What are the top three to five common risks do you list to your GTM strategy and how do articulate mitigation plans to address those risks?

There are several risks you may encounter while creating your GTM strategy. Here are the three most common ones in my opinion:

Incorrect Target Audience

• Impact: Targeting an incorrect audience can result in wasted marketing efforts and ineffective sales strategies. Essentially, you could have an excellent product for the wrong people.

• Mitigation: Ensure you invest sufficient time and resources in the pre-launch stage to conduct thorough market research. This will help you understand your ideal customer profile, including demographics, needs, wants, and pain points. Use customer personas to guide your targeting efforts.

Ineffective Pricing Strategy

• Impact: Pricing can define the future of your business, especially if you are a one-product company. Pricing too high can alienate customers, while pricing too low can damage your brand perception and profitability.

• Mitigation: Conduct competitor analysis and market research to determine an optimal pricing strategy. Consider offering different pricing tiers to cater to different customer segments.

Inefficient Distribution Channels

• Impact: Knowing your target audience is as important as understanding how to reach them. Get this wrong, and you could limit product accessibility and affect sales.

• Mitigation: Choose distribution channels that align with your target audience's buying habits and preferences. In the initial stages, I would advise to stick to a single channel, first learn and improve and then scale.

A GTM typically includes risks around how certain groups of customers may react to the change in experience, be it the product, service, or pricing.

Generally, these negative reactions manifest into risks across these business areas:

• Revenue Drop: churn in existing customers, erosion of conversion in new customers.

• Operational Overwhelm: customer backlash or confusion, inundating internal support teams' capacity to deal with the amount of inquiries incoming.

• Negative Press: customer backlash escalating to negative press via social or media platforms.

To mitigate revenue related risks you'll need to clearly understand:

• how you'll be monitoring upside versus downside.

• what metrics will you use, and plan out scenarios that would require a different set of actions - e.g., launching added messaging via email, offering special discounts to select groups of customers, or in the worst case scenario, rolling back the change.

To mitigate operational overwhelm, you'll need to:

• develop reactive talking points for customer teams on commonly asked questions.

• ensure support teams are appropriately staffed, especially if the GTM launches just before a holiday or weekend.

  • work with the team leads to develop scenario planning, where there is flexibility to scale resources up/down quickly.

To mitigate negative press, you'll need to develop:

• reactive talking points for social and press teams

• it's generally good to have the option of getting positive affiliates or influencer stories. You can activate these as a component of the GTM, or lean into them if significant backlash happens

I've done 3 major launches in the past 3 years. The most common risks to our GTM strategy that I've seen personally is:

• Delayed engineering timelines - This can make it hard to lock in advertising, events and press commitments, that you wish to employ as part of your launch. It also adds a lot of uncertainty to the rollout plan and can frustrate marketing/design partners.

• Long Leadership or partner reviews - If leadership or a core partner takes a lot time to review your materials each time, it can really slow down the process and demotivate your cross functional stakeholders.

• Compliance or Legal risk - I'm in Fintech, so we try and build in significant time for legal and compliance review. However, with social media and several other industries under scrutiny for customer data, this can always be a risk for even the most simple SaaS businesses.

To craft an effective GTM strategy, it’s crucial to identify and address potential pitfalls. From my experience, the top 3 GTM strategy risks can be:

• Poor Product-Market Fit: Ensuring your product aligns perfectly with the market and addresses customers' pain points is paramount. The lack of product-market fit can be quite costly.

  Mitigation Plan: Conduct thorough customer research and validation, including surveys, interviews, and beta testing. Ensure your product resolves the specific pain points of your target audience. Consider launching a MVP to gather early feedback and make necessary improvements.

  
  

• Poor Project Management: A well-structured project management plan is essential to ensure timely task completion and a successful launch.

  Mitigation Plan: Develop a well-defined project plan with clear roles [ use DACI model], responsibilities, and timelines. Regularly review progress, identify bottlenecks, and make necessary adjustments to keep the GTM strategy on track.

  
  

• Poor Messaging: Having a clear and compelling message that resonates with your target audience is essential.

  Mitigation Plan: Develop a clear and compelling value proposition that addresses your target audience's pain points. Test your messaging with focus groups or pilot campaigns to ensure it resonates. Continuously gather feedback and adjust messaging as needed. Create a messaging framework that clearly defines the key messages and their alignment with customer needs.

One more thing, your GTM strategy isn't a 'set it and forget it' deal. Monitoring your GTM strategy's progress and adapting as needed is an ongoing process. Regularly assess KPIs and make data-driven decisions!