Updated on October 9, 2024.
A go-to-market strategy is a plan for how to sell your company’s products or services. There are many different strategies a company can use when it’s getting ready to hit the market. So many that sometimes the selection may be overwhelming.
But if you ask yourself the right questions and answer them truthfully, then with a bit of creativity, your go-to-market strategy will be sure to succeed. Moreover, by doing so—and following these proven steps—you’ll increase your chances of crafting an effective marketing campaign that leads to exponential growth! So don’t hesitate to launch your successful go-to-market plan today.
What is a SaaS go-to-market strategy?
Let’s break down the basics.
A SaaS go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the plan a company uses to bring its software to market, targeting both B2B and B2C segments.
In B2B, the focus is on selling to other companies, typically with a longer sales cycle and larger deal sizes. Key elements include identifying target industries, leveraging content marketing, building relationships through sales teams, and offering free trials or demos to showcase value. Enterprise clients often need custom solutions and robust support, making the sales process more personalized and consultative.
In B2C, the strategy is geared towards individual users, emphasizing scalability and self-service. The approach relies heavily on digital marketing, social media, SEO, and referral programs. Subscription models with tiered pricing or freemium options allow customers to try the service with minimal risk, driving user acquisition through ease of use and affordability.
Advantages of a SaaS go-to-market strategy
When properly developed, an in-depth go-to-market strategy can play a pivotal role in your SaaS company’s growth, laying out a clear path to success.
Here are just a few key benefits:
Guides your strategic direction
A carefully crafted GTM plan serves as a blueprint for launching, marketing, and selling your product. It helps you set clear objectives, manage resources efficiently, and create timelines to streamline the process.
Focuses on customer needs
A successful GTM strategy centers around a deep understanding of your customers’ requirements. It ensures that your product and marketing initiatives are aligned with their pain points and preferences, making it easier to meet their expectations and encourage widespread adoption.
Facilitates scalability
SaaS products are inherently scalable, and a strong go-to-market strategy allows you to expand customer acquisition, infrastructure, and support systems as your user base grows, all without requiring heavy upfront costs.
How to create a go-to-market strategy for a SaaS company
Crafting an effective GTM strategy for a SaaS business involves a systematic approach that brings together several essential components.
Here’s a breakdown of the key steps for launching your product and attracting customers:
Conduct research to pinpoint your target audience
The first step is conducting thorough market research to identify your target audience and understand their challenges, preferences, and needs.
For B2B, this can mean segmenting by industry, company size, and decision-maker roles. This research informs everything from product development to marketing tactics.
Refine your value proposition and brand
A compelling value proposition is crucial for distinguishing your SaaS offering in a competitive market.
Your value proposition should clearly state what sets your product apart and why it’s beneficial to your audience.
This is because strong branding helps establish credibility and trust with prospects.
Develop value-driven messaging
Your messaging should emphasize the value your product provides, focusing on how it addresses specific customer pain points.
Clear, benefit-oriented messaging helps prospects understand why your product is the solution they need.
Plan your sales and pricing approach
Choose a sales strategy that aligns with your target audience and product complexity.
Whether subscription-based, tiered pricing, or freemium models, ensure your pricing matches customer expectations.
Train your sales team to effectively position your product and handle objections.
Create a marketing and distribution plan
Develop a marketing strategy that incorporates digital, content, and social media channels to create awareness.
Choose the right distribution model, whether self-service sign-ups, inside sales teams, or partnerships, based on your product’s complexity and customer needs.
Implement a customer acquisition strategy
Attract leads with a targeted acquisition strategy that uses content, webinars, and automated email campaigns to nurture prospects through the sales funnel, from initial interest to conversion.
Design an onboarding process
A seamless onboarding process ensures new users get value from your product immediately.
Offer tutorials, support, and resources to minimize churn and boost customer satisfaction.
Establish feedback loops
Create feedback mechanisms like surveys, support tickets, and in-app feedback to continually improve your product and customer experience.
Align teams
Ensure sales, marketing, product development, and customer support teams are aligned and working towards the same objectives for a cohesive and effective GTM execution.
