How to develop messaging for a mature company entering a new market with a huge brand recall vs a new company?

I’m going to expand my answer to include the entire GTM strategy as well as the product strategy itself. 

For a mature company, I can think of at least a couple of scenarios that would require taking different approaches. For this answer, I’m going to focus on the scenario where you expand into adjacent markets that serve similar teams where there are efficiency gains to be made from tools consolidation. There are many examples of this (including Salesforce, where I used to work), but I’ll focus on where I currently work (in 2024): New Relic.

New Relic was founded as an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) company, whereas Datadog started with infrastructure monitoring, and Splunk was a logs company. Over time, each company realized we could go after each other’s market share, either by acquiring companies that had solutions similar to our competitors, or by building those products internally. In terms of GTM strategy and messaging in this scenario, the value-add of offering a platform of capabilities vs. individual tools is two-fold: 

1) Faster and more efficient troubleshooting when something breaks, because a user has visibility into their performance across their entire stack: Apps, infrastructure, network, and end users’ experiences (ie, mobile devices and browsers). This value prop should resonate with practitioners and IT decision makers.

2) Lower OPEX, due to consolidating onto fewer tools (and simpler procurement process, fewer contracts, etc). This value prop speaks to IT decision makers, budget holders, procurement, etc.

So in the scenario I painted above, the messaging and the GTM strategy should reflect the two broad customer value props I outlined. And as a mature company, you benefit from the following (which you should take into account as you build your strategy):

• Existing customer base

• Mature GTM orgs (Sales and Marketing)

• Credibility within your market, your customers, your prospects, analysts, etc

Having the above “feathers in your cap” is HUGE, and you’ll benefit significantly from them. The one caution would be if, instead of being considered an innovator in your market, you’re thought of as a laggard throwing up a hail mary to stay relevant, you’ll have a tougher time convincing customers to adopt your new product.

Now, let’s discuss doing this at a new company (full disclosure: I haven’t worked for a startup, so take this with a grain of salt). Depending upon the size of your startup, you’ll find yourself on a spectrum from having none of the following to having a fair amount of it:

• Existing customers

• Mature Sales org

• Credibility

The earlier stage you are in, the less important it is to focus on the messaging, and the more important it is to truly understand your ideal customer profile(s), your personas, their pain points, and whether they’re willing to pay for a “better” solution to whatever they’re doing today. As such, your focus should be talking to as many prospects, users, and customers as you can to learn as much as as possible, as quickly as possible. Along the way, you’ll be able to validate the aforementioned and start to think about how to message your solution.