This article is based on Amruta Hunnurkar’s talk at the Amsterdam Product Marketing Summit. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the talk in its full glory here.
Here’s how we’d all like our GTM strategies to go:
Step one – Research: You fully understand the product’s features and benefits, you’ve done your research on the competition, and you’ve nailed your buyer insights.
Step two – Distill: You’ve distilled all that research into clear messaging and a value proposition. Then, you go to your leadership team, explain your plan, and say, “I want to launch in these channels on this timeline. Can I get some budget and resources?” Naturally, your leadership team says yes.
Step three – Launch: You execute the launch, everyone’s happy, and buyers are throwing money at your product.
But – be honest – has this ever been your experience?
In your dreams, right?
Here’s how it usually goes: You do steps one and two really well, but then you walk into a meeting with the CEO, and they say, “Is this the right target audience? We should change it.”
Or, a product manager comes to you and says, “Remember that feature we were going to launch? It’s not happening anymore.”
Or, you launch, only to discover that marketing, sales, and customer success aren’t using the messaging or materials you’ve created. (I call this “GTM gone wild.”)
All of these issues can be overwhelming, and worse, they can put your go-to-market at risk of failure. So, today, I’m going to share some common GTM risks and practical ways to overcome them. Hopefully, the tips and examples I’ll share will save you a lot of time and help preserve your sanity the next time you’re tasked with launching a product.
Let’s get into it.
Risk #1: Wrong target audience
You could have the best product in the world, but if you’re serving it to the wrong audience, you’ll waste countless marketing dollars, and your sales strategies just won’t be effective.
So, how do you mitigate this? Well, the first step is obvious: establish your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas, and do it for each product if necessary.
But here’s something that might not be as obvious: you need to audit and socialize this information consistently.
After each launch, always go back and look into the following questions:
It’s a great idea to pair that quantitative data with deeper, more qualitative insights. If you’re listening to sales calls, customer success calls, or even customer support conversations, pull quotes from those and add them to your buyer persona slides.
Then, send that intel out to the rest of the company so you’re not constantly re-educating them on who the customer is.
Running pilot campaigns
But what if you’re launching a new product in unfamiliar territory, or if someone like the CEO or head of marketing questions whether you’re targeting the right audience? This has happened to me before, and one approach that worked was running a pilot campaign.
Let me share an example from my time as SumUp’s Head of Product Marketing: the launch of SumUp Tap to Pay on Android – a product that allows merchants to take card payments on their phones. Phone payments are everywhere now, but back then, this was brand-new territory for us.
As we prepared to launch this product, I kept hearing the same question from internal leaders and stakeholders: “Why shouldn’t we mass market this to all our merchants?” However, from the initial data, I could see that this product was a perfect fit for a specific group – merchants on the go, like food trucks and taxi drivers.
So, we ran a pilot campaign, targeting a group of our existing customers. This allowed me to sharply define the audience as these on-the-go merchants and really hone in on the messaging and value proposition – focusing on the mobility aspect of the payment solution.
So, if you’re not sure who your ideal target audience is, why not try running a pilot too? You’d be surprised how many of your current customers might want to test a new product just for a small incentive like a gift card – I know I was!
