When I started working, I didn’t know what a Go To Market (GTM) strategy was. When I joined a company as a co-founder, 15 years later, I still had never heard of a GTM. Now, another decade along, I still only have a vague idea of what it actually means.
So I wrote an essay on what GTM is, how it relates to the Consultancy 2 Saas maturity model and how you can recognise common mistakes. The essay is written from the lens of “a new product in a new market”: growing companies in the environmental supply chain risk sector. It doesn’t take much imagination to apply the model to other sectors as well.
What is Go To Market?
Simply put, GTM is your plan to get and retain clients.
Wikipedia says: “a plan of an organization using outside resources (e.g., sales force and distributors) to deliver their unique value proposition to customers (“go-to-market”) and to achieve a competitive advantage.”
The 4 GTM components:
- Customers: the target market and market segmentation (geography, industry, size (big head, long tail), behaviour, use, …)
- Unique Value Proposition (UVP): why they pick you over alternatives
- The competition: whom else the buyer could choose (including their own team and doing nothing)
- Sales channels: direct, indirect, online
A solid GTM strategy balances all 4 components to your engine of growth and value discipline.
- Sticky: retaining customers: acquisition must consistently outpace customer churn
- Paid: acquire customers through paid promotion; reinvest profits to acquire customers.
- Viral: users invite others through product use, generating self-propagating customer acquisition.
- Product Leadership: lead through continual innovation, delivering distinctive products customers eagerly choose.
- Operational Excellence: deliver reliable products conveniently at low cost through streamlined operations.
- Customer Intimacy: tailor solutions and service to customers’ needs through deep relationships.
Now, with components defined, we have enough tools to analyse GTM strategy for each of the phases of the Cons 2 Saas maturity model. After that, we will have a look at 7 common mistakes.
But first marketing.
Mistake #1: the marketing strategy is not to be confused with the GTM strategy, A marketing plan is not a GTM strategy, the marketing plan follows from the GTM strategy.
GTM for Consultancy 2 SaaS; common patterns
A GTM evolves with the consultancy 2 SaaS maturity stage of your organisation. Let’s have a look at common GTM patterns for each stage.
1. Consultancy
Customers: a handful. Segmentation is whoever your network trusts enough to hire you. UVP: the people who show up: expertise and credibility, not a product. Competition: other consultancies, the client’s own team, and doing nothing. Channels: direct and founder-led. Speaking, writing, and referral.
Engine of growth is sticky by default: you keep clients by being indispensable to them. Value discipline is Customer Intimacy, and there is no other option at this stage, which is fine.
The GTM here is almost always implicit, and almost always should be.
2. Automated Consultancy
Customers: the same clients, but repeated problems finally reveal a segment. This is your first real market signal: the pattern you automated is evidence that a group of buyers shares a problem. UVP: still the people but now faster, cheaper and more consistent. The tooling is internal and invisible to the client. Competition: consultancies, plus the tools your clients could buy or build themselves. Channels: still direct, still consultative selling; referral carries more weight.
Engine is sticky, with the first paid experiments usually arriving too early. Discipline is still Customer Intimacy, with Operational Excellence appearing internally, in how you deliver rather than in how you sell.
The GTM trap is selling the tool before it is sellable. Your automation makes your margins better; it does not yet make a product.
Note: the parent essay splits this stage into 2a (selling time more efficiently) and 2b (selling access to a system). The GTM above covers both, because at 2a none of the four components move: same buyers, same channels, better margins. At 2b the buyer changes, and a new buyer is a new GTM.
3. Hybrid
Customers: here you must choose. Big head or long tail becomes a decision. Most companies make it implicitly by following whichever deal closed last. UVP: ambiguous, and that is the problem. Sales is selling a product; delivery is running a consultancy. Competition: you now show up in product comparisons, you lose on features, and you start losing on price. Channels: direct sales and referral. This is where the temptation to hire career sales people and start campaigns arrives, usually one stage too soon.
Engine is sticky, with paid starting to work. Discipline is still Customer Intimacy; claiming Product Leadership here is mistake #8.
The GTM failure that defines this stage is selling the roadmap. Every deal closed on a promise pulls the product back toward consultancy, and because the promise was made in a sales conversation, nobody books it as debt.
4. Big Head SaaS
Customers: explicitly segmented, with a written ICP you can act on. The big head is named. UVP: the outcome the product enables, priced on value. The product does the core; the front office (account management, delivery) does the trust. Competition: getting real, and comparison is now legitimate, which makes industry standards and benchmarks worth more to you than differentiation (mistake \#9). Channels: direct sales, plus partners and resellers for reach. Channel strategy becomes a decision for the first time.
Engine is sticky plus paid, though referral is still your strongest line. Discipline begins shifting from Customer Intimacy toward Operational Excellence, with Product Leadership only if the market itself is maturing.
Product debt is a GTM problem, not an engineering one. If your compensation plan rewards bespoke commitments (typically driven by investors who focus on short term top line growth), your GTM is quietly funding the journey back to hybrid. You keep bouncing between automated consultancy and hybrid.
