What are some of the best product go-to-market strategies used by best brands?

One of my favorite quotes in marketing is: “sell the hole, not the drill.” A marketing professor at Harvard, Theodore Levitt, lectured about this and would argue that people don’t want to buy a drill; they want a hole. The drill is just the tool used to create the hole. This is where I’ve seen some PMMs get it wrong; they focus on the benefits of their product before the outcome the customer is looking to achieve.

Here’s what we know from human psychology: in both B2B and B2C settings, buyers purchase to achieve an outcome. That outcome could stem from a range of needs, including emotional and functional. As PMMs, we can use this insight to better articulate how our products help buyers achieve those outcomes.

At Cisco, we focus on customer outcomes in all of our narratives, which is a key component of the GTM strategy. At the end of the day, our customers are looking to solve a problem or to achieve an outcome. For example, they want to simplify their IT operations or reduce operating expenses. Through our narratives, we want our customers to walk away with the impression that Cisco understands these outcomes, and thus have engineered products that help them achieve those outcomes.

In the GTM strategy consulting work I’ve done for some of the biggest tech brands in the world, I always started with identifying and researching the outcomes/pains the target audience is trying to achieve. Winning GTM strategies are those that best align customer outcomes to how the product or portfolio helps the target audience achieve those outcomes.