In business and life, knowing what to do is the hardest part. Finding product-market fit, understanding your customers, and knowing what and how to sell to them, these are all a part of your Go-To-Market (GTM). For so many businesses they just throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks. But what if you didn’t have to waste all that time? What if you had a formula for determining what has the highest likelihood of success before you started? Well, now you can, at least with your SaaS GTM strategy.
Whether you’re going to market with a new product for a new audience, reviewing your GTM strategy for an existing set of products or services, or just working on planning, knowing the steps to follow and a methodical system that delivers results is the difference between spinning your wheels and gaining traction.
Before you can start working on approaching a market, you have to understand two of the most important aspects, who you are targeting and what problems you’re solving for each segment or customer type. Different businesses solve different problems, but many of them don’t have these problems clearly and concisely written down.
Step 1: Write down the problems your product or service solves.
Make this as simple as possible with a quick description of the problem, not the solution. Some companies solve complex problems and it can take a bit more space to write it down. The key here is to make it quick, but still understandable. Some companies solve the same problem for all of their customer segments, others solve different problems for the same customers. A large company with many business units may solve a vast array of problems for each customer segment. In this case, break it down by business unit.
Enter the problems into the top section of the spreadsheet here:
Step 2: Identify and list out your segments
This part is harder than it seems at first glance. Identifying customer segments can be a challenging task because companies need so much information on their customers to make decisions about segmentation. Even if you have a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), this kind of customer is still often broken up into segments. The important thing here is that this segmentation is quantitative, not qualitative, which is the biggest issue in getting this done. Here’s an article that helps you run a quantified customer segmentation analysis.
Once you have your market segmentation or customer profiles clearly identified, write down the title of each segment and a brief description of that segment. You’ll probably also want to connect it to your segmentation spreadsheet as well so it’s clear which is which.
Put the segments on the left side of the page here:
Step 3: Intersecting Segments & Problems
Now that you have your problems on the top and your customer segments or profiles on the left, it’s time to explain how you solve that problem for that customer segment. In each of the that intersect a problem and segment, write out how you will solve the problem for that segment.
Then, using the dropdowns below the “Solution to Problem Applied To Segment” area, fill in the following three areas:
Pain: This is the level of pain the problem is causing the customer. The higher the pain, the more likely they need a solution and are willing to pay for it.
Sale: This is the difficulty of the sale. Is this a simple sale or a complex sale? If it’s a complex sale, my favorite book on this is Mastering The Complex Sale by Jeff Thull. The higher the number, the easier the sale. So if it’s a one call close with a 95% close rate, that would be around a 10. If it’s a true complex sale requiring months or years to close, that requires coordinating multiple C-suites within the business, that would be closer to a 1 or 2.
Implementation: How long and how complex is the implementation and how likely is it to go sideways? An easy implementation, like no implementation at all is a 10. Whereas a large, complex implementation requiring many consultants, technicians, and customer success reps over the course of months or years would be closer to a 1 or 2. Also, if your team hasn’t done this kind of implementation in the past, that brings the number down further.
Step 4: Adding It Up
Now that you’ve got all the numbers associated with the different intersections of problems and customers, you can see who is most likely and least likely to sell and succeed. The spreadsheet will show green for the top item, a blue background for the second place, and a white background for everything else in the intersection of problems and segments.
Step 5: Analysis Time
Thought you were done? You forgot about the analysis portion of the exercise! Sometimes there is a clear winner, but most of the time you need to ask yourself questions like:
- Could I change the difficulty of sale or implementation if I modified how I am approaching this problem?
- Are there sub-segments where the pain is higher that aren’t represented here?
- Are we solving the right problems for these customers? Could we tweak what we’re solving?
- Are these really the right customer segments?
- Is the solution really solving the problem?
- For each segment/problem intersection, who are the competitors is there a way to make a change to what we’re doing to avoid them?
The list goes on. After going through and asking yourself all of this, consider creating a word or docs document that explains your thoughts on the analysis portion and linking the items in the cells to your areas within the word document so you have a working file that changes as you change things in both files. As you go through the analysis, your ideas can get extensive and it gets complicated to manage everything within a spreadsheet.
Step 6: Choose The Winners
After you’ve gone through this entire process, there are sometimes 1 to 3 clear winners, but other times a lot more questions than answers. But this is great! Now you just need to check with your potential and current customers about the questions that were brought up to figure out the best path. It’s going to take time and money to figure this stuff out, but it’s a lot less money than just trying thing after thing after thing and maybe getting lucky.
No one said it was going to be an easy path to get to these answers, but if it was easy the opportunity for growth wouldn’t be there, would it?
So once you’ve:
- Concisely written out the problems your company solves for it’s customers
- Segmented your customers
- Written out how you approach the problem for the segment with your solution
- Selected a number of the Difficulty of Sale, Ease of Implementation, and Level of Pain for each problem/segment intersection
- Analyzed each item to see if there are other ways to improve your odds of success by finding places where the pain is higher, implementation is easier and more consistent, and the sale is faster and easier
- Validated your hypotheses for each of the questions brought up during the analysis phase
- Edited the document with the new data
Then you’re ready to pick who you’re going to focus on first and for what problem. You can also use this document to determine how much budget you’re going to allot to each of the problem/segment intersections you’re selling or remove intersections that haven’t been working but you haven’t been sure why. Because now you’ll see clearly through the fog and have a clear understanding of what and who to focus on within your go-to-market strategy.
Happy hunting!
