Your Insights Toolkit
For GTM Strategists
Whether you’re aiming to break into new markets, verticals, or use cases, or introducing a new solution within your existing portfolio, developing a robust go-to-market (GTM) strategy is crucial for achieving your company’s growth goals. This process can be daunting, with numerous potential directions to consider. You might wonder where to focus your investments to gain the most traction and accelerate your success. What challenges and distractions could derail your efforts? Our framework is designed to address these pain points by providing GTM strategists with a comprehensive framework that integrates customer, market, and competitor insights into their strategic planning, ensuring you take the most efficient path to success.
KAE’s 4 Principles for an Effective Go-to-Market Strategy
Get the full GTM framework here.
By framing the insights into specific chapters of our recommended GTM toolkit, we provide a clear process to each complex phase of your launch.
Utilising customer, market and competitor research is vital for achieving a holistic approach to your market strategy. Customer research provides deep insights into preferences, behaviours, and pain points, enabling you to tailor your offerings and messaging to meet actual needs. Competitor research, on the other hand, reveals market positioning, strengths, and weaknesses of rivals, helping to identify opportunities and threats. Market research plays a crucial role in understanding the broader landscape in which your business operates. It encompasses both customer and competitor research but extends further to include industry trends, economic shifts, and regulatory changes. Together, these insights drive informed decision-making and strategic planning.
KAE delivers customer, competitor, and market intelligence through a prismatic lens, offering a clear and holistic way forward. By applying our advanced capabilities, methodologies, and techniques across customer and market intelligence, we empower you to achieve insight that is both insightful and actionable.
Once you have considered the insights needed in each step, learn how to build your brief.
1) Follow the North Star
Insights and recommendations are tied back to how you define overarching business growth objectives and metrics (e.g., customer acquisition, revenue, profit) and this should be the North Star guiding your project.
2) Customer-centric precision
KAE is strictly evidence-based with a high emphasis on the voice of the customer. We specialise in advanced customer research techniques to ensure a clear link between customer perceptions and commercial outcomes, to give you the highest likelihood of gaining traction.
3) A team sport
Always based on cross-functional collaboration and ownership, our GTM framework is structured and communicated to serve the respective needs of various teams and leaders, so that each type of role has its needed toolkit to make effective decisions on a day-to-day basis.
4. Continuous improvement
What do you wish you had known or done differently the last time you entered a new market or vertical? What successes do you wish to replicate? Let’s implement your learnings for continuous improvement.
KAE Go-to-Market Framework:
Our GTM framework provides a structured approach to your launch by translating research questions into the delivery of an evidence-based toolkit for your GTM strategy. This approach helps you mitigate risk, uphold stakeholder interests, and utilise your resources more efficiently throughout your launch journey.
When expanding into unfamiliar territory, it is crucial to understand the landscape. Identify potential customers and assess how they are currently being served by both direct and indirect competitors. Analyse the trends and dynamics driving the market and be aware of any regulatory challenges. Conducting a thorough market and competitive landscape analysis will provide the context needed to inform your next steps.
Understanding your customer personas’ purchasing journey, their needs and pain points, and their drivers of choice is crucial. The insight helps determine why they choose to buy from you or opt for other alternatives.
Establishing a detailed profile of your new customer provides a solid foundation for prioritising actions to connect with them more effectively across Product, Pricing, Marketing, and Sales.
Delve deeper into how your planned offering is positioned relative to the competition or the status quo to identify the essential elements, key differentiators, and your unique selling proposition (USP). This analysis is most effective when viewed through the lens of how well you and your competitors connect with your target audience and address their key drivers of choice across different personas. For Product teams, prioritisation heatmaps for horizon planning the roadmap are a valuable outcome of this activity, while Sales teams benefit from tools such as battle cards and enablement resources.
The final element of a quality GTM framework is one that allows you to continuously track, measure and re-calibrate as needed. Agree at the outset across functions how you’ll measure and track progress across time, and what you collectively feel the appropriate timelines are for this. Tying back to your North Star objective, what will be your check=in points to see how cross-functional activities are performing, and where you may need to troubleshoot, pivot from, or double down on your plans?
What elements of your marketing communications should you amplify or reduce to drive engagement throughout the funnel? How much customisation and localisation will be necessary if you’re expanding into new markets? Which channels should you prioritise for investment based on how prospects discover your brand, and to boost brand awareness and generate high quality leads?
As you go to market, it’s crucial to clearly understand how to achieve desired outcomes among your audience, ensuring that your marketing spend is optimised effectively.
What are your customers willing to pay, and which pricing structures are most appealing? For consumer products, consider the optimal bundles and configurations that drive uptake and enhance top-line performance. In addition to understanding customer preferences, it’s crucial to contextualise this with market insights. Ensure you have a clear view of your pricing relative to competitors, enabling you to craft effective, value-based messaging.
In addition to a traditional sales strategy, there is a clear benefit of taking a scientific approach to understanding what customers expect from their interactions from your sales team, and what investments you must make to improve conversion rates and remove potential switching barriers. In many B2B industries, you will also need to identify how you can leverage integrations and partnerships as a successful distribution channel, enabling your ecosystem to effectively become an extension of your sales team, and for you to become an integral, seamless extension to your customers’ existing workflows and environment.