Because you know as well as we do that cross-functional collaboration is the key to success.
What to avoid with a go-to-market strategy for SaaS
While creating a go-to-market strategy, it’s crucial for SaaS companies to be aware of certain missteps that could hinder success.
One of the most common mistakes is not defining a clear target audience. Without a deep understanding of who your ideal customers are, you risk wasting time and resources on marketing and sales efforts that miss the mark. Instead, narrow your focus and create detailed customer profiles based on industry, pain points, and needs.
Another pitfall is poor messaging. If your value proposition is unclear or doesn’t effectively communicate how your product solves specific problems, potential customers may not see its relevance. Focus on crafting messaging that resonates with your audience’s challenges and showcases the unique value you offer.
Overlooking customer feedback is another practice to avoid. Successful SaaS companies consistently gather and act on user feedback to improve their products. Ignoring what your customers are saying can lead to churn and a lack of product-market fit.
Lastly, failing to align your teams can result in disjointed efforts. Sales, marketing, and product teams need to collaborate and share goals to ensure that every aspect of your GTM strategy is cohesive and customer-focused.
SaaS go-to-market strategy template
Having a go-to-market strategy template helps SaaS companies organize and execute their GTM motion effectively.
It typically begins with identifying the target audience through detailed market research, followed by refining the value proposition to highlight what makes the product unique.
The next step involves crafting messaging that clearly communicates how the product solves buyers’ problems.
The template should also include developing a marketing plan to create awareness, outlining a sales approach, and establishing pricing models that align with customer expectations.
Finally, it should incorporate feedback loops and ensure team alignment across all departments to execute the plan smoothly.
Types of SaaS go-to-market strategies
There are several ways to market your SaaS product, but the basis for a successful go-to-market strategy is understanding who you’re selling to and how they make the decision to buy. For example, smaller businesses have simple decision-making processes, while enterprises have many hoops to jump through before deciding to buy.
But there’s so much else that goes into choosing the right go-to-market strategy, such as pricing. By the time you finish reading this article, you’ll have a better idea about your target audience and how you should balance marketing and sales for a more significant impact.
Marketing led go-to-market strategy
Best suited for SMB and mid-sized companies that require a low or no-touch approach.
The marketing-led go-to-market strategy for SaaS products is right for you if millions of small and medium-sized businesses out there can quickly adapt your SaaS product and your price point is relatively low.
Typically when you market to SMB to mid-sized companies, you want to make purchasing easy, practical, and appealing. Because there are so many potential clients, the low/no-touch approach makes sense. You’ll need a solid marketing-focused game plan that provides users an intuitive self-service platform that’s also highly automated so you can continue growing your company.
Marketing led approach means the most critical part of your go-to-market strategy is effectively communicating your value to potential users. A good value proposition will convince prospects they need and want what you are selling. To strengthen and keep the marketing efforts going, consider adding a referral program that encourages users to invite friends to maximize your efforts and traffic.
If you get this viral loop right, then people who may have never come across your product before can be swayed into buying from you with ease.
To keep the momentum going, focus on content, PPC (pay-per-click), SEO (search engine optimization), and social media content to amplify your success.
B2B SaaS companies using marketing-led as go-to-market strategy:
Typeform, Mention, Hubstaff
Pros and cons of marketing-led go-to-market strategy
Pros:
- High volume of potential customers
- Low customer acquisition cost
- Highly automated
- Short sales cycles
Cons:
- Low average revenue per account
- High volume of customers
- Highly talented CMO
Pricing is an essential factor to consider when you go for the marketing-led go-to-market strategy. When you’re just getting started and no one knows your name, relying exclusively on the no-touch approach is probably not a good idea.
Sales led go-to-market strategy
Best suited for enterprise companies that require a high touch approach.
Have you ever tried selling to big businesses? SaaS Go-to-market strategy sales process is much different from a small or mid-sized company. When selling to an enterprise, it’s all about solutions and not tools – which means customized offerings for each enterprise customer. So naturally, it requires a high number of touchpoints to complete the sale.
