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Chapter 4 Strategist: Direct Your Product's Go-to-Market

The launch of Pocket 4.0 set the small company on a totally different trajectory. Nate, now CEO of a venture-backed startup, was up at the white board as the team gathered to solve the problem of how to follow 4.0. His marker squeaked as he wrote 5.0's key features on the wall-sized canvas. The affable CTO stared at the whiteboard and asked, “How do we make all this matter?”

Unlike B2B companies, where an analyst can anoint a company “leader” and shape its future, the fate of a consumer app like Pocket's lies in the hands of ordinary people. An app can have a moment but then fade. The team needed a way to boost and grow people's interest. And they needed something press-worthy to compete with hundreds of thousands of other apps vying for attention.

Crowded into the sole conference room with a window, Nate wrote the marketing strategies guiding Pocket on the whiteboard: grow a loyal user base, define and lead the category, and leverage partnerships for growth. Using them as guides to judge each idea, the team agreed an online launch like 4.0's wasn't enough. It wouldn't define the category nor elevate Pocket's importance to potential partners. They needed something that let them tell the whole story of why saving Internet content to view later enabled mobile lifestyles and was good for content creators.

The solution came in an idea internally called Pocket Matters. It was an in-person 5.0 launch event with press, partners, and 10 Pocket users at a San Francisco wine bar. Nate gave a presentation that told the story: long-form content had an avid audience when you let people save and view it later—which is why Pocket mattered—and then introduced 5.0's highlights to the world. They shared a digital media kit for journalists summarizing everything being announced. Partners, customers, and press mingled with one another before and after the event.

Within hours of the event, they had a flurry of press, downloads, and partner discussions that accelerated. Less than a month after the event, Nate was also named one of Time Magazine's 30 People Under 30 Changing the World.

While the event helped with all of their strategies, its purpose was to define and lead the category. This clarity helped them make smart go-to-market decisions with better results. It's why being a strategist that directs a thoughtful approach to a product's go-to-market is Fundamental 2 of product marketing.

Key Terms

Throughout this book, I refer to a set of concepts around go-to-market and strategy that, out in the real world, are used loosely. For the purpose of this book, I'll now explain what I mean whenever I use terms and how they interrelate. I'll also mention how others refer to them to help clear up what I know can be confusing.

 Go-to-Market (GTM) Engine, aka marketing and sales, GTM strategy. This is the sum total of all the marketing and sales machinery that bring products to market.At scale, it's an engine that picks and chooses how it leverages products. Because marketing and sales activities exist outside any individual product's go-to-market, the term go-to-market can't be presumed to be associated with a particular product. In this book, I'll refer to this as the GTM engine (my term) because it crosses functions and organizations and to avoid confusion with other uses of GTM.

 Marketing Strategy, aka GTM Strategy. This drives the orchestration of the marketing elements in the GTM engine, for example, brand, corporate communications, demand generation, or promotional programs. This is owned by the marketing team at large at the company level.At the level of an individual product, marketing strategies are driven by the product marketer to create alignment in a product go-to-market plan, where specific activities, how they get done, and dates come together. For most one-product companies, marketing strategies and a product's marketing strategies are largely one and the same.

 Product Go-to-Market. If you're familiar with other SVPG work, go-to-market means for a particular product. But since this book places that work into a company's larger go-to-market context, I will refer to a product go-to-market—the unique purview of product marketing—when I mean the path for how a particular product goes to market.

 Distribution Strategy, aka GTM Strategy, GTM Model, Business Model, Adoption Model. This is the most confused term. It's the chosen go-to-market model used to get products into the hands of customers. A product's go-to-market can include one or multiple go-to-market models. A company often uses multiple go-to-market models as they mature. They include:Direct sales: a sales force is the primary source of distribution. Used most often by B2B companies with complex products and a high price.Inside sales: the customer self-serves into a sales funnel and a phone or online-based rep closes the deal. More typical for companies where customers can self-serve, have lower price points or have higher volumes of new customers.Channel partners: Leveraging independent software vendors (ISVs), value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators (SIs), consulting firms, major regional distributors, carriers, or other technology companies for distribution. More common with highly complex products or when hardware is a part of the mix.Direct to professional/customer: customers buy products themselves, sometimes through some form of distribution (app store, physical store), and often directly online.Trial or freemium: awareness and customers come through free product usage. Customers pay for premium features if they want to access specific features or after a trial is over. In some of these models you may never be asked to pay to use the product. Happy “free” users are seen as evangelists for future paying ones.Product-led growth: customers are acquired or converted by the product itself. Often used in combination with other GTM models.I will refer to these as GTM models. When a product marketer creates a plan to bring a product to market, it leverages the go-to-market models at use in a company to distribute or encourage adoption of a product.

