AMA: Momentive Vice President, Product Marketing, Priya Gill on Go-to-Market Strategy

There are 3 core areas that I ensure I have a solid understanding of before I build my GTM plan (it’s the same for when I have to build messaging & positioning): * Market trends & Competitive landscape: Understand what’s happening in the market we’re looking to play in and the customer problems or market gaps we are looking to solve. What similar offerings exist and how does our offering differentiate? * Target buyer(s) & their pain points: Get a clear understanding of who my target buyer is (budget, motivation to buy, purchase blockers) and what their pain points are (as it relates to the problem space your target buyer is looking to solve) * Product knowledge: What features and functionality are we delivering and how does that translate into a unique value proposition and set of customer benefits From there, it’s building out the core components of the GTM plan (some of which would be pulled from the research above): * Launch goals: how success will be measured * Launch tier & customer impact (if applicable): helps stakeholders know the level of involvement, volume of launch activities and the impact of the launch on the market and to existing customers * Market & competitive landscape: what are the top market trends, who are the top players in the industry * Product & pricing overview: what you’re launching, how much it costs, what’s included (from a capability perspective), what value will it deliver * Ideal customer profile: who are the primary and secondary targets, cut by geography, company profile (industry, company size), and/or persona (department, job level, budget size, titles) * Product messaging & differentiation: product description, value props and top use cases * Customer acquisition strategy: how customers will hear about the product, what the purchase experience will be like, key points to optimize * Launch execution timeline & DACI: key milestones to drive towards and what the DACI looks like for each part of the process Seamless launch execution of the items above, alignment across cross-functional teams and keeping all stakeholders well-informed throughout the process will be key to your success.

One of the most challenging product launches I’ve done was the launch of Box Drive. It was challenging for 2 reasons: 1) we were dead last to market from a product competitive perspective (and only able to launch as a public beta to start) and 2) we were going to be feature deficient (compared to the competition) at the time of the launch. All of our competitors had gone to market with very similar messaging (based on viewing their web copy and press releases) and I was struggling to find a way to deliver something that would be differentiated. As I formulated the GTM strategy, I talked to a subset of our customers who were really excited about the product to better understand their pain points and the benefits they would realize from this product. It was during those conversations that I uncovered a completely new (and major) use case that became the crux of my GTM strategy, and ultimately led to the most successful product launch in the history of Box, up until that point (even though we launched it as a public beta). It speaks volumes to the importance of customer feedback as an input to your GTM strategy.

The most typical KPIs are pipeline/revenue if it’s a product that can be purchased or product adoption if it’s free. However, there are other KPIs that can be leading indicators to follow. It’ll depend on the feature/product/service you’re launching and what the goal of your launch is, so there’s no hard and fast rule here. But here are some examples depending on what you’re trying to achieve: * Product goals * Product-market fit: product adoption * Product launch success: product-specific pipeline, sign-ups * Marketing goals * Awareness and perception: brand awareness, product awareness, brand associations * Content and campaign performance: paid/email click-through rates, website conversion * Financial impact: marketing-driven pipeline and revenue, MQL → SQL conversion rates * Sales goals * Sales productivity: win rates, pipeline conversion * Financial impact: average deal sizes, target attainment

If you understand the customer problems or market gaps you’re solving for, then you should be able to hone in on your target buyer and the types of customers you want to attract. It’s a lot easier to narrow down to an ICP if your product is already established and you have a base of customers to pull data from. From there you can start looking for patterns to see if there are commonalities across a specific segment of customers: by region, industry, company size, or type of buyer (department, job level). If your product isn’t established yet, then you can leverage market research solutions (like a global panel via SurveyMonkey), to gather buyer feedback. Either way, once you’ve honed in on this, you would operationalize it by infusing it throughout your GTM strategy. Meaning, your messaging and positioning, pricing strategy, sales enablement, marketing content, etc. would be tailored to this audience.

I’m assuming that when you say “existing GTM strategy is not working for the product”, you mean that the product launch failed in some way. I think it’s important to first do a retrospective to understand what really happened and rectify the problem areas. Some common areas to explore first: * Dig into the data: Is it a conversion problem or top of funnel problem? * Assess the product & pricing: Is there product-market fit? Did we solve the customer pain points with the feature set we delivered? Is there willingness to pay for what we’ve built? * Assess target customers, messaging and competition: Is our ICP correct? Does the messaging resonate and is differentiated? Is there anything happening in the competitive landscape that could be putting pressure on sales