The ultimate guide to building a GTM strategy: Steps, tools, and best practices

This blog was originally published by our sister community GTM Alliance.

Launching a new product can feel a little daunting. How can you ensure you get your product offering to the right customers at the right time?

That’s where a solid Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy comes in. And guess what? We’re here to share a step-by-step framework for building one.

We’ll cover everything from identifying target customers to pricing models to distribution. Plus, we’ll share some handy tools and best practices to help you build sustainable and scalable success.

With this guide in your back pocket, you’ll be primed to launch your product to market and keep it there successfully.

Let’s get into it.

Hold up, what's a Go-to-Market strategy?

A Go-to-Market strategy outlines how a company will introduce and sell a new product or service to its target customers. It covers everything from your value proposition to pricing, distribution, and marketing.

For SaaS companies (as well as increasing numbers of consumer products), your GTM must align closely with the recurring revenue subscription model. That means acquiring customers cost-effectively, ensuring low churn through customer success practices, and continually monetizing through upsells and cross-sells.

The importance of a solid GTM strategy in the world of SaaS

GTM is particularly crucial in the SaaS realm for a few key reasons:

Fast-paced innovation: With new competitors emerging constantly, you need to move quickly and achieve product-market fit before opportunities disappear. An agile, adaptable GTM strategy is essential.
Short sales cycles: In SaaS, buyers expect transparent pricing and the ability to sign up instantly through self-service options. Your GTM must enable frictionless sales.
Low switching costs: With customers able to easily jump between solutions, your GTM must focus on delivering extremely positive user experiences that drive loyalty.
High customer lifetime value (LTV): The subscription model means you can gain significant long-term value per customer – but first, you have to give customers a reason to stick with you by building customer success practices into your GTM.

By considering these unique SaaS dynamics and challenges upfront, you can craft a customer-centric GTM strategy that fuels sustainable growth.

Your step-by-step guide to building a GTM strategy

So, are you ready to craft a winning strategy? Let's dive in with a step-by-step approach that covers all the essential elements. We'll explore a five-step framework that will help you nail down the perfect GTM plan. Here’s a taste of the five key steps:

Identify your target market and customer personas
Craft your value proposition and messaging
Choose the right channels
Nail your pricing and monetization strategies
Build a sales and distribution model

When you follow this comprehensive framework, you’ll get the clarity you need to confidently launch your product.

Step one: Identify your target market and personas

Thoroughly researching your addressable market and defining your ideal user and buyer personas sets the stage for you to reach and resonate with your target audience.

First, analyze your total addressable market (TAM) - the revenue opportunity available to your offering. Evaluate factors like market size, growth rates, trends, competitive forces, segmentation strategies, and more using data from research reports and your own customer discovery interviews. This will help you realistically size opportunities and focus on lucrative, under-served segments.

Next, divide your TAM into personas - semi-fictional representations of your ideal target groups. To create detailed personas, you can conduct surveys and interviews, and analyze demographic data to get insights into their motivations, behaviors, challenges, and defining characteristics.

It's best to give your personas descriptive names and include key details such as their role, industry, company size, pain points, and value drivers. This will help you better understand and connect with your target audience.

With clear personas mapped to your TAM, you can develop customized messaging and solutions for each lifecycle stage. It's important to think about how your product helps customers throughout their journey, from when they first hear about it to when they become card-carrying advocates. And don't forget to keep learning about your customers so you can improve their experience over time.

Getting your target market and personas right from the start is the key to creating a GTM strategy tightly aligned with the customers you want to serve. It keeps you from wasting blood, sweat, tears, and budget on broad, untargeted activities that reach the wrong customers.

Step two: Craft your value proposition and messaging

With your personas in hand, it’s time to craft a compelling value proposition that explains exactly how you solve each persona’s most pressing pains and needs. To do this, you’ll need to get clear on your positioning – how you’re different and better than alternatives.

