Messaging and the GTM Plan. You can't have one without the other but which comes first?
The GTM plan is basically this; who needs what you're selling, who should you focus your sales efforts on, how are you better than the competitors. In short, how you're going to go-to-market. Only when you know that can you decide what you are going to say = messaging.
But B2B founders/marketing heads with limited budgets keep finding themselves in a chicken and egg situation. This starts with this basic business decision about the way forward.
1.Should you get the sales wherever the lead comes from ( bottom up, product-led growth) and then work out what you should be doing and saying with the lessons learned from the market.
Or the other way around .....
2.Plan what you should be doing and saying for B2B growth sales, do it and then see what happens.
If you go for the second approach this is what is meant to happen:
Define the target audience
Create messaging for awareness
Get your message out there - e.g social media, trade shows, sales deck
Build the Sales Funnel using and refining your messages
Differentiate yourself from the competition's messaging
The reality in busy early stage companies is often full of chicken and egg situations because there there are no/small marketing, sales and product marketing teams and sales funnel infrastructure.
Defining the target audience
Here is the biggest chicken and egg issue. Often not enough customers or stakeholders have been spoken to work out who your ideal persona is and what they are looking for. This may be the case even when you have thousands of users. There is confusion over their need states and use cases - why are they using your product and when.
This means you can't be sure what the messaging should be as we are not sure who we are going for and why they need it. That can only be found out in a conversation.
Sales Funnel
The sales team may be very small. Some verticals may have been targeted but users - including enterprise - arrive in an ad hoc fashion, with no overall plan known and implemented by everyone. The company may have a CRM but it is only used by a few people in the company and not to track all leads systematically . Potentially bigger customers tend to take up a lot of the team's time leaving less time for others to be developed.
You are not sure what is working because there is no direction or documentation and sharing of sales conversations & sales journeys. People use whichever messaging works for them.
Competition
This has not been systematically reviewed including a " battlecard" and mapping of product features, their competitive strategic strength and their marketing approach. Some of this may be done superficially as a slide in an investor deck, but even you are not convinced that you have the whole picture.
It's not clear how you are different so you can't differentiate yourselves in messaging.
You can't develop decent messaging without knowing all this. And messaging is not a luxury - you need it for your website, digital marketing, and basic selling kit. It is not uncommon to be developing both a Customer Sales pitch and an Investor Pitch at the same time and the same work needs to be done for both.
Your leadership have to make these important business decisions intentionally - it is truly is about how you are going to go to market. Once you have done your planning you will know what it a priority, budgets to be spent and who is doing it all.
So what's the hack? The good news is that it doesn't take too long to do the bare bones investigation that will give you some good answers. It is amazing what conversations with 10 customers and stakeholders, some good desk research and industry contact chats can give you and this can take less than a month.
For companies raising a Round A getting this all this right is critical. It's fair to say that you won't be able to raise funds to scale sales unless you can convince investors that you have cracked your GTM. Which takes us back to the chicken and the egg.
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