Go To Market Plan - 6 Steps to Creating a Go-to-Market Plan

If you built a product and you've got revenues flowing, however, you don't have that predictable revenue machine. You don't have that scalable revenue machine where you put in a dollar and you get back to dollars. Then it's time to revamp your go to market plan.

when I first created my go to market plan for my last company, I thought I knew what I was doing. It wasn't until I got paired up with some of the best go to market experts in the business that I really see what it takes to build an effective go to market plan that drives growth. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the six steps that you absolutely need to follow to implement your go to market plan.

And when you implement these principles, you will be able to accelerate your path to the next stage of growth. Intro. What's your buddy?

Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm T. K.

, and on this channel I help SaaS partners like you grow your SaaS business faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now you're new to this channel. Welcome.

I drop in episode every single Sunday with actual strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster if you knew. Be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon. You'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TC Energy.

Now, if you're already part of this community for part of my SaaS, go to market coaching programs, people. Welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here.

truth be told, I record this episode every single year on this channel. This is my sixth year running my go to market program and this is my sixth year running this channel. And every single year I try to put out a go to market plan episode like this.

Based on everything that I've learned. When I first did this, I learned a number of things from my building. My last company, Toutiao as Partout app, and we're back by injury.

And Horowitz We scaled the company and we sold it to a market leader called Marketo. I joined as SVP of Strategy and Marketo. I served on the executive team.

I led a different regions and revamped their go to market plans. And as part of that, we did a two year transformation and sold it to Adobe for $4. 75 billion.

Since that, I started my go to market program and I've helped hundreds of SaaS founders revamp their go to market plan and drive growth for their SaaS businesses. So in this episode, I will take everything that I've learned, both in being in the trenches and actually scaling companies and also coaching SaaS founders in implementing all these principles. I'm going to walk you through the six steps that you absolutely need to know on how to drive growth for your SaaS business and how to actually build an effective go to market plan.

If you're excited, dig into principle number one and step number one Couldn't smash a like bun for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it. There's a scene that really sticks with me, and I try to teach every single founder that I coach. Great founders focus on markets instead of ideas, and this is one of the things that I had to really get great at when I was first starting to get into the startup game as an engineer, I just obsess about the cool features and the cool ideas.

But in reality, the real thing that matters is the markets you're going after. And so one of the first steps in building an effective go to market plan, this is what I was taught when I was getting into the game is to really establish the true bounding box of where you're going to be operating. So step number one is to define the market you're going after.

Specifically, you really want to highlight exactly what type of industry, what type of role, what type of company you're really targeting, and more importantly, you really want to identify what is the urgent and important problem that your product solves. Ultimately, its problems that drive the need for buying software. And while we love the ideas that we have and while we love the amazing features that we have, the truth is customers aren't really buying your product or will not buy your product because they love you.

They're buying it because there's a problem that exists. And step number one and building an effective go to market plan is to really look at your existing customers, really look at where you're getting existing traction and really define what segment of the market, what exactly is the market that you're going after where this urgent and important problem exists. Once you've really started to define your target market, where you want to be building your go to market plan around, the second step in this is to identify the why.

Now, it can be very easy to just say this is the market we're going after and therefore they're going to buy from us. But one of the steps that I found really valuable when helping founders build out their go to market plan is to establish why this is the right market to go after. The trick that I use with founders is we try to find the right macro trend.

Macro trend describes some big thing that's happening in your target market. So for example, my target market are SaaS founders and there's a macro trend where 92% of SaaS companies fail within three years, despite initial funding and initial revenues. This is a real macro trend that exists in our industry and every SaaS founder is worried about it.

It means that you can build a product and you can start to generate early revenue, but within three years, despite funding, you don't get to that next stage of growth. That is a macro trend and it explains why there a need for my product and my videos and everything else that I do. The same is true for the market that you're going after.

So the second step in building a proper go to market plan is to really stress test what is this urgent and important problem and what is the macro trend that exists that really necessitates and proves this is truly an urgent and important problem? You do these two things. You start to get a real definition of the target market you're going after and why it exists, and you get out of your own head on trying to convince yourself something that may not be true because at the end of the day, you may be going out and saying, Hey, this is a really urgent, important problem.

But if you can't quite find that macro trend that proves it, then chances are you're trying to convince yourself of something that isn't true. But when you do find that really great macro trend, this actually helps in two ways. One, it brings mental clarity on exactly the market you're going after and why it exists, but also that macro trend can be used across your sales and marketing activities to show how important your product is and also drive urgency in your deals.

