5 Steps to Select Your Go-to-Market Motion (by Maja Voje)

Learn how to choose the right go-to-market motion for your product + get real examples & templates to amp your GTM game.

“Go-to-market” (GTM) may sound like jargon, but it will save many SaaS products from oblivion in the future.

Vivek Goel said it best:

Now that more PMs are tasked with pulling business levers, getting into the weeds of GTM is no longer optional.

OK, so what is a go-to-market strategy anyway?

In simple terms, it aims to answer:

• who is the target customer? (e.g. SaaS founders? Doctors? Accountants?)

• how will we position ourselves to them (e.g. is Airtable a database? or spreadsheet? or low-code dev platform?)

• what value will we articulate to them? (e.g. Asana helps teams organize work and create visibility on bottlenecks)

• what will we charge to provide this value? (pricing, packaging)

• how will we reach these customers? (e.g. paid media? outbound? content?)

• how will they gain access to our product (e.g. self-serve? pilot program? talk to a sales rep first?)

Now, a key part of every GTM strategy conversation is to select how we will distribute our message and find clients where they consume information, show buying intent, and purchase.

That’s where selecting the right GTM motions comes into play.

GTM Motions are the vehicles with which our solution travels from the dev kitchen to the customer’s hands.

For example, when you think about how Miro grew their product, you’d understand that they used a combination of a freemium (product-led growth), community, content, and a partner ecosystem to capture their ballooning customer base.

But the question remains.

How do you select the right GTM motions for your product?

To help with this conundrum, I solicited the help of the GTM queen - none other than Maja Voje - who was kind enough to lend us some wisdom.

Maja spent 15 years working in growth and marketing and has helped several companies invest up to 10-25 million and scale from 20 million to 60-100 million in yearly revenue, including companies like Bayer, Google, and Rocket Internet.

She is also the author of the popular book “GTM Strategist”, where she rewrote the GTM marketing and growth science for companies tackling more unknowns than knowns. Give her a follow. Seriously.

Now, before I pass off the proverbial mic to her, I have some good news.

If you stick around, you’ll see an amazing offer on this edition to help you power up your GTM skills and hit the ground running.

Alright, enough of me. Here’s Maja:

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GTM Motions

Go-to-Market Motions are your proven playbooks to get customers to your product - predictably and scalably. Imagine that you are building growth engines for your company.

Their job to be done is to get a sufficient volume of customers into your product at predictable costs. When you validate them, you no longer have to worry about where your next deal is coming from. You can sleep easier. 

In my book, Go-to-Market Strategist, I defined 7 Go-to-Market Motions: 

1. Inbound - you create content to generate leads 

2. Outbound - cold outreach to a higher volume of targets via email, social media, or phone

3. Paid digital - media buying to capture the target audience’s attention

4. Community - engaging with or creating content for community members

5. Partners - collaborating with other companies for mutual marketing or sales benefit 

6. Account-based marketing - targeting high-value accounts with personalized campaigns

7. Product-led growth (PLG) - developing solutions for self-onboarding and early value realization (aka - the product would “sell itself”) 

After securing product-market fit, most companies discover that 2 or 3 growth motions work best for them. While bigger companies can run all these GTM playbooks simultaneously, smaller companies have to concentrate their much more limited resources on 1-3 motions before moving to the next one. 

The inevitable question is: 

How do you select the Go-to-Market motions that will work well for you?

5 Steps to Select Your Go-to-Market Motion

Sure, you can run experiments through all go-to-market motions, but the problem is that most of them take time and reps to show traction. In most cases, you have to stick with them for at least one quarter to give them a fair chance.

The problem is that most companies in the go-to-market stage have 3-9 months of runway to make it or break it. “Let’s try them all and see what sticks” is not a valid plan for them.

You need to narrow down the initial selection immediately.
Where do you have the best chance to win? 

I defined 5 steps to help you think, collect intelligence for your decision making, and decide where you have the best chance to win.

Here are they: 

1. Talk to your customers - go where the audience is 

2. Research the competitors - do not reinvent the wheel 

3. Play on your strengths (and competitors’ weaknesses)

4. Narrow down your selection to 2-3 motions (understand the pros and cons of each) 

5. Stick with them for 1-3 months - do the reps, make sure the compound interest kicks in 

Some of these steps are easy. Some are not.

Let’s dive deeper into each and share some examples.

1. Talk to your customers: Go where the audience is 

If you have done a proper customer discovery interview or if you are collecting this information from leads, you are already in great shape to understand where your target customers are actively searching for information in the problem area that you are solving.

If that is not the case, you can simply send a variation of this email to your leads or customers. This is an adaptation of the email that the business unit head at an enterprise hardware company sent to one of his clients. It resulted in much better intelligence than if the marketing team conducted desktop research. We got real insider information with this email. 

