Go-to-Market Strategy and the Practice of Launching

Premise — Choosing a GTM motion is the continuation of positioning

If you start GTM strategy from the question "which channel do we sell through," you tend to end up with tactics that ignore the target customer's buying behavior. As April Dunford shows in her book Obviously Awesome, positioning is a combination of elements—segment, comparison (alternatives), and unique value—and GTM is the work of translating that positioning into actual customer touchpoints. If you decide only the channel while positioning is undefined, the message and the customer's expectations diverge, and acquisition efficiency does not improve.

Another premise is whether you can observe a certain level of PMF signals before locking in your GTM strategy. If you expand GTM investment while you have not reached PMF, spending on a product that doesn't fit runs ahead, and the cost of correcting course later balloons.

Procedure — Connecting positioning, channels, and metrics

1. Write out your positioning statement in a single sentence. The format "For [segment], in [category], we provide [unique value] instead of [alternative]" is an easy starting point to work with.

2. Choose your GTM motion to match the customer's decision process. In areas where individuals or small teams can try a tool on their own judgment, product-led growth (PLG—a motion that starts from a free trial or freemium and has users experience value inside the product) tends to work; for high-value contracts that require internal approvals and sign-off across multiple departments, sales-led (a motion that starts from meetings and demos) is realistic. OpenView Partners' ongoing research on PLG also points out that these two motions diverge in suitability depending on the organization and price point they assume.

3. Narrow your primary channels to one or two to match the motion. If you launch everything at once, you become unable to evaluate the results of any channel.

4. Decide your success metrics and target values in advance. Rather than "launching and then picking a nice-looking number after the fact," agree before launch on what you will look at to judge success or failure.

5. Decide stop criteria and exit criteria as a set. By deciding in advance how you will act if metrics fall well short of targets, you can avoid emotional decisions.

Worked example — A launch plan template

The following is a template for illustration. The figures are rough guides and vary greatly by business model.

■ Launch plan template (example)
- Positioning: For [segment], in [category], provide [unique value] instead of [alternative]
- GTM motion: PLG (centered on in-product onboarding) / Sales-led (centered on outbound + demos)
- Primary channels: narrow to 1-2 (e.g., SEO content + in-product referral path)
- Success metrics: e.g., 30-day activation rate, pipeline generated
- Target values: set in advance, grounded in past similar initiatives or internal benchmarks (absolute values differ by business)
- Stop/exit criteria: course of action if a metric falls below a set fraction of target
- Internal rollout: completion date of briefing for sales, support, and customer success

Where people stumble

Copying a channel that another company succeeded with, as is, is a common failure. If positioning and customer base differ, there is no guarantee the same channel will produce the same results. You first need to return to your own positioning and confirm whether that channel fits your target customer's decision process.

It is also not uncommon to launch without deciding success metrics in advance, then, once results come in, pick a convenient number and conclude "success." This is the result of skipping steps 4 and 5, and it does not feed into learning for the next launch. That said, many SaaS companies are neither purely PLG nor purely sales-led, but rather combine, in stages, a hybrid motion in which sales takes over from a free trial. You do not have to dogmatically choose one or the other; the practical approach is to shift the mix according to customer segment and contract value.

Read next

How to assemble the positioning that is the starting point of GTM strategy is covered in "Positioning and Differentiation Strategy." Also, how to assess the PMF signals that are a precondition for expanding GTM investment is organized in "How to Measure Product-Market Fit."