Top-Shelf Tip No. 193:

“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”

David Packard

Your Go-To-Market Strategy Checklist
The terms, go-to-market strategy and marketing strategy, are often used interchangeably in the workplace, but these are actually different concepts. Today and tomorrow, Promotional Consultant Today will examine these two concepts and provide checklists to prepare you for your next product launch. First, let’s define the difference between the two terms.

Marketing Strategy. Marketing strategy is usually focused on who to sell to and what to sell. The boundaries of marketing strategy run across functional lines inside an organization but marketing primarily interacts with two other functions in a company. First, marketing interacts with development via product marketing to convey market requirements and to provide content for communications and sales tools for selling. Marketing also interacts with sales to build a pipeline and assist in closing an opportunity more quickly.

Go-to-Market Strategy. This type of strategy focuses on how the organization will put offerings into the market to reach market penetration, revenue and profitability expectations. A marketing strategy is a subset of the go-to-market strategy. The latter impacts all functions within an organization. It’s not an event or a specific product launch. A go-to-market strategy is the entire product lifecycle—from concept to sunset.

Ready to create a go-to-market strategy for your portfolio of products? Use this simplified checklist to get you started.

• Determine the market opportunity.
• Decide upon the beach-head target for initial market penetration.
• Understand the buying process: Identify the decision makers, approvers, recommenders, influencers and snipers.
• Understand the business issues for decision makers and develop a value proposition that resonates with them. Tie them to a compelling event.
• Establish a differentiated position from substitutes and alternatives.
• Prepare a product roadmap that includes evolution of a product, product extensions and the entrance into new markets.
• Document the distribution strategy and corresponding sales process.
• Create an integrated demand generation plan to create qualified opportunity.
• Develop a comprehensive and methodical demand management plan to follow-up on qualified opportunities.
• Prepare an implementation plan to ensure the offering is set-up to perform properly.
• Train the support organization to handle implementation and end user inquiries.
• Identify partners for creating awareness, interest, consideration, purchases, implementations and supporting customers.
• Read PCT tomorrow for more on marketing strategy.

Source: Peter Buscemi is a strategic and visionary marketing executive and brand champion who has leveraged his unique combination of classical training and entrepreneurial experience at start-ups and Fortune 500 companies to transform technology innovations into multimillion-dollar revenue streams.

Compiled by Cassandra Johnson