Why Your SaaS Business Should Switch To Continuous GTM Strategy Planning

The point of every business is not to make sales; the companies that succeed the most make the most strategic plans. Many businesses try to meet this need by creating a product marketing plan before or during launch. While this can be very useful, it only sometimes doesn't represent the prospective customers to whom the product is targeted.

Nowhere is this truer than in B2B SaaS businesses, where the company's success relies on a deep understanding of the customers' needs and pain points. It is why most SaaS companies are switching to a SaaS Go-to-Market strategy. But what is a GTM strategy, and how does it benefit your business more than a traditional marketing strategy? How do you build an effective GTM strategy for your B2B SaaS company? We will consider all these questions in this blog.

What is a GTM Strategy?

Traditional marketing and GTM strategies are designed to push your products and services to prospective clients, but they differ a bit in their respective approaches. A conventional marketing plan tries to generate demand for your product by using branding, messaging, and content strategies via websites, social media pages, and online channels. Usually, a traditional marketing strategy is developed after a product launch and evolves with market feedback and changing customer needs.

On the other hand, a GTM strategy is prepared before the product launch and is more interested in identifying your prospective client's needs and pain points. It covers how you will introduce your product and how it will reach your target customer. It also covers other aspects of your business, such as positioning and pricing, value proposition, distribution channels, and launch tactics.

The most significant feature of building a GTM Strategy is that it aligns more with the company's goals and visions. GTM's appeal to SaaS business is helpful in any constantly evolving landscape, and price agility is as valuable as the product or service. And no business needs you to be highly adaptable as a SaaS business where consumer needs constantly change. While traditional marketing schemes are primarily reactionary and put you on the back foot, a GTM strategy is more proactive. It helps you keep abreast and even step in front of the needs of your consumer base and market changes.

SaaS GTM Strategy vs Traditional Marketing: What Are The Differences?

Although GTM and traditional marketing are both marketing strategies that can lead to lead conversion and sales and can even be used in different marketing scenarios, they have varying features that differentiate them from each other and affect how they are used.

Traditional marketing is broad and long-term and focuses more on the growth and retention of your product. Due to this focus, traditional marketing is more concerned with answering questions such as Who is my ideal customer? What value are you delivering to them? How will you communicate that value with them? Traditional marketing will also seek a way of measuring the product's success.

However, GTM marketing is more specific and narrow because it focuses on the initial launch and adoption of the product and may not be that concerned with the long-term; this partly contributes to its amendable nature. GTM strategy addresses questions such as who will be the product's early adopters? What problems am I trying to solve? How will I reach the adopters, and how will I get them to purchase the product?

What is a Continuous GTM Strategy?

An effective go-to-market plan can give you the advantage of specificity and detailed knowledge of your product and the market. Still, it is only sometimes a long-term strategy. Hence, some businesses have adopted the continuous GTM strategy, emphasizing ongoing and dynamic planning in response to ever-changing market conditions. Some features of continuous GTM strategy that make them a highly agile means of marketing include:

• Real-time data about customer behavior and market trends is used to analyze current strategies and implement new ones.
• A customer-centric approach based on real-time customer feedback to understand and analyze changing preferences and needs.
• Shorter planning cycles are designed to adapt to new information and constantly update plans.
• Cross-functional collaboration across several departments within the organization, usually from the marketing, sales, and customer support teams. By merging multiple departments, you will acquire holistic data that is both recent and accurate.

What are the Benefits of a Go-To-Market Strategy for SaaS Businesses?

Suppose you're a SaaS business launching a new product or introducing an existing product into a new market. In that case, a sound GTM strategy is essential in helping you penetrate the market quickly and grab the attention of your target audience. A good GTM strategy enables you to figure out the right way to launch by assisting you;

• Map out every important touchpoint, such as potential customers, their pain points, existing competitors, and their business model, amongst other things.
• Figure out how to position yourself and your sales and marketing strategy to stand out and gain a competitive advantage.
• Determine the customer acquisition cost and make informed decisions on discounts and promos that won't cost you or your business.
• Adopt the most suitable sales process for your SaaS business for the product and the target niche.
• Use a consistent roadmap to ensure your service or product fits the user's needs.

Developing a GTM strategy will help you maintain the product-market fit that transcends beyond the product's initial launch. By utilizing the features of continuous GTM, you set a solid foundation for upcoming products and set up your business to react flexibly to change.

Building an Effective Go-to-Market Strategy for B2B SaaS Businesses

There are several steps you have to take when creating a GTM strategy for your SaaS; the steps include:

Step One: Identify Your Target Audience

This involves creating a detailed user persona for your product, complete with demographics such as gender, age, health, marital status, etc. The target audience you identify will determine every other part of your strategy. Using your buyer persona, you can build a marketing plan and campaigns around them, focusing on one market at a time. You want to ensure you stick to a geographical region before expanding so you can easily manage progress and track the right metrics of the campaign.