Selling to enterprises takes a lot of resources, time, patience, and mad sales skills because they usually have unique demands, and as we mentioned, they require heavy customizations.
To convert your potential enterprise prospects into consumers, you will need to develop strong marketing and sales teams that collaborate and have the ability and talent required to:
- target decision-makers within target organizations
- get them all in the same room for the demo.
There are usually many decision-makers in enterprises, so the sales cycles are typically long. Just remember to be patient and persistent, and don’t forget to follow up.
B2B SaaS companies using sales-led as go-to-market strategy:
Salesforce, Workday, Bynder
Pros and cons sales-led go-to-market strategy
Pros:
- High revenue per account
- Potential sales to daughter companies and partners
- Powerful marketing tool
Cons:
- Low volume of potential customers
- High cost per acquisition
- High level of customization
- Demanding customers
- Long sales cycles
- Patience and persistence to build trust
While each enterprise user might seem like an opportunity worth their weight in gold, this isn’t always so. Remember that if there’s only one consumer on whom you depend and they leave unexpectedly-you’re out of business, so plan accordingly.
Hybrid go-to-market strategy
Best suited for mid-sized companies that require a balance of low or and high touch approach.
The hybrid go-to-market strategy requires a careful balance of great marketing and sales; you need to have a mid-touch sales strategy targeting organizations with mid revenue per account and mid-level cost per acquisition.
One of the keys to success is developing a go-to-market funnel that combines the right amount of automation with a helping hand from your sales and customer success teams along the way, depending on the customer.
You’ll still need a solid marketing plan that enables automated purchases. Still, you should also be ready for “enterprise style” mid-size companies that require the whole shebang, aka demos and meetings with multiple decision-makers and continuous follow-ups. When done right, the hybrid go-to-market strategy can lead you down an efficient and highly profitable path.
A hybrid go-to-market strategy is often a viable option, but you need to make sure your product meets the needs of potential customers, or it will have trouble gaining traction.
B2B SaaS companies using hybrid go-to-market strategy:
Atlassian, MOZ, Shopify
Pros and cons of hybrid go-to-market strategy
Pros:
- Mid-sized volume of potential customers
- Mid-level customer acquisition cost
- Semi-automated processes
- Some short sales cycles
Cons:
- Mid-sized volume of potential customers
- Highly talented sales reps
- Some long sales cycles
- Market-product fit confirmation
Successful SaaS go-to-market strategy starts with the mission matrix
The mission matrix is an easy way to map out your go-to-market strategy. It’s a 3×3 visual grid that combines your possible sales strategies with the potential target companies.
To fill out the mission matrix, you must ask yourself two fundamental questions:
Target company – Who are we trying to sell to?
Possible answers: Small and medium-sized businesses, mid-sized, enterprises.
Sales strategy – How are we planning to sell to them?
Possible answers: self-service ( low/no touch), inside sales or partnerships (medium touch), enterprise sales (high touch).
There is more to a B2B SaaS go-to-market strategy than who and how. The who and how are highly dependent on the price point, product-market fit, user experience, and more. Coming up with an effective go-to-market plan consists of a lot of moving parts.
How Walnut can help your go-to-market strategy
No matter which go-to-market strategy you’ll choose for your SaaS product, it can only take so far down the sales cycle, especially if you’re just starting out.
When you’re a young SaaS product, you don’t always know your unique selling proposition and where you should focus your sales and marketing efforts. SaaS products usually have various features and benefits, and until you gain some traction, you won’t know which one is the most attractive to your clients.
But what if you could have data that can help you shape better marketing and sales strategies that will put you ahead of the competition? Data you can obtain during the product demo phase, even if the sale doesn’t go through.
Let’s assume you could offer personalized interactive demos that will let you provide a sales experience out of this world and collect valuable and actionable data in the process. Well, you can.
Walnut lets you create personalized and interactive demos for every demo request you get. This opportunity opens the door to a whole new sales experience for you and your clients because each demo comes with built-in analytics and data collection. Data you can use to sharpen your sales strategy. The best part is that Walnut is designed to scale along with your SaaS.
Ready to take your sales experience to the next level? Request a demo!