To launch a successful product, it's important to start by understanding the struggles that your customers face. One way to do this is by conducting value proposition interviews. By asking targeted questions, you can learn about the problems your customers have, the impact these issues have, how your product can address these issues, and where alternative solutions fall short.

Next, define your core value proposition with a simple, credible statement addressing your persona’s situation, obstacles, and desired outcomes. Be sure to quantify the improvements your solution provides over existing options. And don't forget to refine your language until it strikes an emotional chord with your audience.

Once you have your core value proposition, it's time to tailor your messaging and content for every touchpoint. This means creating customized summaries for your website, sales conversations, ads, and all other interactions. Be sure to emphasize the areas where your differentiation really shines through.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-and-done kind of job. As the market evolves, your messaging must keep up or get left behind. Test your content continuously with target users. Is it hitting the mark? Where do customers tune out or seem confused? You can then quickly pivot based on feedback.

Remember: Value propositions should be external-facing and benefit-driven, not focused on product features. The most effective messaging clearly communicates your unique ability to help customers achieve progress and success.

Step three: Choose the right channels

With your core messaging locked and loaded, it's time to figure out which communication channels will enable you to reach your target audience.

You might want to start with digital channels like search, social media, and display ads to create early interest. To build relationships with potential customers and establish your organization as a thought leader, why not lean into content marketing through blogs, guides, and webinars? You could also use chatbots or good old-fashioned telephone sales reps to connect with promising leads.

As you weigh your options, consider the cost per lead, conversion rates, and, most importantly, where your target customers can usually be found. For instance, LinkedIn could be a great place to start if you’re looking to get your B2B solution into the hands of millennial buyers. If you’re targeting Gen Z with a consumer offering, get on TikTok.

Partnering with complementary solutions is another great way to expand your reach. Joint marketing can increase your visibility – plus, integrated products create a more seamless user experience. For example, many expense management tools partner with corporate card providers.

And, of course, never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth! Delighted users talking about your business on social media and peer forums is the most persuasive kind of marketing you could ask for. You can even incentivize sharing through referral programs to speed up your growth.

Lastly, it's important to continuously test and optimize your channel mix based on performance data. By focusing on the channels that work best for you, you’ll bring in more promising leads and grow your business faster.

Step four: Nail your pricing and monetization strategies

When it comes to making a purchase, pricing can be a major factor in the decision-making process. Pricing strategies can vary depending on whether you're launching a consumer product or a B2B SaaS offering.

Here are some options you might want to consider if you’re launching a SaaS product:

Per-user pricing: This has the benefit of being simple and scaling revenue as customers grow. Many collaborative tools like Slack use this model.
Tiered capabilities: This involves offering preset packages (for instance, basic, pro, and enterprise) with increasing levels of features and capabilities. The great thing about this model is that it allows for upsells to higher tiers.
Usage-based: In this model, you charge for customers’ actual usage or throughput. This model is popular among fintech and cloud infrastructure providers like Stripe and AWS.

To make things easier for your customers, finding the right balance between value, affordability, and margins is important. Avoid overwhelming them with too many options or nickel-and-diming them with add-ons. Instead, consider offering discounts for annual contracts and special terms for influential customers.

For SaaS offerings, retention and expansion are key. Be sure to continually highlight the ROI of your product through usage analytics, and consider testing smarter bundling or incentives to encourage customers to upgrade to higher price points.

Whatever your product – SaaS or otherwise – here are some other key pricing strategies to consider – you can even use them in tandem with the pricing models above:

Value-based pricing: This is all about pricing your product based on perceived value. That is, what your customers think it's worth. To see it in action, look no further than the iPhone.
Competitor-based pricing: This strategy involves studying your competitors’ pricing models and setting your price accordingly. If you want to position your brand as a higher-end option, set your prices a little higher. Looking to be seen as a no-frills alternative? Go a little lower.
Cost-plus pricing: This one is based on the profit margin you’re looking to make. You simply calculate how much your product costs to produce, then add a certain percentage on top.