 Channel Strategy, aka Partner Strategy, Marketing Mix. See above for its use as a form of distribution. In marketing, channel strategy refers to the marketing mix across different marketing channels, such as PR, events, social, digital paid, or content. For the purpose of this book, I will specify either channel partners or marketing channel mix.

 Product Strategy. Connects business objectives and product vision to the work done by individual product teams. In product marketing, key elements of product strategy drive a product go-to-market plan, especially timing of tactics.

 Business Goals or Objectives. These are the specific, measurable desired achievements for a company over a set period of time. In product marketing, marketing strategies in product go-to-market align tightly with these goals.

Hopefully, this makes the relationships to concepts and language I'm using clear.

The Role of Marketing Strategies in Product Go-to-Market

Much as product marketers can't do their job without customer and market insights, no marketing activities should happen before putting in place the why. This is done in a product go-to-market plan, in which marketing strategies tell us the why behind all market-facing activities.

Declaring strategies creates guardrails that prevent activities from going off strategy. It keeps activities strongly aligned with business goals. They help teams answer which ideas are on strategy or not, reducing marketing activities that don't move the business forward.

If strategies answer the why, the when is the next most important factor. This is because whether or not an activity or tactic is relevant depends on product milestones, customer's realities, and existing market dynamics—all of which have an element of time associated with them. For example, if your target market is students, major product launch activities would be timed around Back-to-School.

The why and when in a product's go-to-market are what make the what and how worth doing. I see many companies begin their product go-to-market journey thinking of it as a list of to-dos, then asking how they should do them. Take the time to put the strategic why in place first.

Marketing activities also need to be grounded in the realities of a company's resources and stage. In the Pocket example, they right-sized their event to their stage—inviting just 10 customers and partners with whom integrations were deep. This exposed press to Pocket's ecosystem without taking on more than their small team could do well.

Here are some starter questions to help think through your marketing strategies. Remember, their purpose is to guide all other marketing activities. Which tactics are most appropriate depends on your answers:

 Is third-party validation important for credibility?

 What kind of customers are you trying to acquire and how fast?

 Where do those customers spend time in their professional or personal lives?

 Are you trying to educate the space?

 What are the product's strengths?

 Are there particular trends that present opportunities in your category?

 Does someone else already have established relationships with the customers you're trying to reach?

 What is the preferred way to adopt new products or technology for your customers?

A product marketer's job is to then articulate strategies specific to their product's situation and go-to-market. For example, grow healthcare vertical adoption or define product suite for DevOps category. The strategies or tactics that make it into a plan can include a wide range of marketing levers—partnerships, channels, branding, pricing, or communities—but what they're in service of is clear.

Remarkably, the strategy building blocks for a product's go-to-market inevitably fall into some variation of these themes:

 Enable growth to hit a revenue or business goal

 Improve conversion of specific customers

 Generate awareness, improve discovery, or build a brand

 Define, reshape, or lead a category, ecosystem, or platform

 Engender customer validation, loyalty, or evangelism

 Find and develop new customer segments, partners, and programs

Some worry taking the time to be strategic in a product's go-to-market slows things down or makes marketing less dynamic. Done well, it's an accelerant.

In part 3, I use a few examples to show how a strategy for one company can be a tactic for another. It all depends on stage and goals. I also introduce a lightweight product go-to-market canvas that combines all important market elements in an easy framework that makes planning across product and go-to-market teams easier.

How Company Maturity Evolves Product Go-to-Market

For a startup with one product, everything you do in market is part of a go-to-market puzzle. You're experimenting rapidly, learning about market dynamics, which customers are good ones, what product to build, and the best ways to bring it to market—all at the same time.

It's why the product go-to-market is your go-to-market strategy at the earliest stages of a company. It's also why product marketing plays such an important role at startups and why I advocate making a product marketer your first marketing hire.

At more mature companies, the go-to-market machinery is much more established and complex. The work is as much about internal coordination as it is about accelerating product adoption in the outside world. A product's go-to-market strategies might look similar to earlier stage companies but the work is done by the GTM engine of marketing and sales. Each has their own strategies and agendas, which can at times be challenging for product marketing to align. Parts 2 and 5 of the book explore much of this organizational challenge.

Regardless of where your company falls on the maturity spectrum, a product marketer is responsible for crafting the marketing strategies that shape a product go-to-market plan to keep activities aligned with what the business needs.

Once in place, you need a story that shapes how the world thinks about your product. That is where positioning and messaging comes in.