two main types of go-to-market strategies are sales-led and product-led.
What is a sales-led strategy?
A sales-led go-to-market (GTM) strategy involves the sales team as the primary driver of revenue and customer acquisition.
This strategy focuses on outbound prospecting, relationship-building, and human-led sales motions rather than relying on marketing automation or product-led growth.
Key traits of sales-led GTM:
- Direct sales outreach: SDRs/AEs actively prospect and engage target accounts.
- High-touch sales cycles: Suited for high ACV (annual contract value) deals that require demos, discovery calls, and custom proposals.
- Targeted account-based selling: Focus on ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buying committees within high-value companies.
- Marketing supports sales: Marketing’s role is to generate MQLs and enable sales with collateral, case studies, and campaigns.
- Sales cycle ownership: Sales owns the pipeline from lead to close, including nurturing and follow-ups.
Use it when:
- Your product is complex or requires education/demos.
- Your customer journey involves multiple stakeholders.
- You sell to mid-market or enterprise customers.
- High LTV justifies the cost of a sales team.
Example tools involved:
- CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot
- Sales intelligence: Cognism, ZoomInfo
- Engagement: Outreach, Salesloft
- Enablement: Gong, Highspot
What is a product-led strategy?
A product-led go-to-market (GTM) strategy is an approach in which the product itself is the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion.
Instead of relying heavily on sales reps, users discover, try, and adopt the product on their own, often through free trials or freemium models.
Key traits of product-led GTM:
- Self-serve onboarding: Users can sign up and start using the product without needing to talk to sales.
- Free trial or freemium model: Users experience value before buying.
- Product is the main growth engine: Features like in-app referrals, usage-based upgrades, and “aha moments” drive adoption.
- Data-driven growth: User behaviour and product usage data inform marketing, onboarding, and upsell efforts.
- Bottom-up motion: Starts with individual users or small teams, then expands to larger org-wide contracts.
Use it when:
- Your product is easy to adopt and delivers fast time-to-value.
- Your target audience includes SMBs or tech-savvy users.
- You want to scale rapidly with lower CAC (customer acquisition cost).
- Your product supports viral or usage-based growth loops.
Example tools involved:
- PLG analytics: Mixpanel, Amplitude
- User onboarding: Appcues, Pendo
- CRM with product usage visibility: HubSpot, Salesforce with PQL signals
- Billing: Stripe, Chargebee
⚠️ See Cognism’s list of the best go-to-market tools.
How do you build a go-to-market strategy?
Successful product launches require planning and strategic thinking.
Follow this six-step go-to-market strategy framework to get the best results:
1. Define your ICP
Your ideal customer profile (ICP) comprehensively describes your perfect customer.
The kind of customer who can find massive benefits from your product or service, while also being able to give you enough value in return to make your business profitable.
In most cases, this will be the ability to use your product to boost their bottom line, but there could be other benefits, such as:
- Reducing costs.
- Driving efficiency.
- Improving the productivity/well-being of staff.
In return, your ICP delivers value back to you through revenue. They may also provide referrals, customer insights, and testimonials.
To develop your ICP, you need to know:
- Who they are.
- Where they work.
- The day-to-day challenges they face.
With this data, you can build a portrait of your best-fit customer and reach out to others who match their characteristics.
And Cognism can help you here!
Meet Sales Companion, your personal assistant for faster, smarter prospecting.
Access quality contact data, take advantage of buying signals that tell your reps when to engage, and get personalised recommendations for new customers and accounts - all from one centralised hub!
See how the tool works - take an interactive tour 👇
2. Research your competitors
Understanding where your product or service fits in the existing landscape is key to any GTM strategy.
That’s because learning about what your competitors offer will help you position your product.
Start by assessing their G2 reviews page. Filter by relevant customer segments - for example, SME, mid-market, or enterprise.
This allows you to determine what potential customers like and dislike about competitors’ platforms and what truly resonates with your ICP.
It’s also worth considering how macro and micro trends could impact your launch now and in the near future.
Doing this helped Cognism differentiate itself in the market.
While other B2B data providers had to adapt to the GDPR’s introduction in 2018, Cognism saw an opportunity and built compliance into its platform.
As a result, compliance is one of our key value props, threaded through all of our content and collateral.