Do not hesitate to implement this one. It is easy and super powerful. 

What is the worst thing that could happen - you will not hear back. 

Well, in that case, you can send a reminder, ping them on social media, or ask this randomly when you have your next call with them. Go, go, go - no excuses.

2. Research the competitors - do not reinvent the wheel

Customers have their preferences on how to buy. You cannot force them to “buy differently”. Over time, you can change habits, but not next week. You have to respect and follow their customer journey. And your competitors have already figured it out and invested in testing their assets to acquire them successfully. While some companies prefer to ignore the competition and “find their own path”- I personally find massive inspiration for my work from competition analysis. Here are some of the tactics and tools that I use. 

Now, some could argue that it is important to “stand out”, create demand, be original … I would reply: yes, it matters to stand out and create differentiated value, but go where the audience is. It is much cheaper, quicker, and more efficient than trying to convince customers to change their information consumption habits and how they buy. And we do not have resources to waste in GTM. Back to step one, my friend. :)

3. Play on your strengths (and competitors’ weaknesses)

This is the key to a winning strategy. It looks easy, but you need to do some reflection and retrospection to implement this concept in full. It requires deep thinking. Start by asking yourself: 

• What are you naturally good at? If you are a naturally charming and charismatic person, you may excel at events, founder-led growth or video-first strategy - it is your gift. Oppositely, if you have a stellar dev team, you can be much faster in launching smaller tools, aka engineering and marketing that will create buzz. Serial entrepreneur Guillaume Moubeche, co-founder of Lempire was naturally good at outbound and great on video, growing networks (communities) and story telling. He leverage these superpowers to grow six ventures (lemlist- $28M ARR, leamwarm, lemcal, taplio, tweathunter) and a strong personal brand. Clay - 0,5 billion validation on the other hands did not go all in “founders personal brand”- they prefer to work with influencers, partners, continue to improve the tool and showcase how it can benefit users. 

• Can you create some leverage or synergies? Can you team up with someone to co-create content, open new markets with their network, or work with a complementary company serving the same audience? 

• Did you find a GTM motion ignored by competition but coherent with your customer research? In that case, move fast and create the first mover advantage. 

Naturally, you also have to dive into what your weaknesses are. Some options are just not obtainable to you right now. We have to be realistic here.

Never forget that go-to-market is a very dynamic journey. The decisions you will make now can be rewritten with the entry of a new competitor to the market, with your team getting bigger and stronger, and with additional intelligence you unlock learning by doing. Things change. And we have to change with them. 

4. Narrow down your selection to 2-3 motions (understand the pros and cons of each)

You are in luck. My colleague Ognjen Bošković (Founder at Raven, prev. Head of Growth at CXL) and I created a traffic light 🚦 of GTM motions so you can easily navigate through the menu. We incorporated costs and time-to-value as well as ran scenarios for each if you do it in-house or if you outsource.

Please consider that these prices apply to Western Europe and North America. It may be different in your case. But realistically, if you are pre-product-market-fit and aim to get first traction, “creating content” or outbound is a more likely start than building sophisticated ABM programs or partnerships. I hope you will find this one helpful.

5. Stick with them for 1-3 months - do the reps, make sure the compound interest kicks in

Now, the hard, boring part. When you make a selection, you need to stick with it for at least one quarter. Do not expect to be “great at it” from the get-go. Great things take time. You will get better with the reps and the customers will see you enough times to develop trust, preference, and make early purchasing attempts. The customer journey is not “see - click- buy” for most innovations.

We have to create multiple touchpoints with a prospect to win their hearts and minds. Here is an example of how you can create synergies from testing 2-3 go-to-market motions simultaneously, but if you are a solo GTM operator or really scarce on resources - start with one if you have sufficient intelligence from previous steps.

For my business, GTM motions are: 

1. Inbound - a combination of LinkedIn, Substack, and content collaborations with other leaders 

2. Partnerships - I have regional partners to open new markets - Spain and MENA because they have complementary expertise and in-depth market knowledge

3. Under testing: Outbound/Paid digital: Lately, I have been running outbound campaigns - more info here - and invested in Meta advertising for digital products. 

What are yours? 

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Need to amp up your GTM game? Good news.

Maja is running a Black Friday deal on a 100-Step Go-to-Market Checklist - available with an 80$ discount.

It includes frameworks, examples, and templates that have earned the trust of VCs, the endorsement of field experts, and have helped 7500+ companies to land customers and turn a profit faster.

If you need to level up on GTM, make sure to snag it now: https://gtmstrategist.com/gtm-checklist/ 

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That’s all for this week, folks. A massive shout-out to Maja for helping us out here.

Till next time,

Aatir