Step Two: Decide on the Value Proposition and Core Brand Message

The value proposition should highlight the user problems and how your product or service is the best solution for those problems. You can only do this effectively through the following processes:

• List out your buyer persona and their pain points.
• Compare their pain points with the solutions your product or service offers.
• Identify the solutions that best align with the target audience's needs.
• Create marketing messages on your landing page and other channels to attract customers and convert leads.

Step Three: Choose Your Pricing Strategy

Choosing an appropriate payment plan is a crucial decision that could determine how much you make in losses or profits. Most SaaS businesses ideally choose a subscription-based approach instead of a one-time offer, as this allows them to focus more on satisfying existing customers than constantly searching for new ones. However, this can also come with many commitment issues that could take away from expanding your business. Other payment plans you can try include:

• The freemium pricing model gives users access to a version of your product with limited features to explore the product before upgrading to a paid plan with more features.
• The user-based pricing model charges customers based on how many use the product. For example, the package plans depend on the number of employees in an organization that uses the product.
• Price per feature model, which charges users by how many features they need.
• The pay-as-you-go model charges users based on how much they use the product. This model is similar to how you're set for utilities.

Step Four: Decide on Your Sales Strategy And Action Plan

You also want to decide which type of sales strategy will be most suitable for attracting your target market. The two major types of sales strategy are:

Product-Led Growth Strategy

This product-led go-to-market strategy involves making the product the focal point of your marketing and sales efforts. In this case, prospective customers are sold after being allowed to experience and get value from the product. Chat GPT used this strategy when they released a free version of Chat GPT before rolling out a paid premium version, which quickly sold to people without the need for many ads.

Sales-Led Growth Strategy

This growth strategy relies on your sales team's ability to generate, attract, and convert leads. What drives the sales is how well your sales team is selling the key benefits of your product and convincing prospects to convert. Consider this growth strategy if your product has high-level guidance with a longer sales cycle. Generally, your prospective customers are more in contact with your marketing, sales, and customer care teams than with product-led strategies.

Step Five: Streamline Your Marketing Efforts on Specific Channels

A good GTM strategy will also help you identify how you can reach your target audience, grow brand awareness, drive demand, and gain the attention of potential buyers. Most SaaS businesses use content marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to build long-term authority in their field and generate demand. Others prefer the paid social media and influencer marketing route. Remember that your product and the location/behavior of your target audience will be crucial in determining the distribution channel.

Step Six: Choose a Customer Experience Strategy

This type relies on the growth strategy you've already decided on. For example, if you've decided on a growth-led strategy, the driver of your business is acquisitions and retention. In this case, you'll need a customer experience strategy to guarantee users a smooth ride through your product. A satisfactory customer experience will increase the chances of converting customers on a freemium subscription into paying customers.

Step Seven: Choose the Right Metric to Track New Product or Service Marketing Success

One of the significant features of any SaaS company is that you always have multiple growth metrics to track, and in reality, you can't follow every metric. You will need to choose a few key metrics that reveal your progress. These metrics include Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), which are important indicators of how much you're spending to get customers. Ideally, your LTV should be higher than CAC; otherwise, you must adjust acquisition spending or optimize your product for customer retention.

Conclusion

SaaS businesses have to adapt to a constantly changing marketplace. While conventional marketing plans can help you push your products, a good go-to-market strategy can do wonders for your product launch, including giving you an ongoing and flexible strategy to deal with data in real time and adopt new policies. Ask the right questions and measure the appropriate metric to ensure your product performs well on the market.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Five Pillars of a robust Go-to-Market Strategy?

Although GTM strategies can be time-consuming to plan, it pays off in the long run. You want to consider five pillars: product analysis, product messaging, sales proposition, marketing strategy, and sales marketing. (We have addressed these pillars under the steps needed to make a sound GTM strategy).

What Are the Go-to-Market Questions You Should Ask?

There are some questions you want to ask to get you started on the path to transforming your business. Here are them: Who buys my product today? What do I know about my current customers? What key benefits do they get from your product? What problem does my product solve for them?

How do You Answer a GTM Question?

Considering that the right GTM strategy aims to put the customer first, you want to answer by explaining the essential features of your product or service and how it can help your customers.

What is the Goal of developing a Go-to-Market Strategy?

Go-to-market strategies help companies clarify the direction and plan for their marketing campaigns, provide the best way to launch services and products and improve service and product success possibilities.‍