How do you create a B2B Go-To-Market strategy?

Whether you're launching a new product or service or updating your go-to-market strategy (GTM) for an existing product, your business's ability to reach the right audience at the right time is an ongoing challenge.

But by taking the right steps now and carefully developing a detailed go-to-market strategy that's specific to your B2B business, you'll avoid getting the wrong audience and wasting time and resources by launching a campaign that doesn't succeed.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, it is essential to recall some basic principles.

What is a Go-To-Market strategy for B2B businesses?

A B2B Go-To-Market strategy is a step-by-step plan that your business develops to find the available market to target in order to gain new business and continue current business. It includes detailed identification of accounts that could benefit from your product, sales and marketing programs around the offering, determining where your product is in the market, and key performance indicators (KPIs) critical to the success of your program.

Whether your GTM strategy supports an immediate product launch or is part of an existing distribution strategy for your brand, it can have a lasting positive impact by aligning all areas of your business. Adopting a unified approach can help align sales and marketing teams, reduce advertising costs, and provide a great shopping experience.

Once the terms are defined and the “why create a Go-To-Market strategy” is clear, it's time to develop your GTM strategy.

How do you create a B2B marketing strategy?

A good B2B marketing strategy focuses on efficiency. With the following steps, you will be in a position to create an effective and achievable plan that will allow you to make the most of your resources.

1. Identify your target audience

Identifying a narrow target audience, composed of target accounts and buyer personas, is crucial to developing a successful B2B Go-To-Market strategy.

You can start this process by working with your product or service development team, which typically does extensive research on the target audience up front. Here are some typical parameters to identify:

• Geographic data : size of the company (headcount and annual turnover), sectors of activity and locations.
• Technical data : technological profile of the ideal business, including the types of solutions it uses.
• Stage of the journey : where are accounts and potential customers in the buyer's journey.
• Signals of intent to buy : indicators showing that accounts are looking for your offers or similar competing offers.
• Specific roles within a company

With these attributes in mind, you can work with your sales team to create a list of target accounts and prioritize them.

To create a list of target accounts that takes account behavior into account behavior in real time, consider adding an account intelligence platform to distill actionable information from a multitude of B2B data (CRM, website, advertising, advertising, intent signals, intent signals, news, social information, etc.) With account intelligence, you can enable your marketing and sales teams to detect opportunities earlier, advance business more quickly, and drive further growth.

After identifying the target accounts, you can create buyer personas or ideal customer profiles (ICP) - semi-fictional representations of your ideal contacts. Personas will help you to conceptualize the journey of your buyers and the factors that will positively or negatively influence their buying decisions.

In planning the marketing of B2B products, there are several personas positioned along the buyer's journey, ranging from the user to the final decision maker. When building each persona, you should take into account their:

• Problems : Does your product solve a major problem?
• Motivational Factors : Are they more focused on reducing costs or increasing revenue? What are the other measurement criteria?
• Business Objectives : Does your product match the company's aspirations and culture?

Special attention should be paid to mapping your target accounts and KPIs, which is why this step should be carefully checked before moving on to the next one.

2. Conduct competitive research

You know your product. You know your target audience. Now it's time to find out who you're dealing with.

Identifying the main players in the market will help you identify gaps and opportunities to highlight your offering and its desirable characteristics that are absent from those of your competitors.

During your research, identify your top 3 to 5 competitors and assess how they brought their products to market. Whenever possible, analyze customer reactions to their products, reading reviews and online discussions to help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of their products.

By seeing what your target audience likes (or doesn't like) through the customer reviews of your competitors, you can better position your offer so that it fully meets the expectations of your target customers.

3. Determine your value proposals

Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors will allow you to perfectly develop the unique value proposals of your offer.

A value proposition is a marketing message that aims to differentiate your product or service — or even your brand — from the competition in a way that is appealing to potential customers.

As you write your value proposals, think about why your business decided to design this offering. Make a list of the features of your product and ask yourself a few questions:

• What is the benefit of each characteristic?
• How does my business offer a unique advantage in implementing each feature?
• Take the perspective of your ideal customer and ask yourself the following question: “What's in it for me?”

If you want to present the unique benefits of your product, you can also address more important value elements related to your business and brand. This could be the age of your business, its location, the sustainable development processes it has implemented, etc.

While this exercise should help you create a solid list of valuable accessories, be sure to only look for Best. What stands out from the crowd? A single interesting proposal can make a product and a brand stand out from the crowd. Most of the time, you can focus on your top 3 to 5 proposals.

Now it's time to work on your content, arguments, and message.

4. Develop your arguments

First, take the main valuable arguments that you have identified and try to refine their wording. Avoid pomp terms (“The world's first software!”) and be sure to make promises that you can always keep. You should get a message that is concise, clear, and easy to understand.

Once you've refined your value proposals, rewrite them in the context of the pain points of your buying personas. To do this, you can use keyword research tools, which will also help potential customers discover your offers in search engines. Instead of imposing your technical vocabulary, these tools can help you match your message to what customers are looking for and offer your product as a response.