Whether you’re selling SaaS or consumer products, it's important to be transparent about your pricing. Don't make customers jump through hoops to figure out how much something costs – and why not offer promotions or bundles to sweeten the deal?

Step five: Build a sales and distribution model

If you're looking to boost sales and reach more customers, it's important to tailor your sales and distribution methods to fit each customer segment.

For smaller businesses or teams, self-service purchases are a great option. Offering free trials showcasing your product's value and making signup seamless will help make the process easy and enjoyable for your customers. Clear pricing and product documentation will also make buying a breeze.

For mid-market customers, inside sales teams can be very effective. Having specialized reps respond quickly to inbound leads and nurturing promising leads through focused sales conversations will help you scale efficiently. This is a much better strategy than resorting to the dreaded cold calling.

Meanwhile, enterprise deals often require a different approach. You'll need field sales reps who can develop deep client relationships over long sales cycles that span months.

Another way to expand your reach is through distribution partnerships. Embedding your solution within a broader platform is a great way to increase your distribution with limited sales costs. Some great examples of this are the Shopify App Store and Salesforce AppExchange, which have propelled thousands of complementary integrations.

Must-have GTM tools

The wealth of software and tools available to modern GTM practitioners has the power to streamline your Go-to-Market processes so you can launch a product more smoothly than ever before. Let’s take a look at some of the core tools you’ll need.

CRM and sales automation tools

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot help you centralize all your prospect and client data in one place. This way, you can nurture relationships with them throughout their entire lifecycle.

Here's where it gets even better: you can feed insights from your marketing, sales, and service interactions into the platform to create an integrated profile. This means you can personalize your interactions with them at scale.

Sales automation tools can also be integrated with a CRM platform to boost your productivity. For instance, email tracking can help you qualify leads in real-time by following up on engagement. You can even integrate with email clients like Gmail. These platforms even offer chatbots to instantly address visitor questions and surface sales opportunities.

Contract automation tools like DocuSign and Juro can also standardize document handling, making things even smoother. And when you use CRM, sales automation, and contract automation tools together, you can move buyers smoothly through the sales pipeline. While the technology handles traditionally time-consuming tasks like sending out contracts, you have time to focus on what matters: your customers.

Finally, integrations with sales and contract tools can capture all your interactions and record them in CRM profiles. Over time, this enriches the quality of your data, helping you build a more complete picture of your prospects and customers, so you can continue refining your offering to meet their needs.

Marketing and analytics tools

Marketing automation can help you nurture leads with personalized messaging. It's a great way to engage with potential customers on a larger scale. You can use tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Brevo to create email campaigns, conduct A/B testing, score leads, and track marketing analytics.

But that's not all! Marketing analytics can provide you with valuable insights and data. With tools like Google Analytics, you can see your traffic sources, highest-value landing pages, and conversion bottlenecks.

And if you’re looking to get to know your customers even better (and you should be!), you can also collect first-party data on their interests and behaviors with survey tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform.

Using session recording and heat mapping tools like Hotjar and Fullstory, you can even see how your visitors interact with your website. That way, you’ll see what’s working and what’s not and optimize accordingly.

If this all sounds like a lot to keep track of, don’t worry – you can also check out all your key metrics at a glance with marketing analytics dashboards from the likes of Klipfolio and Looker.

Using these technologies, you can reach more people and get the feedback you need to optimize. You can also test different messaging styles, offers, and outreach channels to see which ones work best for each customer persona.

With analytics, your teams can better understand how each customer uses your product. This intelligence can help customer success managers (CSMs) guide customers towards adopting new solutions and solving more business issues over time.

Customer success tools

Speaking of customer success, this function is crucial for driving recurring revenue growth by maximizing renewal rates and minimizing churn. Working hand-in-hand with sales, CSMs ensure customers are fully adopting your product and continuing to expand their usage and fall in love with your product – and when you have a happy and successful customer, they’re more likely to stick around for the long run.

