Finding Product Market Fit (PMF) is one of the top priorities for every Startup, and achieving it is one of the greatest moments of delight for the founders & the Startups. The intrinsic necessity of a successful Startup & pressure to achieve PMF all too often keeps founders up into the late hours of the night.
Early client success and obtaining PMF are significant accomplishments that business Startups should be proud to achieve. But the fact is that finding PMF is not enough to unlock growth for enterprise Startups. There’s a missing link between finding PMF and unlocking business growth. That missing link is often not recognized or identified, creating a gap between PMF and business growth. Hence, without achieving it, it is impossible to achieve consistent business growth after PMF. This missing link is called Go-To-Market Fit (GTMF).
What is Go-To-Market Fit?
GTM Fit focuses on bringing these three things together: A clear sales model, a repeatable GTM plan, and urgency.
1. Clear Sales Model: Decide how you’re going to sell your product. There is no one perfect sales strategy. Each company will choose a different one depending on its product, sector, and revenue model. The selection of a sales model depends on factors such as customer decision-making, product kind, price point, and gross margin. Sales models can vary based on your approach to demand generation, sales organization structure, and more. That said, here are a few types of popular sales models to consider:
a. Inbound sales: This approach focuses on generating demand by pulling buyers to your website using SEO, digital advertising, and content marketing
b. Outbound sales: This model relies on salespeople to generate leaders, typically through prospecting techniques like cold calling or social selling
c. Account-based selling (ABS): Using this approach, sellers typically work a handful of accounts with a highly personalized approach, tailoring all elements of the deal to meet the customer’s demands
d. Self-service sales: This model allows buyers to self-service the entire sales process on your website, from education to solution purchase.
For example, if you choose an account-based sales model, you may organize your sales team differently than inbound sales. In the case of the former, this approach would require heavy investments in sales. The latter, on the other hand, may require a deeper investment in content marketing and SEO.
Sales models and processes are two sides of the same coin: your sales model determines how you generate leads for your business, and your sales process converts that approach into action.
While organizations test out several models, they finally need to scale with only one. The sales model helps revenue leaders understand how and where to invest in growing business.
2. Repeatable GTM Plan: It is the foundation of GTM Fit. The GTM Playbook details each step the business takes to find, engage, win, and increase clients. It goes much beyond slides and sales techniques. It is a powerful instrument that serves as the model for sales and marketing activities, developing sales representatives and aligning the business operations behind what it has to accomplish to succeed.
Developing a go-to-market strategy requires research and hard work, but these easy steps can help:
A. Identify your buyer personas. You need to know exactly who your target market is. That is why creating a buyer persona profile is crucial. Buyer personas are fictional profiles of people who represent your ideal customer base, and they are useful during the prospecting and lead-generation stages.
B. Create a value matrix. A product marketing team crafts a value matrix to zero in on messaging that best connects a product to the problem it's solving. A value matrix also communicates the purpose of a product to all stakeholders.
C. Define your sales funnel. Using the information in your buyer personas and value matrix, outline how your sales team will take potential customers through the sales funnel. Begin to make a plan for moving potential customers through each stage of the sales funnel: initial contact, lead qualification, business case, evaluation, negotiation, closing, and renewal.
D. Select a sales strategy. There are numerous sales strategies your company can use to guide potential customers through the sales process. Choose one or more sales strategies that best fit your needs, depending on your product, market, and business model.
E. Decide how to generate product demand. To raise awareness of your product launch, you determine whether you want to use inbound or outbound marketing efforts.
F. Develop a content marketing strategy. If you choose an inbound marketing strategy to generate demand for your product, the best way to attract your target customer is by using content marketing. And as important as the content is how effectively your team uses search engine optimization (SEO). The higher your SEO ranking, the easier it is for potential customers to discover your product.
G. Use metrics to hone your sales process. Choose a system to measure your sales progress to improve your sales team's performance. Use key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rate, sales volume, and time to ensure you're hitting your targets and assess where your sales team needs to improve.
H. Outline a plan for customer retention. It costs more money to acquire a new customer than to do repeat business with a current customer. Marketing techniques like upselling and customer loyalty programs are common ways to incentivize repeat business and build long-term customer relationships.
It takes a lot of refinement, effort, and iteration to get the GTM Plan right.
3. Create urgency: The final part of GTM Fit is urgency. Line up on a clear problem area or use case that answers the question, "Why buy now? Instead, of 6 months from now?”
Invoking people's fear of missing out (FOMO) is a strong approach to increasing conversions and sales by making them feel as though they are going to miss out on or lose a fantastic opportunity.
A. Offer Something People Want - Urgency only works if your product or service is something that people actively want to begin with. If someone isn’t interested in your product, all the limited-time offers in the world won’t make them want it.
B. Set a Deadline - If potential customers know there’s no rush to buy your product or service, they’re more likely to put off buying it to weigh the pros and cons. Create an incentive to take action by running your sales and offers for a limited time.
C. Create Scarcity - The scarcer a product or service is, the more people want it. If you can highlight how scarce your product or service is – or at least create the illusion that it’s about to run out – you can drive people to click the Buy button before someone else does.
D. Use the Right Words - Strong ad copy and a compelling call to action can make all the difference between whether your visitors make a purchase or click away.
E. Offer a Bonus Incentive - In addition to your main offer, give people an extra incentive to act fast.
F. Use Numbers - Numbers are a great way to get people’s attention and make an offer more attractive.
G. Use Warm Colours - Colours and psychology are deeply linked. Research from HubSpot supports the idea that using warm colours (red, yellow, and orange) for your CTA buttons can create a sense of urgency that drives action.
H. Customize Your Offers - Make your urgency-driven offers even more compelling by personalizing them.
I. Keep the Pressure On - Take a look at your sales funnel and see where you lose the most leads. From there, try to figure out how you can increase the urgency of your marketing at these critical points.
If you want to sell more, boosting the sense of urgency in your marketing is the way to go. Making people feel as if they’re about to miss out on or lose a great opportunity is a powerful way to drive conversions. As with many other techniques, urgency is best used in moderation.
Where did the concept of "Go-To-Market Fit" originate? We sought out the similarities between enterprise Startups that accelerated growth and unlocked growth as compared to those that did not by reflecting on the experiences of our entrepreneur friends and the experiences of our portfolio companies. It was simple if they didn't achieve Product-Market Fit: they stopped growing. The unexpected finding was that many enterprises attained Product-Market Fit and their first 10 customers but were unable to unlock growth.
Don’t stop at achieving your PMF, but look for achieving the GTMF. And keep reviewing it periodically to continue your growth trajectory.