GTM Strategy: Objective, Challenges And Solutions

Launching a new product or service is a process directed by a thorough analysis of the targeted market and competitors. To manage innovation challenges and ensure a successful product launch, your business needs a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy. Not only does it focus on the initial launch of the product, but also on the whole life cycle of the product to chase business growth. In other words, a Go-to-Market strategy is a plan to employ the resources (internal & external) of an organization to deliver great customer value and gain a competitive edge.

A Go-to-Market strategy is a business plan that defines how to enter a new market to reach target customers or launch a new product/ service.While building a GTM plan, businesses face many challenges due to rapid innovation and daily changing market dynamics. Therefore, you must create it with caution and rich knowledge to either avoid the challenges or overcome them. Before discussing the major challenges when developing a GTM strategy, let’s take a look at its objective and the best technique to build one.

The Objective Of Strategizing A Go-To-Market Plan

Rapid innovation is causing products and services to evolve over time. This brings along raised market risks at early stages of product entry, launch and growth. Therefore, a GTM strategy is essential at all stages of product life cycle to achieve the following objectives:

• Create awareness around your new offering
• Convert prospects
• Maximize your market share and exploit the gaps
• Reinforce your brand position in the targeted market
• Create a unique value proposition
• Integrate best practices with strategic elements

The Best Way To Strategize A Go-To-Market Process

• Define your market
• Set value proposition for customers
• Create a timeline to chase a business goal
• Chase one goal at a time
• Refine your sales process
• Carry out effective marketing
• Gather, analyze & employ competitors’ data (Competitive Analysis)

Challenges You Face While Creating a GTM Strategy

Strategizing Go-to-Market activities before launching a new product/ offering or before entering a new market is full of challenges. You need to consider various factors such as market size, growth rate, barriers to entrance, market economics, customer needs, buying behavior, channel identification, market & customer segmentation strategy, computing abilities, and sales solution. Here’s an out-and-out classification of these challenges along with the possible tactics to overcome these.

Creating a GTM strategy involves clarifying plans and directions to enter a new market and reach ultimate business growth milestones. The challenges faced while strategizing a Go-to-Market plan revolve around the following factors:

• Customers: They are a crucial factor to consider while building a GTM strategy. Determining your initial customers, create effective tactics to deliver excellent customer experience. This will help you work out the best approach for engaging different customer types, gain loyal customers and accelerate product purchase.
• Channels: Measure up to the ideas and vision of your team to work collectively to launch a new offering with an impactful message. Your workforce collaborating with each other across various channels is a key factor to consider when overcoming the challenges in the primitive stages of your GTM strategy.
• Competitors: Conduct specific analysis like PESTLE and SWOT to understand your competitors and their performance in your targeted market. This will help you find any market gap and exploit your competitors’ weaknesses in the right segment.

Challenge: Remain In Sync With The Market

It is one of the most commonly faced challenges by businesses while creating a GTM strategy. To remain in sync with the market, you need to consider a diverse set of factors before entering the market or launching a new product/ service.

How To Overcome It

• Product Definition: It includes market problem identification and validation. Also, you need to evaluate “how” your new product will help customers.
• Market Definition: Determine the target markets and identify the size of each market in terms of number of potential buyers, reachability, and buying power.
• Competitive Landscape: The most important factor in GTM strategy is analysing your main competition and understanding their reaction to your market entry/ product launch.
• Distribution Option: It includes identification and testing of the latest market trends across various available channels. Here is an informative blog post on ecommerce trends that you may find helpful.

Challenge: Deliver Value Propositions Across All Channels

Proper articulation of how a company should be perceived in the minds of its customers & prospects is another challenge that businesses face while entering a new market or making a new offering.