So, here are some customer success tools to help your CSMs drive tangible results for your organization:

Usage analytics tools like Mixpanel and Pendo are useful for your product teams and provide visibility for CSMs, allowing them to identify struggling customers and address roadblocks. Plus, they can reveal unused features to upsell.
Customer health scoring platforms like ChurnZero use advanced metrics to detect subtle signals predicting churn risk. This allows early actions to get struggling customers back on track.
Customer engagement tools like Totango and Planhat track usage behaviors and trigger messages nudging inactive users to re-engage. Some offer in-app triggers like educational content or prompts driving adoption.
Customer surveys can be used to collect Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and customer satisfaction feedback on the user experience. This highlights what’s going well and what could be improved. Tools like Qualtrics and GetFeedback allow you to easily create these surveys and analyze the data they generate.
Self-service support sites efficiently handle basic questions, freeing teams for high-impact account management.

Used in tandem, these technologies help scale the personal high-touch experiences that customer success teams drive. By proactively guiding customers to realize more value, they also organically grow recurring revenues over time.

GTM best practices

Beyond tools and tactical execution, overarching best practices will set your product launch up for ongoing success. Let’s explore a few of these best practices, focusing on…

Market alignment,
Agility and adaptation, and
Cross-functional collaboration.

Market alignment

If you want your Go-to-Market strategy to be successful, you need to focus on your customers' needs. As the market evolves, you, too, need to evolve alongside it, keeping up with changing customer preferences and market landscapes.

To set your roadmap, it's important to conduct primary research with your customers, rather than just prioritizing internal goals. You should regularly interview prospects, customers, and former clients who switched to your competitors. Ask them open-ended questions to discover their needs and how the market is shifting.

Analyzing your win/loss ratios is also important, as it can help you identify weaknesses and understand why would-be customers choose other options. You can use these findings to fine-tune your approach to better fit customer needs.

Lastly, it's important to keep up with market trends by attending conferences, reading research reports, monitoring your peers, and consulting with experts. While you don't need to reinvent your plans every week, it's important to evaluate any important shifts in the market that may require a quick pivot to optimize your product-market fit.

In short, by aligning your strategy with the needs of your customers, you can deliver the solutions they need right now and stay ahead of the competition.

Agility and adaptation

In dynamic markets, rigid approaches to pricing, distribution, messaging, and marketing can quickly grow stale. That's why it's important to stay agile and be ready to pivot based on feedback and results.

To do this, it's essential to define key performance indicators (KPIs) for each initiative and monitor them constantly. If you notice that, say, your email marketing strategy has been consistently failing to drive conversions, it's time to change your approach.

You've also got to be willing to try out new channels, partnerships, pricing models, and messaging. Start with minimum viable campaigns and set clear KPIs to measure their success. As you scale the campaigns that are getting traction, be sure to quickly shift or sunset any ineffective ones.

Finally, build a culture that embraces informed experimentation and adaptation. This will allow you to easily shift resources towards initiatives that are most optimized for the current market conditions.

Cross-functional collaboration

And, of course, what would an article on GTM be without a quick shout-out to our old pal, cross-functional collaboration? Taking a product to market is an inherently cross-functional effort – you need everybody from sales to marketing, customer success to product, product marketing, and more marching to the beat of the drum.

One way to make this happen is by sharing KPI dashboards that cover all the important metrics, from traffic and leads to customer retention. This will help everyone stay on the same page and work towards the same objectives.

It's also a good idea to involve all teams in the planning process so that everyone has a say. This way, you'll be able to align your efforts better and create a more cohesive customer experience.

Of course, it's important to nurture relationships between team members, too. Open communication channels like Slack and informal get-togethers, whether online or in person, can go a long way in building trust and empathy between teams.

Onwards to GTM success!

By following the framework we've laid out, you're setting yourself up for some serious success. This approach isn't just about launching a product; it's about understanding your market inside out, connecting with your customers, and adapting to meet their needs.

With customer obsession at the core of your strategy, you’ll craft cohesive experiences that attract and delight the perfect users to fulfill their evolving needs over time. That’s how category-leading brands are built.