This will come in later. I'll talk about it later in one of the subsequent steps. Once you've established a market and once you've established the why, the macro trend, then comes the third part, third part is positioning.

Even with this target market and this bounding box, it can be a very big market. And in software we've learned that we can actually segment the market in specific ways. So in terms of the target market for SaaS, you can actually break this down into selling to small and medium sized businesses.

You can go after the mid-market and you can go after the enterprise and this can be broken down in a more detailed way as well. You can go after the little enterprise or the upper mid-market or the lower mid-market, and you can even go after solo users. So there are different segments of the market that you can be going after as you are starting to define what your go to market plan is going to be.

Now, this is important for a number of reasons. The first reason is it helps you really chunk down which segment of the market you can be the most competitive, where you can really solve the problem or the segment of the market where the problem is the most pronounced. It also really drives how you're going to communicate.

So by the time you are actually running that ad or you're creating your website, you're doing all the marketing motions, which comes at a later step, you're going to be a lot more custom focused on the specific segment of the market and the more focused you are, the more effective your messaging is going to be. So positioning, really figuring out what segment of the market you're going to be focusing on is one of the key steps to building a proper go to market plan. Now, if you go after the entire market, well, it's possible to do that, but you may not have the budget to really reach that entire segment of the market.

There's only so much money you can spend on ads or outbound or cold calling. So the more specific you get and the more intentional you get about the segment of the market you go after, the more effective your go to market motions are going to be later on, which is a later step that I'll cover. Now, as you're thinking about positioning, there's a couple of nuances to this.

So one of the things that's true in SaaS is if you are selling to the SMB or solo, then likely it's going to be impacting how you sell your product. It will also be impacting how you price your products. If you're selling to SMEs and solo, you probably can't afford salespeople.

It means that they can't afford these big six figure deals or ten figure deals, so they can only pay, say, $49 a month or $9 a month, in which case you can't really pay a sales person and pay their salary and their commission to be able to serve this market. as you start to pick the segment of the market you're going after, it will have implications on how you actually execute on your go to market plan and your pricing. So in this case, if you're going after SMB, it's going to be relatively cheap.

But if you're going after the enterprise, chances are you're going to have to charge a good amount of money. So that you can afford the marketing and enterprise sales reps that are required to be able to sell into that market. So the more upmarket you go, the more you're going to have to charge and also the more complex of the sales motion you're going to have.

in this kind of scenario, you will likely have a product led growth motion where they start a free trial and use the product on their own. Whereas on this side there may be a forced sales process and there may be a demo and you might actually have to go on site to actually sell to them. So all these things start to become more complex, which means that you have a much more complex sales process.

So as you starting to think about the positioning in the market and what segment of the market we really want to go after, you can start to think about the implications of that, meaning you're going after the SMB. Well, you will architect your website and the primary button in a certain way and your product would experience a certain way. But if you're actually going after higher end in the market, well then you have to actually architect a proper sales process.

So all of these little nuances start to come together as you decide on the positioning for your market. Okay. So once you do these three things, you start to get an understanding of where you're going to be playing.

And this is a critical part of your go to market plan. One of the things you'll notice is we haven't run a single ad yet. We haven't talked about what goes on your website.

have a done an outbound campaign and that's intentional. What this really does is as part of the planning process and this is what I learn from the best as part of the planning process, we start to first get really intentional about where are we going to play, how are we going to differentiate, and how do we make sure that by the time we're executing, we actually know what we're doing and we're being very intentional and we know that we stand a chance at winning. this is the whole point of building out a proper go to market plan and go to market strategy because it forces you to make some tough decisions upfront instead of just sending out 10,000 emails and wondering why no one responded.

So let me just pause here for a second before I go to step number four. Are you starting to see the power in this? If you start to see the power of building a proper plan before you start executing so that by the time you start executing, you're more set up to succeed.

You start to see the power in this. Can I just get a yes in the comments below and also smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that.

Also, as you're going through this, if you're starting to get questions, you're starting to get some aha moments. I would love to hear from you in the comments below. So just put in the comments.

Any questions that you have or any thoughts that you have as you're going through this already? want you to take a really active, role in this because if you really get this right, it will set you up for success and hitting that next stage of growth for your SaaS business. And one of the way to do that is start to make some notes about what is your target market, is an urgent import problem.

What is the macro trend? Which segment of the market do you want to go after and just share it below so I can hear from you. Also, if you're in the stage where you're building out your go to market plan and you want to work with me to actually implement all these steps, then you should check out my SaaSs.

Go to market coaching program. You're have to go anywhere right now. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode.

Also link to it below. Let's go to step number four. This is where a lot of these pieces start to come together.