3. Develop your messaging
Effective product messaging for a go-to-market sales strategy boils down to this:
Communicating your product or service’s value to your ICP in a way that resonates with their pain points.
And to do this, you need to speak their language. Here are some ideas:
- Listen to Gong recordings of sales demos and conversations with prospects (tip: in Gong, you can search for competitor names and review how prospects perceive them).
- Shadow sales reps live as they cold call.
- Pay attention to the language your customers use about their pain points and ambitions.
- Review your competitors’ websites and how they position their product offerings.
- Take words and phrases from case studies/G2 reviews; this will help you refine your messaging.
With all this info, you can define your product’s USP and how it compares to the competition.
The next step is to write it all down and pitch it to your executives. Create a slide deck summarising the key takeaways you’ve learned about your product’s positioning and your competitors’.
It’s likely that there’ll be some changes at this stage; your C-suite will definitely have their own thoughts to share.
Remember, this is a collaborative process. Take their input on board, and together, you’ll land on messaging that’s laser-focused on your buyer personas.
Follow this process 👇
4. Set targets
Sales targets
All good GTM strategies are backed up by efficient business models.
To set sales targets, we recommend using the capacity model. Here’s how it works:
Say you have two outbound SDRs working on your launch.
If you review the number of cold calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages they send daily, you can work out their average output and response rates.
This means you can estimate the number of meetings each rep will book.
Next, you should use the meetings booked/opportunity rate to inform your reps’ targets.
From here, you can factor in an average opportunity-to-close rate. For this, Cognism uses 25%.
This allows you to build your full funnel pipeline and map out data-driven targets your reps will work towards each month.
Note:
If you see you’re a long way off these targets, you may need to adjust a part of your go-to-market strategy, such as your ICP or messaging.
Marketing targets
Now, for tracking your B2B marketing efforts!
At the beginning of your GTM strategy, aiming for a 50/50 split between inbound and outbound will allow you to:
- Land on achievable benchmarks.
- Measure the two against each other from an efficiency/success perspective.
This starts with an estimated cost-per-lead (CPL).
At Cognism, we bake in $30 as our worst-case scenario for content leads. Meanwhile, the CPL for direct inbound demo requests from paid ads is $250.
Next, you need to overlay some predicted conversions from across the sales funnel stages, which will differ for content and paid demo requests.
You’ll also be able to determine how much budget you’ll need to hit the same number of opportunities as outbound.
The table below shows how to work this out and set targets for your B2B marketing activities.
5. Choose your tactics
To reach your ICP, you must use various strategies in tandem. These include:
Data
As we mentioned above, you need quality data to target the right people.
The good news is that there are many B2B data providers available. Aside from Cognism, companies like Lusha or ZoomInfo can give you precise contact data.
And with this data, your sales team can enhance their account-based selling and target individuals who are most likely to buy your product or service.
⚠️ See Cognism’s list of the best B2B data providers.
Marketing
When creating your go-to-market plan, you must allow your marketers to test, try and optimise.
Here are some tactics to try:
Start with an offer. Then, adapt that offer to the marketing channels where your ICP hang out.
You’ll need different offers for the top (TOFU), middle (MOFU), and bottom (BOFU) of the B2B marketing funnel. You’ll also need to present the offer differently on every channel.
As BOFU marketing campaigns are full of quick wins and key learnings, they’re always a good place to start.
Look at retargeting audiences on channels such as LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. Build ABM campaigns on Google and Bing that target high-intent keywords.
You can start your TOFU and MOFU strategies from here, knowing you have the lowest-hanging fruit ticked off.
Content
If data is the key to your outbound approach, content marketing drives your inbound lead generation.
When creating a content plan to promote your product or service, the first thing to remember is to do your keyword research.
Although free tools are available, paid platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush are far more powerful.
These SEO tools allow you to review the keywords your competitors already rank for and identify niches you can dominate.
You can also track your target keywords’ rankings and report on progress to your team leaders.
Partnerships
If you’re entering a new market with limited brand recognition, why not do some piggybacking?
This involves teaming up with companies that share a similar ICP but have greater brand awareness.
Working with them on co-marketing initiatives will get you in front of the right people, generating awareness and demand for your product or service.
Some of the best co-marketing ideas include:
- Joint webinars.
