Becoming a customer experience company is a challenging and continuous goal. You can — and should — always improve the customer experience; it’s not something you can achieve and put aside. Customer expectations change constantly, and switching cost are low, even in the enterprise markets. That brings us to the core element of the corporate strategy: GTM strategy.
A GTM strategy is similar to a military strategy. It takes into account the following elements:
Combined, these outline a customer acquisition process, which explains how the company will attract and convert buyers. Here is the definition of a traditional GTM strategy:
Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is an action plan that describes repeatable and scalable processes for how a company acquires, retains, and grows customers.
So, what impact does GTM strategy have on the quality of customer experience, and why is it crucial for companies to change their GTM strategy if they want to improve customer experience?
As we highlighted, customer experience requires organizations to go beyond demographics and firmographic data to understand customer needs, values, and expectations. These insights will help your organization personalize its product offering, pricing, and message to improve the customer experience; but it will also help you understand what journeys, channels, and processes best match customer expectations. Every organization serious about focusing on customer experience has to evaluate and optimize its GTM strategy to align with a vision of delivering a better customer experience.
It is worth noting that to be successful, a GTM strategy must be repeatable and scalable.
Traditionally, a GTM strategy highlights channels as the fourth essential element, but in the last two decades, digital transformation drove an explosion of new channels for organizations to reach prospective customers. Seeing that a prospective customer can switch from one channel to another in a matter of seconds, channels themselves became somewhat less important. What matters more is the overall customer acquisition process, which is intertwined with every aspect of a GTM strategy.
In other words, the customer acquisition process is changing because of changing customer expectations and the increasing number of channels through which prospective customers can be reached. Enterprise buyers expect to try and evaluate software in an easy, frictionless way. As a result, a new approach to customer acquisition has emerged where the product itself becomes a channel for acquiring, retaining, and growing customers. This approach fundamentally changes the traditional GTM strategy by elevating product as one of the primary channels. This new strategy is referred to as a product-led GTM strategy. The name suggests the importance of product as a tool and channel to attract, retain, and grow customers.
Product-led go-to-market strategy is an action plan that describes repeatable and scalable processes for how a company acquires, retains, and grows customers, driven by in-product customer behavior, feedback, product usage, and analytics.
In a product-led GTM strategy, the product becomes a crucial and irreplaceable part of every step of how your company prepares to reach and engage prospective customers. In fact, OpenView, a venture capital firm, says your product is a key part of your marketing. One of the major benefits of this approach is receiving in-product user behavioral data that can be then used to change or adapt the whole GTM process. How prospective customers interact with your product early in the buying success could help your company make better decisions about what features to build next. You could even adjust marketing messages based on in-product behaviors to highlight values and features that correlate with a higher probability of a prospect becoming a customer.
A product-led GTM enables companies to focus more on effective product growth strategies, and incorporate real-time, in-product customer behavioral data to create meaningful engagement across multiple channels and devices.