Step number four. And a lot of people skip this because it's scary. And trust me, I've done this too, but I like to make sure that I let a little candle I put out some soothing music and I really go out there and look at the competition.

Now I know that you have the best product in the business, but at the same time your customers don't know that yet. And in order for your customers to ever discover your product, your go to market and your marketing and your sales has to communicate that you are better than the competition and there's no way you're going to know how to communicate, how you're better, how to differentiate from your competition unless you spend a little bit of time figuring out what your competition is doing. one of the things I like to do is set aside an hour and really start to do a bunch of Google searches and really start to look at all the websites of my competition and look at their G2 reviews so I can start to map out where are the competitors in the different chessboard of the market?

Are they serving the SMB? Are they serving the enterprise? Are they serving little enterprise or the upper mid-market?

And I like to map out where these competitors exist. This does a couple of things. One, it just helps me understand what my customers are already seeing in this market because chances are if I'm running an ad or I'm doing outbound or I'm generating leads through organic social content, any number of marketing and sales motions right alongside it, they're going to see messaging from my competitors because they're targeting the same segment of the market.

And what this really does is helps me understand how am I going to be different? And also, do I just go and directly compete against one of these guys, or do I go after a different segment of the market where there isn't a lot of competition? And that's the distinction in this because by looking at the competitive dynamics in this market, it helps you go back and look at what is my market thesis and am I in the right one, What is the right macro trend and my position in the right place.

One of two things is going to happen. One, you might realize there's a segment of the market or competitors don't exist, meaning they're not serving a certain segment of the market. In that case, this is what we call whitespace.

It means that there's an underserved segment of the market. If you find an underserved segment of the market, then chances are, there's opportunity there. It could also be that that's just a terrible market, which is why competition is not there.

So this is where you go back and figure out the macro trend and really start to understand is that a good market? Is the problem truly urgent and important for that segment of the market or not? The help is stress test it.

You could also decide, you know what, I actually don't want to go after the whitespace. There's a reason why no one's competing in there. One of my features makes me ten times better than anything else that's out there or you might say, you know what?

It's traditional SaaS companies that are competing over here and I'm building out an air enable SaaS offering, which means that everything is ten times faster. So I'm going to go after and compete against these guys and really beat them and really highlight how we're ten times better than the competition. So what this really allows you to do is understand the competitive dynamics instead of ignoring it, because I know it can be scary to look at, but then say, Cool, what segment of the market am I going after?

What's my positioning and what's the macro trend? So I can truly compete against these guys. that's why spending a little bit of time to look at the competition makes a huge difference because at the end of the day, your potential customers, your target customers are being inundated by your competition.

So you should understand how you can differentiate yourself. So by the time they look at you, they immediately understand, Oh, these guys are different. I really want to do business with them, which is the way you actually create an effective go to market plan.

Once you've mapped out the competition, then a lot of these pieces start to come together. Step number five is to actually develop your messaging. Now, messaging shows up in a couple of different ways.

The simplest way is your website. As soon as you go to your website, the big text, the hero text that's up there is your messaging. It also shows up in ads, in your ads.

There's messaging that really needs to be speaking to your ideal customer. Messaging shows up in outbound emails, messaging shows up in your organic post and your blogs and keywords. Whatever you do in terms of sales and marketing messaging shows up in your sales stack so you can actually guide people through the process and get them to buy and align the different buying groups.

Messaging is one of the key pieces and messaging done in a vacuum tend to not be very effective. This is why I meet so many founders who maybe hired a fractional CMO that can't get a real CMO job and burned through three months of paying them and got nothing on the other end, even though they did a bunch of activities or they paid an agency and the agency came from the right place, but there just wasn't enough budget to really figure out where the heat is in the market. So they couldn't really get results.

so founders that really embrace building a go to market plan themselves and then go to the right service providers to execute on that plan tend to do better founders that run some of those go to market motions at first really understand the data, and then they know like this is working and then hire agencies to go scale it out, tend to do better. So it's super important to really create your thesis on what your messaging is going to be. There's two core pieces of messaging that you want to define as part of this step.

The first one is your value proposition. Your value proposition is your one sentence that clearly articulates what you do in the market for you ten times better than the competition. I like to use the grandma test when we're working on value propositions.

It's Thanksgiving and Grandma. asks you what your company does. Can you actually explain in one simple sentence what your company does and most of your family will understand?

This is where fancy words tend to not work. And the truth is, if Grandma can understand what you do and why you're better than your ideal customers who are very, very distracted in a noisy world will also understand it. So creating a value proposition really helps you understand how you differentiate in the market, and that feeds into stuff like your home page messaging and your ads and everything else.

