4 Stages of Go-To-Market Strategy

What tactics to apply, when to apply them & KPIs

This Substack post is written by Maja Voje, the best-selling author of Go-To-Market Strategist. She has worked with companies such as Google, Heineken, Bayer, Userpilot, Clay, and 750+ smaller companies to build winning go-to-market strategies and cross the chasm.  

Why should you care about go-to-market (GTM) strategy? 

Having a solid GTM strategy is the difference between hoping that something will work well and planning how to get there. 

The biggest mistakes you can make when crafting your go-to-market strategy are: 

• Merely copying the competitors and being slightly cheaper 

• Relying on something that Dropbox (or any other unicorn) did 10+ years ago - the world is changing fast, honey!

• Ignoring that it exists and just calling it “marketing” - it is so much more!

A best-in-class strategy plays on your strengths and attacks competitors' weaknesses. But we also have to be realistic. We try to make the best out of our resources, traction, and lifeline.

In this article, I will share examples and proven tactics you can use to advance your go-to-market strategy at each stage of your entrepreneurial journey. 

Ultimately, we aim to take you from early adopters to early majority customers. 

In other words, we are on a mission to cross the chasm where 95% of innovation fails 🐊.  

Stages of Go-To-Market Strategy

Based on Notion Capital’s model, I defined a model of 4 stages of Go-to-Market journey. The traction numbers are adjusted to B2B SaaS European reality. They may vary across geographies. Here are the stages that you are probably already super familiar with as an entrepreneur: 

• 🌱 Problem-solution fit - get first users or, ideally, customers to prove that your product can actually solve the problem it aims to solve 

• 🎁 Product-market fit - you are searching for signals that the product can repeatably deliver the value to the target audience and (especially important if you are bootstrapping) that you can capture some of this value to build a sustainable business. 

• 🎯 Go-to-market fit - you aim to find at least one predictable and scalable GTM motion, which literally means how you get customers. 

• 📈 Scaling - you try to find more product-market fits by opening new markets and new GTM motions to scale your business.

Now, we will dive into each of these stages. I will share proven tactics of my portfolio companies and examples of how companies successfully passed the main milestones on their go-to-market journey.

1. Problem-Solution Fit 

At this stage, you want to deliver practical value to the users and measure that with their satisfaction scores and early activation/retention. At this stage, we do not complicate much regarding client acquisition. Your first adopters are usually already in your network - aka “phonebook”. Here is a presentation of this stage as defined by First Round Capital’s Product-Market Fit Model; this is the Nascent PMF by their definition. 

Long story short - you need to prove that your product works. 

Example: Expert9 is a B2B Influencer marketing platform for LinkedIn that connects brands with reliable influencers and uses tons of AI to make this process as smooth as possible. They got their first partners and influencers through personal contracts and they will use their case study of an early pilot to achieve new customers with outreach, content marketing and - being mentioned in posts such as this one. 🤠

2. Product-Market Fit 

Next, you have to prove that the solution delivered value to users repeatedly and that they activate and retain the product. The opposite of retention is churn (users stop using the product). High retention and low churn are what we are aiming for here. Ideally, we also see early recommendations and referrals at this stage, which is a magnificent booster of product-market fit. Oh boy, do we need some leverage at this stage, right? At this stage, we do not like to overthink or overspend on acquisition. Here is a brilliant list of GTM Actions adopted from Ali Abouelatta’s analysis on how unicorn 120+ companies 🦄 got and retained their customers.

Example: MedAsk is an AI tool for checking medical symptoms developed by a group of developers, doctors and pharmacists as a side project. The team did not have time or interest to deal with “marketing and sales” so they simply spent $200 on Google Ads and asked their users how they liked it. Since the results were very satisfactory and those users continued to use the product, they pitched these data to partners and reporters. They also posted the link in some relevant Facebook communities with the goal of getting their first 10000 users and 100 WAU (weekly active users). 

3. Go-to-Market Fit 

Now that you know how to get the initial traction, you no longer want to rely on random spikes to get new customers. You want to build repeatable and predictable ways to get the right type of customers into the product. Here are 7 Go to Market Motions I defined in my book GTM Strategist. For most early GTM companies, 2-3 motions will work best. Remember, always go where the audience is.

Example: DevStats is a tool that helps dev teams measure and manage their productivity. They got their first customers from personal networks. Later on, they tried cold outreach and they sponsored the Engineering Leadership Substack. Now, their verified GTM Motions are Outbound and Community. They are also trying to double down on influencer collaborations and inbound. 

4. Scaling 

At the scaling stage, your appetite for growth and expansion drives you to open new markets, get more traction by opening new GTM Motions, and grow by driving new products. Imagine that you are searching for more product-market fits. The secret behind the hockey stick growth rates of unicorn companies are growth loops. Simply put, a user does an action that drives other users to the product. It is a form of engineering virality and word of mouth. Here are 5 types we defined with Ognjen Bošković:

Example: Rows.com is a spreadsheet tool. Its campaigns are known to go viral (for the AI feature launch, they got 125,000 signups in 90 days). They also created viral campaigns with billboards and physical marketing materials - long story short, they go viral at least 3x a year, which is a huge boost for their network. But that is not the only growth loop that Rows uses. They actually utilize all the growth loop types: you can create a sheet and share it with your colleagues (usage-based loop), invite more users to the team to co-create (collaboration loops), users can share their templates in their gallery (user-generated loop), and they have a referral program. Want to grow exponentially? Think growth loops. 

---

Exclusively for VC Corner: $50 Discount for GTM Bootcamp - if you want to dive deeper into your target market selection - which “Persona” should I target, how to set up the price, do the positioning and messaging right, so everyone will understand what if your promise to the target audience (UVP) and why should they choose you over competitors - choose the right GTM Motions for your business. It is a 5-hour training at your own pace.

Ruben has negotiated a special deal for you. Go to gtmstrategist.com/bootcamp and use the promo code VCCORNER50 for $50 discount 💪

---

Cool - and our journey here is done.

I hope you enjoyed it and learned a ton. 

If you want more of this - let’s continue the conversation.
Let’s go to market - stronger together! 

FREE Resource: If you would like to craft your v01 of Go-to-Market strategy, you are welcome to use my GTM Power Hour template ⚡ which helped more than 2000 companies to list the main assumptions of their Go-to-Market strategy in less than an hour. There is a video tutorial with examples of how to fill out the template. Head over to https://gtmstrategist.com/resources/power_hour/ and take it for a spin. 

---

Not there yet? Join the GTM Strategist community on Substack, where I share new examples, frameworks and tips to help you navigate your go-to-market journey.