How To Overcome It

• Conveying Your Offering’s Value: Evaluate how the features of your product will solve the market problem. Inaugurate the product with a cohesive approach to deliver a tailored and right message across various channels.
• Segmenting Customers: To become more customer-focused, you need to segregate your customers into different groups according to their different needs. It requires a deep analysis of customer behavior, their lifestyle and shopping patterns.
• Positioning:Brand positioning makes your business unique and meaningful, while succinctly articulating how it is different from its competitors. Therefore, work out ways to distinguish how your product or business should be perceived in the minds of the targeted customers/ prospects.
• Choosing The Right Sales Approach: A right sales approach is a tailored message that develops a buying vision in the targeted market. Adopt comprehensive strategies that state “Why change” rather than “Why buy” via the appropriate channel.
• Analysing Buyer’s Journey:Encourage customer decision-making at all stages of the buyer’s journey to cultivate a customer-centric business approach. It includes the awareness stage, the consideration stage and the decision stage. Refine your strategies and fill the gap to exploit every competitive edge.
• Pricing: Develop a full potential roadmap for the sales process to launch the new service/product at cost-effective prices. Adopt pricing strategies and tactics to realign business expenses and attain sustainable revenue growth.
• Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Acquire market and gain competitive intelligence by measuring customer satisfaction rates and analyzing competitors’ actions. Encourage customer interaction activities and utilize a personified customer approach to channel customer experience.
• Integrating A Feedback System: Analyse customer loyalty by integrating a feedback system such as in the form of a reviews and recommendations section that influences your passive customers. It helps you refine your marketing tactics for the new launch or new market entrance.

Challenge: Measure Up To The Front Line

Measuring up to the front line of your employees is another big challenge for businesses when entering a new market or launching a new product. The main struggle is to make the front line perform according to key customer metrics in the evolving or new market trends. Your front line employees must be completely aware of your GTM strategy.

How To Overcome It

• Client Engagement/ Retention: Based on competitive analysis and intelligence, the front line employees must adopt agile process to engage clients and put best efforts to retain them. Market opportunities must be pursued to convert regular customers into active loyal customers.
• Customer Support: Have a closed-loop support process in place to effectively work on a customer’s feedback within 24 to 48 hours. It includes assisting customers, focusing on process improvement and innovation as per their requirements.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management): In this customer-driven era, it is essential to develop healthy and long-term relationships with customers. Make sure your workforce actively uses CRM to resolve customer queries across various channels.
• Sales Training Support: To develop an efficient sales team, align training sessions with the needs and goals of your front line employees. Make sure the training methods are in harmony with your business objectives and are customer-focused. Craft communication campaigns to reinforce an appropriate business message across multiple channels. Also, help your team develop the right mindset to understand the changing shopping behaviors and buying decisions of customers.

Challenge: Address Territory Coverage

Making the right GTM strategy to cover a specific area, having potential customers, is one of the tangible challenges faced by businesses.

How To Overcome It

• Set Sales Territory: Setting sales territory limit may help your sales team to focus on one particular area. Perform client segmentation considering factors like common shopping behaviors, purchase history and buying decisions.
• Set Goals & Establish Targets: After proper segmentation of customers, look for the opportunities and possibilities to meet your business objectives.
• Develop a Tangible Strategy: After defining your business goals, demonstrate various resource requirements, team responsibilities, and tactics to accelerate the conversion rate.
• Track Results & Optimize Territory Division: Once you finish with the tangible strategy development process, put it to action. Continuously check the effectiveness of your strategy by tracking results. Also, optimize the territory division and try your best to go beyond the territorial boundaries.

Challenge: Adhere to Effective Promotions/ Marketing Techniques

Adhering to the best practices of digital marketing is full of challenges as the market trends and customers’ buying behaviors keep on changing rapidly.

How To Overcome It

• Demand & Lead Generation: Continuous improvements in product, marketing, pricing, sales and distribution across different channels help your business generate high product demand and increase lead conversion rates.
• Marketing Tools: Utilizing the right advertising platforms and tools help your message reach the target audience. Further, it aids in spreading brand awareness with the launch of your new product/service.
• Branding (On-Promised Delivery): Direct and indirect channels aligned together improve branding. Make sure to meet your delivery aptitudes and promises to provide a superior customer experience.
• Public Relations (PR) & Advertising:A quick tune-up of advertising strategies and styles can fill the communication gap between your business and prospects. The right advertisement through relevant channels attract potential customers. Therefore, you can build healthy public relations with people in the targeted market.
• Content: Develop tailored content that is relevant for a specific audience. This helps you deliver the business message across the high-demand verticals in the potential market. Besides, customer-centric content aids in engaging the audience and boosting sales with effective marketing intelligence.
• Internal Marketing: Increase the engagement of your employees by persuasively articulating your business goals and objectives. This helps foster brand advocacy and earn faithful employees. Make sure that each employee understands their role well and contributes their bit in business growth.

A Go-to-Market strategy is associated with the most critical issues and opportunities at the time of new market entrance or new product launch. It helps your business attain success and growth by enduring market changes and competitive advantages and achieving efficient outcomes. Strategizing GTM is chock-full of challenges. However, an expert GTM strategist can make things manageable for your business to successfully launch a product or enter a new market.