The other piece that I like to work on with founders when we're building out their go to market plan is their strategic narrative. There's two big pieces of competition that exist when you're trying to sell software. The first one is apathy.

The apathy is where they kind of know this is an urgent and important problem, but there's a bunch of other stuff and they're not really going to move right away. And so you really have to find a way to inspire them to move faster. You have to educate them, help them understand why they need to move on this.

Now, the other type of competition, the reason that you need to overcome is actual competition and a deal where they're looking at your competitor and they're trying to understand whether they should go with you or someone else. In that kind of scenario, you really need to educate them about why you understand their problem better than anyone else in either of these cases where you're trying to battle apathy or you're trying to battle actual competition, one of the things that comes in handy in your go to market motions is a strategic narrative. A strategic narrative.

I call this a manifesto helps you really structure a way of communicating what you do, why you do it, and what's the transformation you bring to your customers lives in a way where they will really resonate with it is a specific way of educating them of why you actually do what you do and why they need to choose you versus anyone else in the market. One of the things I found, this is my sixth year running the go to market program and running the channel Creating the strategic narrative clarifies a whole lot of things. It clarifies your messaging, it clarifies your product roadmap, the class who you're serving and clarifies what you put in your home page, and it clarifies the type of marketing motions you're going to run.

It's a specific process that I take you through, but when you craft a proper strategic narrative, it helps you really get a deeper understanding of what it is you're doing in the market and gets you to a point where you can look at any prospect and say, Look, this is why we do what we do and here's why you should go with us. And you would be crazy to go with anyone else in the market. And that's the type of conviction we want you to achieve when you are running your go to market place so that you can actually sell your path to that next stage of growth.

So this is where messaging comes in really handy, and that's step number five. Once you've done these five steps, then comes the fun part, then comes step number six, and that's execution. Now there are 13 different ways to go to market, each of those ways have unique advantages and disadvantages in each of those ways work for certain segments in the market and don't work for certain segments of the market.

one of the things you'll have to figure out is once you have your targeting, that's the target market you're going after. Once you have very specific segment of the market you're going after, once you understand the competitive dynamics and once you have your messaging, then you have to figure out, cool, how do we get that messaging in front of our ideal customers on a consistent basis? Now, you could be doing this through inbound, you could be doing this through outbound and you could be doing this through channels.

And all of these break down into multiple different channels that you can be going after. And it really depends on the segment of the market. You're going after and also what your capabilities are.

One of the things I've found is founders really need to first figure out what their messaging is and figure out a way to iterate on it and get it right. And then they can turn on as many of these 13 channels as possible as they look to scale. So it really is one of those things where the slower you go in the beginning, the faster you can go in the long run.

founders that really take the time to think through these five steps and then get into execution are the ones that do really well in the market because they come from a place of conviction. And when it comes to go to market execution, one of the key pieces that you'll also want to do is collect the right data. One of the things I found is it's never perfect when you first get it out, but if you collect the right data, you'll be able to understand Is my targeting right?

Is the market right? Is my messaging right? And based on the data, you can iterate on it and gets better and better and better and better and better.

And that's what allows for you to truly achieve scale. All right. So those are the six steps to building a proper go to market plan.

And we implement these six steps. You'll be able to accelerate your path to the next stage of growth. Let's recap them.

Step number one is to really figure out the bounding box, the target market you're going after. Once you really understand the target market and have defined what is the urgent and important problem that exists, then you want to get into step number two. Step number two is where you define the macro trend that proves that this is truly an urgent and important problem.

This macro trend helps bring you clarity on what you're doing, but also can be used in your go to market motions to educate your customers on why they need to take action. Right now, macro trend that I use for my specific market for SaaS founders is that 92% of SaaS companies fail within three years, despite initial revenues and funding. And one of the biggest reasons that they fail is they don't really have a proper distribution strategy.

They don't have proper go to market plans, which is one of the macro trends that proves what I do and the things that I teach is super valuable. So you want to find the macro trend that's relevant for you. Once you figure out the macro trend in the target market, then you want to map out the market and really figure out where you want to position yourself.

There are different segments in the market you can go after. You could go after the SMB, the mid-market enterprise, and depending on the segment of the market you're going after, it will dictate how much you can charge and the type of sales process you have, whether it's product led or it's sales driven or it's some sort of hybrid. Once you've figured out the positioning, then it's time to really stress test it.

So that's when you look at the competition. I know it's not the most fun thing to do. Light a candle, put on some music and really look at the competition and time, box yourself to an hour to understand what are the competitive dynamics in the market.

