Complex GTM Strategic Planning Doesn’t Work
More than 30,000 consumer products and services are introduced each year. 80% of them fail!
What happened? Imagine that you are the well-entrenched market leader, you have a well-identified customer base, you may even own intellectual property rights to unique technology. Yet, you’re no longer your customer’s BFF.
Not to disparage planners or the planning function per se, but what you really needed was a leaner, more efficient GTM Framework that still satisfied your need to assess risk, articulated a crisp relevant value proposition to your intended customers, and helped everyone in your organization convey these promised advantages to your current and future customers – faster – much faster!!
Those cheeky upstarts who are disrupting your industry and appropriating your prized customers don’t have (or at least don’t start out having) strategic planning departments, or dozens of staff members crunching complicated financial worksheets, or arduous planning methodologies that only planning departments know how to use properly.
The 7 Elements of a Lean Go-To-Market Strategic Plan
So how do you address the outcome objectives of GTM Planning without foregoing the appropriate amount of information?
Throughout my career of launching hundreds of products for some of the largest global consumer and B2B brands years I have refined, battle-tested, and narrowed down the following seven elements Successful GTM Strategic Plans need to address:
- New Business Justification / Business Case – Why are we doing this and what else do we hope to gain? (Hope, by the way, is not a strategy!)
- Market Strategy – What is the rationale for how we plan to engage with our intended customers, and attain the strategic plan’s objectives?
- Value Proposition – What advantages do we believe the offering promises to deliver and why would someone buy from us versus a competitor?
- Positioning – How does our intended customer view our offering against other choices?
- Messaging – What top two or three advantages do we deliver (challenges solved / gains made / experiences enriched)?
- Buyer Journey – What behaviors are undertaken by our intended customer during and after their purchase decision journey? Can messaging influence their decisions?
- Sales and Support Model – How do we plan to sell and support the products and services to the intended customer?
If you’re interested in reading the complete article about lean GTM Strategic Planning and the Eleven Canterbury network please connect with me at https://elevencanterbury.com/2019/11/21/7-steps-for-successful-go-to-market-planning/ or drop me a note at Bill@DowningGoliath.com.