- Joint virtual events.
- Joint white papers/eBooks.
- Guest blogging.
- Content sharing (newsletters/social channels).
6. Provide feedback
Finally, establish a feedback loop between marketing, sales, and product development. This will ensure that you act collectively on your key GTM learnings.
To create this loop, you must make individuals accountable for different parts of your strategy.
Hold regular meetings where these individuals can report on their findings and overcome stumbling blocks.
With consistent team communication and collaboration, you’ll find your strategy runs much more smoothly. You’ll gather insights to help you refine:
- A winning ICP that you target on the right distribution channels.
- Messaging that converts.
- A product that better solves your ICP’s pain point.
What are some go-to-market strategy examples?
Get inspired with three GTM examples from top B2B SaaS companies! 👇
Salesloft
What: Rebrand and UI updates
Why: To tell a new story about Salesloft: how it equips sellers to create fantastic buying experiences.
When: September 2021
How: Salesloft updated its story, messaging, logo, and colour palette while dropping the upper-case “L” in “loft”.
The company redesigned its brand to reflect how it had “grown and evolved as an organisation [serving] some of the world’s biggest and best brands.”
Regarding UI, Salesloft began transitioning to its modern user Interface in Summer 2021.
This included “cleaner visuals, better use of space, all with the same content-rich experience [users] love.”
The changes focused on Salesloft’s navigation bar design, tables, and icons.
Results: G2 reviews suggest that Salesloft’s UI updates have been successful, with one user praising their “intuitive, user-friendly platform”.
They said:
“I like how easy it is to stay organised with the to-do’s, reminders, and tasks. It makes you feel productive when you complete steps.”
Cognism
What: Verified contact data - Diamond Data®
Why: To provide the most accurate, compliant contacts for business development teams internationally and “minimise inefficiencies due to inaccurate job titles and incorrect/misdialled numbers and create a leaner, faster sales process.”
When: October 2021
How: Cognism is an excellent example of a go-to-market strategy. It added phone-verified cell phone numbers and direct dials cross-checked against global Do Not Call lists to its platform.
It then combined this with consent-based intent data powered by Cognism’s partner Bombora.
But Cognism went beyond just phone-verified contacts in its Diamond Data® launch. Also included in the new wave of functionalities was Diamonds-on-Demand®.
This feature allows Cognism users to ask Cognism to verify contacts on demand.
“Cognism then allocates internal resources to source and validate that contact data and notifies you within 48 hours, meaning you can get through to everyone you want to reach much easier - and with greater certainty than ever before.”
Results: Diamond Data® provided value to Cognism’s customers.
For example, one G2 reviewer praised the company’s “high-quality contacts” and the ability to filter between “different types of users including [Diamond-verified contacts].”
Pre-need sales and marketing leader Precoa also found success with Diamond Data®:
Regional Director of Business Development @Precoa
Gong
What: New visual identity
Why: To move beyond the company’s “youthful, startup past” and “look more sophisticated”.
When: October 2021
How: Chief Marketing Officer Udi Ledergor explained the steps Gong took to achieve their new visual identity:
“The new logo we chose celebrated people and aligned perfectly with our persona. There were our brand drivers, built right into the mark itself.”
“There was Celebration (a vibrant burst of energy), Conversation (the social bubble), and Individuality (a unique G shape conveyed in the mark). The burst was still there, only now it had morphed into a mere outline of its former self, representing us more emotionally than before.”
“And where photos of sales folks used to dominate the layout, now sat dramatic illustrations of everyday individuals who’ve transformed into sales superstars through the thoughtful determination of a pen.”
“They humanised the brand with their disarming smiles and inspiring gazes. Our new brand characters and the style we chose for the illustrations also indicate our deep commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
These are all components of a fantastic go-to-market strategy to take inspiration from.
Results: Aside from breaking LinkedIn and starting hundreds of debates on company Slack channels, Gong solidified its status as a sophisticated enterprise.
5-star G2 reviews still roll in regularly for the revenue intelligence giants, and their stock in the B2B SaaS space continues to rise.
FAQs
Who is responsible for a GTM strategy?
A small group or pod of senior stakeholders from your sales, marketing, and product departments should be responsible for your B2B SaaS go-to-market strategy.