A value matrix is another useful exercise in creating a message that focuses on the pain points of your potential customers. A value matrix identifies the business problems of each persona and highlights how your product is helping to solve them. By associating each pain point with a product characteristic, you'll be able to create marketing content that resonates.

5. Trace the buyer's journey

Once you've developed your message, it's time to map out the buyer's journey. Just like pain points in personas, mapping the buyer journey allows you to put yourself in their shoes to better target your message.

The buyer journey shows the path from problem to purchase. To create the best possible experience, it's critical to understand and align your direct marketing efforts at each stage of the buyer journey:

1. Qualified: The account may not be fully aware of your brand or products, but it fits the description of your target personas and has shown signs of activity on your website or through your campaigns.
2. Conscious : The account knows your category, but is not yet fully committed. At this stage, it's important to build trust, spread the word about your brand, and take advantage of social proof.
3. Engaged : The account engages with you and includes your brand and products, but does not yet show purchase intent. By maintaining this relationship through thought leadership and educational tools, you will help the customer identify the value of your brand and the solutions it offers.
4. Account qualified by marketing : The account is finally showing signs of being on the market. At this point, there should be more marketing coverage and relevant business contacts with the various personas.
5. Opportunity : The account is close to the finish line and the entire purchasing committee should be involved at this point. Turn vision into action, from marketing to sales, using tools for third-party validation, vendor comparison, and consensus building.
6. The customer : The journey does not end there. Now that the account is a customer, continue to maintain the relationship through thought leadership, best practice content, and the use of customer success tools.
7. After-sales : Identify upselling and/or cross-selling opportunities to present to the customer at the right time.

Taking this journey and the state of mind of your prospect into account at each stage of the journey will help you write relevant messages that will get you results.

6. Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs)

Assessing the effectiveness of your GTM strategy can be difficult. It's critical to focus on the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your strategy so you can quickly recognize what's working and what's not working and pivot accordingly.

While many B2B businesses prioritize lead conversions (or the measurement of MQLs, “Marketing Qualified Leads”) as a key performance indicator, there are other account-based metrics that can work hand in hand with MQLs to assess success. A solid go-to-market strategy in an ABX (Account-Based Experience) world requires measures that go beyond general lead conversions. Instead, consider a dual-funnel approach to measuring the success of your account-based tactics by including the measurement of MQAs (Marketing Qualified Accounts) as a key metric alongside lead conversion. By using a lead-based funnel and an account-based funnel, you can measure your GTM strategy in a more granular way.

When determining KPIs, ask yourself the following questions:

• What will be the monthly, quarterly, and annual measure of success?
• What are our short-term goals?
• What are our long-term goals?
• What are the milestones we want to celebrate?

Measurable results like key performance indicators will give your marketing and sales teams the focus they need to deliver effective work. Think carefully about the best indicators of the success of your product.

7. Choosing demand generation tactics

Achieving your marketing KPIs and overall pipeline goals depends heavily on how you generate demand, which can be achieved through both entry and exit strategies. Account-based marketing and sales strategies often use a combination to target selected accounts and engage entire marketing groups rather than random individual buyers. By focusing on high-potential targets, account-based tactics can also be more personalized, even going so far as to treat a single account as a market.

For reference, outbound demand generation generally involves a sales team reaching out to potential new customers. She can do this through cold calls from a list of prospects, emails, or a booth at a trade show or conference.

The “inbound” approach concerns marketing and integrates the messages of the fourth stage. Prospects can discover your product through organic search, PPC ads, social media, or other forms of digital and field marketing. After getting an email address, your marketing team supports them through the buyer journey by providing more relevant content, such as e-books, webinars, and demos. It is essential to orchestrate all contacts between marketing and sales channels to ensure consistent messaging and to ensure that the prospect has an optimal experience, thus preparing them for the purchase.

Going from inbound to outbound at the right time through account-based strategies makes it possible to effectively fill gaps in the buyer journey and to obtain more engaged and better marketing qualified accounts.

8. Gathering the right data

Demand generation can stimulate the growth of a new product, at Condition to work with correct and clean data.

That's where intent data comes in. Intent data uses AI to indicate how interested an account is in your product. By tracking online activity, you can assess the interest of a prospect.

Intent data makes your inbound and outbound call efforts easier. Instead of sending an email blindly or making a cold call, they allow you to connect with customers when they want to hear from you.

9. Refine with a feedback loop

You did it. You've developed a comprehensive offering, brought it to market, conducted competitive research, developed value proposals and messages, and cleaned, monitored, and refined data. Now is the time to gather user information and data, which you can use to provide honest customer feedback to the market and your product team.

Setting up a feedback loop is the last step in an effective B2B Go-To-Market strategy. Develop ways to gather feedback at every stage of the buyer journey. This attention to detail increases buyer satisfaction and retention, taking your GTM efforts from good to great.

Whether it's through closed-loop surveys, customer service observations, sales representatives, or other means, gather feedback that you can analyze and act on.

Conclusion & Summary

Ready for the go-to-market?

With the research, planning, and ongoing refinement that comes from developing a B2B go-to-market strategy, you can run a successful go-to-market campaign and put processes in place that will benefit your business in the future.