Is there a whitespace and do you want to go into a certain whitespace or do you want to go direct head to head against a competitor because you have a ten X better offering once you've done that, then you really put it all together in terms of your messaging. There's two components to your messaging. The first one is your value proposition.

This is how you communicate what you do in one sentence, you also want to communicate why you're ten times better than the rest. And you also want to have a strategic narrative that's a longer form version of how you really communicate, why you do what you do, why your customers need to take action now, and why they need to go with you. I call this a manifesto.

Once you have these pieces, you have your go to market plan, and most people don't even do these pieces and just jump to the execution. And that's why most go to market initiatives fail. But when you do these five steps, you have a proper plan and a strategy, then you can drive your execution.

There are 30 different ways you can bring your message to your ideal customers on a consistent basis. You could do inbound, outbound and channels. The key here is to start with one channel collect the right data, make sure your messaging is resonating, and then iterate and scale from there.

And you do these six steps. You'll be able to excel your path to that next stage of growth. now you know the six steps to building an effective go to market plan.

What you may not know is to, okay, how do I figure out if I'm solving an urgent, important problem? How do I define this in the form of a proper ideal customer profile? do I find the right macro trends?

What are good macro trends and what are bad macro trends? You may be wondering what segment of the market do I want to position against? You may be wondering, do I go after the whitespace or is it a bad market or do I go after this direct competitor?

If I'm going after this direct competitor, how do we compete to win? You have me wondering, how do I craft my messaging so that Grandma understands what I do and it's not overly complicated? Or you may be wondering, how do I structure my strategic narrative?

Because my sales cycles are long and I really need to drive action inside of my sales process. Or you may be thinking about, look, I have my messaging and my targeting, but which channel do I use and how do I win in that channel? Maybe you want to do LinkedIn or you want to do Twitter or you want to do ads or you want to do CRM and you really want to figure out the right mix and really collect the right data so you can scale.

So if you're in this stage where you're building out your go to market plan and you really want to execute on this in the right way and you want to reduce execution risk and you want to step by step process on building out your go to market plan, executing on it and driving growth for your SaaS business. This is why I created my SaaS go to market coaching program. Inside of this program I help you go from a relatively undefined go to market plan to a well-defined and scalable go to market machine that you can execute on the way we do.

This is three key steps. The first step is we build out an ideal customer profile. Now everyone thinks to have an ICP until they work with me.

I follow a 29 point process to guide you in, really fleshing out your ICP and it includes your urgent, important problem identification, macro trends and even positioning that ICP helps you really hone in on the segment of the market that you will be targeting once you have your ICP. Then I teach you how to build out your manifesto. Your manifesto is the framework that I use to flesh out your value proposition.

It's your messaging, it's your strategic narrative, it's how you communicate to the market, why you do what you do, why you do it better than anyone else, and why they should buy from you. Once you have these two pieces, you have your go to market plan and strategy. Then comes the third pillar.

The third pillar is a Broadway show. A Broadway show is a consistent set of sales and marketing activities that you can execute on to bring your manifesto to your ICP on a consistent basis. As I mentioned, there's 13 different ways to go to market and go into different channels, but that can be overwhelming.

So I'll teach you which channels to start with, what data to collect and how to iterate and scale as it starts to work. I even teach you exactly who to hire, in what order and how to evaluate them so you can truly scale and go from founder lead to founder leverage. It is an incredible program.

It's my sixth year running the program. We've shared so many success stories and we continue to share the success stories inside of the program. So if you'd like to work together, just go to T.

K. Care. com slash GTM, T.

K. Datacom slash GTM, and you'll get all of the details. Now, the better the fit, the better the results, which is why in that page, you'll get all the details on how the program works and how to work together.

With me, what we ask of you is to fill out a small application form and book a call with us on the call. We'll figure out where you are, what your goals are, what's holding you back. And if it sounds like it's the fit, then we'll be off to the races right away.

So just go to tkkader. com/gtm. Now, if you've got values from this video, which hopefully you did, if you're still watching, please smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm.

It just loves it when you do that. if you have a fellow founder, if you have a team member that would get value from this video, please share this video with them. You're part of a WhatsApp group or Slack group, a Reddit group of other SaaS founders that would get value from this video.

Please share this with them as well. We want to serve and help as many SaaS founders as possible. Also, I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster.

So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon. You'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business.

When you are with us, yours is going to be unstoppable. I'm T. K.

, and I'll see in the next episode of Inside the SaaS Go to Market Coaching Program. Thank you everybody, and take care.