5. Long Tail SaaS
Customers: segmented by behaviour and usage rather than relationship. You no longer know their names. UVP: self-evident in the product. If it still needs a human to explain it, you are not here yet. Competition: the (product) category exists, so you compete on price, onboarding friction and integrations. Channels: online and self-serve. Product-led, marketplaces, integrations that put you in front of the right person at the right moment.
Engine is paid and viral. Discipline is Operational Excellence or Product Leadership, depending on how mature the market has become.
The GTM that got you here is not the GTM that works here. Everything that previously built trust, the conversations, the handholding, the named relationships, is now cost. And most B2B companies in new, trust-dependent markets never reach this stage, which means planning as if you will is itself a GTM mistake.
Going through the maturity stages naturally leads us to:
Mistake #2: a GTM strategy is not static, it evolves with your market, product and competition and your consultancy 2 SaaS maturity stage.
Common mistakes
Mistake #3: no GTM
Many organizations do not have a GTM. Simply because they never heard about it. Like me for the better part of my career. That doesn’t mean those companies cannot be successful. There are many companies without a GTM that are very successful. Well, let me rephrase that. There are many companies without an explicit GTM that are very successful. Those companies probably have all 4 GTM components in place and understand their engine of growth and value discipline really well. But they might not be explicitly aware of it.
It’s ok not to have an explicit GTM but it will start to bite you as you grow.
Mistake #4: incomplete GTM
Not addressing all 4 GTM components. It sounds silly but it’s really easy to overlook one of the components. The most common one of this pattern is the “solution without a problem” GTM; businesses in love with their product with their face to the technology and their back to the market. Give me a Euro for every downstream EO company that has a picture of a satellite on their homepage and I’ll be rich.
Mistake #5: wrong strategy, right product
You know your customers, you understand their problem; you just haven’t noticed who else has it. This is where you are targeting NGOs and Foundations and governments and you are not aware of private sector enterprises that need your solution. Technically, it’s the same product. But the packaging and GTM are completely different.
Mistake #6: right strategy, wrong product
Opposite and similar to mistake #5: typical for businesses that are maturing successfully towards SaaS in a particular market with a particular product, then copy-paste their GTM when they start scaling. Examples are overlooking contextual intelligence when scaling geographically or introducing a new (immature) service (horizontal scaling) and applying the Big Head GTM of your existing (mature) service. This is where the sales people are selling concepts and MVPs as production ready SaaS products.
Mistake #7: Misunderstanding Engine of Growth
All 4 components are present and well researched but you misunderstand your engine of growth: you mature to B2B Big Head via sticky and later partly paid strategies, not viral; you start paid campaigns while your product is not yet mature enough; you start hiring sales professionals while you are still in the consultative selling phase. This usually happens after some success in maturing towards SaaS (automation, hybrid) and start applying SaaS paid and viral engine practices too early.
Mistake #8: Misunderstanding Value Discipline
Related to mistake #7, misunderstanding what kind of company you are: Product Leadership, Operational Excellence or Customer Intimacy. Operational Excellence is a good strategy for mature products in mature markets but doesn’t make sense with new products in new markets. Similar for Product Leadership. Tempting because everybody thinks they are Steve Jobs. But when it’s not yet clear what the product actually is (a new product in a new market), what are you exactly the leader of then? If the direction of the finish line is not clear, you don’t know who is leading the race.
Mistake #9: Product maturity and perceived competition
Finally, one of the most overlooked: confusing other players in new markets for competitors. Selling new products in new markets is all about building trust. Customers won’t buy products they don’t trust; they don’t trust products they don’t know. And they don’t know your product. And they don’t know other players’ products either. You and your perceived competitors have a common interest: build the market by building trust. And marketing aggressively against so-called competitors erodes trust in the whole market, leaving very little to compete for. What you and your competitors should do is develop industry standards, benchmarks and regulations so the market can judge the quality of your products independently and unambiguously.
There are many more mistakes and patterns but these are the ones that I encounter most often.
Wrapping up
Make no mistake. Defining a good GTM is difficult. And I think that is why organisations don’t have a GTM or have a flawed or outdated GTM. They are aiming for the perfect GTM. Discussing, analysing and re-thinking the GTM until they find “the one”. Don’t do that.
Just start with “a” GTM, make sure all 4 components are addressed and balanced to your engine of growth and value discipline and maturity stage. Then, start measuring lead generation, lead time, lead conversion and churn and revisit your GTM each quarter. Do this for each of your products or services and you will see your happy clients increase.
Finally, the GTM is a strategy. And a strategy has 3 components:
- Idea (the GTM plan)
- Communication
- Execution
You need all three in place for a strategy to be successful.
Which leads us to the final, and biggest, mistake, mistake #10: thinking the GTM is the playbook, the slide-deck, the document, the idea. The most common reason your GTM fails is because of weak and ambiguous communication and poor or no execution.
More about the latter in a future essay about decision making: “Promises, how to build trust, make decisions and live with no regrets ”.