Compared to larger GTM teams, this structure allows stakeholders to bypass long feedback loops, iterate on the GTM strategy, and develop better products.
Hold your pod accountable to pre-agreed lead generation KPIs. Shared goals will keep them aligned.
At the start of your go-to-market, the pod should come together to:
- Define your ICP.
- Align over messaging and positioning.
- Share findings and best practices.
After this, reconvene the pod every week. In these meetings, go through:
- Data deep dives.
- Sales team struggles.
- Key product pushback.
What is the difference between market strategy and marketing strategy?
A market strategy defines which markets a business will target, while a marketing strategy outlines how the business will attract and engage those markets.
In that sense, the market strategy is just one part of the marketing strategy.
In practice, a SaaS marketing strategy includes broad things like:
- Processes.
- Target audience.
- Channels
- Tools.
- Tactics.
While a market strategy includes specific things like:
- The market you serve.
- Deep product understanding.
- Deep persona understanding.
- Behavioural analytics.
- Competitor analysis.
- Positioning.
- Packaging.
- Pricing.
It encompasses how you’ll take a product to market, who you’ll target, and the sales tactics you’ll use to convert customers.
What is pricing strategy in GTM?
A pricing strategy is the process of deciding how much to charge for a product or service. Pricing may change throughout a business’s scale-up journey.
For example, you may start by targeting SMBs before targeting mid-market and enterprise customers.
What is freemium pricing?
In the freemium model, you offer a free trial and try to upsell the solution to users.
Some lead generation platforms cap this trial to a number of monthly credits, hoping the details prospects find are enough to convert some of them into paid customers.
What is flat rate pricing?
In the flat rate model, users pay one price to access all a product’s features, usually in monthly or annual instalments.
What is user-based pricing?
In the user-based model, pricing increases as you add more users. Task management software, Monday.com, is an excellent example of this.
What is pricing-per-feature?
In the pricing-per-feature model, users can purchase different packages that provide different levels of access to product features.
What is tiered pricing?
Depending on their price plan, customers get different access levels in a tiered package.
Cognism’s pricing is an example of this.
What is pay-as-you-go pricing?
A pay-as-you-go model is based on your consumption of a product/service; the idea is that you can upgrade and downgrade as you please.
What is markup pricing?
In markup pricing, the vendor adds a percentage on top of a physical product’s cost.
What is dynamic pricing?
Dynamic pricing takes seasonal demand into account, increasing and reducing costs accordingly.
For example, vacation rentals are more expensive when there’s high demand, usually in summer.
What is skimming pricing?
In skimming pricing, the vendor sells a new product at a higher price and then reduces the cost after launch.
Electronics companies like Apple often use this model.
How can you decide your GTM pricing?
To decide the pricing strategy for your SaaS product, you should consider:
- What competitors charge.
- How you want to be perceived (e.g. premium vs. affordable).
- How valuable your product is to customers.
- How much it costs to build your product.
- How much demand there is for your product.
What is a channel strategy in GTM?
A channel strategy is a good go-to-market strategy for startups.
It helps you identify where you’ll reach your customers and how you’ll encourage them to purchase.
The channel strategy involves your SaaS marketing and sales functions, leveraging:
- Online channels - Google ads, blogs, social media, user-generated content, influencers.
- Offline channels - TV ads, billboards, flyers.
- Outbound - Your sales team cold calls relevant personas to generate leads and convert them.
- Referrals - Partner companies point new business your way.
A channel strategy combines a mix of marketing channels and tactics to attract new customers.
Here’s an example:
- A SaaS company wants to launch a new product and migrate existing customers to its new pricing.
- It uses online channels, such as a product marketing newsletter, to raise awareness among its customer base.
- It supports this activity with direct sales outreach.
Cognism’s go-to-market resources
There you have it - everything you need to know about putting together a go-to-market framework!
But if you’re looking for deeper, more valuable insights, we’ve got some treats in store!
We’ve published many other useful blogs on B2B GTM - take a look at the links below:
- How to run GTM in DACH
- How to run GTM in France
- How to run GTM in the UK
- How to use AI to accelerate go-to-market motions
Lastly, don’t forget to download our go-to-market strategy template! It includes all the info you need to build a GTM plan for your business.
Get your free copy now 👇
