Ultimate Go-to-Market Strategy Guide (PowerPoint PPTX)

Launching a product is a big investment and a poorly executed launch can sabotage the success of an otherwise excellent product.

A go-to-market strategy (GTM) is an action plan for launching a new product or expanding into a new market with your current product. A thorough GTM plan helps you define your target customers, coordinate your actions and messaging across teams and position your product for a launch.

Doing the work upfront ensures that you are targeting the right customers, differentiating yourself from competition, and charging the right price for your products, in order to be successful. The Ultimate Go-to-Market Strategy slide deck covers the 7 key steps for a successful go to market strategy:

1. Identify your customer – Customer segmentation is the process of dividing customers into groups based on common characteristics. Segmentation can help you in understanding your customers' needs and motivations better. You can then tailor your marketing, sales pitches and, incentive programs in ways that resonate with that group.

2. Know your competition – Understand the structure of your industry and see where the power centers lie using the famous Porter's 5-forces model. Then, research how you stack up against your competition on a product basis, as well as in terms of positioning and strategy.

3. Create your unique value proposition – Utilize SWOT Analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your product / organization. Use all of the above inputs to craft your own competitive strategy and unique value proposition for your target customers.

4. Define your brand positioning and message – Understand how your customers perceive you; and then draw up plans to shift these perceptions to what you want.

5. Define your pricing strategy – Do you go cost+? What the competitors are charging? Based on what the customer is willing to pay?

Your pricing strategy should be developed after taking into account your unique business aspects and external environmental factors. The best pricing strategy maximizes your revenue and profit, for your situation.

6. Create your sales and marketing plan – Your marketing plan should aim to capture as many targeted leads as possible, and then nurture promising ones through the purchasing decision at each stage of the marketing funnel.

Clear marketing objectives and strategy are key determinant to a successful marketing campaign. Before you go ahead and launch, you need to nail down key facets of the campaign such as primary and secondary objectives; campaign duration, budget; target customers & geographies; etc. Likewise, for your sales plan, list down the key initiatives / actions you will take under the sales campaign, the key metrics to track and the duration of each initiative. These elements should all be in a go-to-market strategy presentation.

7. Implement the plan and track your progress – Define your key goals for the product launch and the associated key performance indicators (KPIs) to achieve. Regularly track progress against these and put in place a feedback loop with the executing teams.

The go-to-market strategy PPT templates included can be used to fill out your own go-to-market strategy deck, covering the 7 steps above. The accompanying Word document acts as a ready reference guide for the entire go-to-market strategy development & execution process.