Tips for B2B go-to-market strategy

The meaning of go-to-market strategy, is how to unlock the growth.

In B2C business, when product hits the point, the company takes off and the magic happened. In B2B business, however, the customer decision and buying journey are far more complicated. In many case, B2B product get the first 15–20 clients, but the growth, just not unlock.

And the B2B go-to-market strategy is all about having a repeatable playbook.

Here are some reasons B2B startup has trouble finding the repeatable step to grow.

1. Heavily rely on founder selling, meaning regular sales reps could not sell as the founder does.
2. Trying to do too much sales model at once, top-down, bottom-up, freemium, and end up spent too much energy and got little result.
3. The product initiative doesn’t meet the urgency, but the founder still so focus on the features itself.
4. Sometimes technical founders consider sales as a black box and just want to hire a VP of sales then try to micro manage him.

Tips to help you build up a go-to-market strategy.

1. When the enterprise product hits the product-market fit, but growth not unlock, you need to figure out whether it’s product problem or sales problem. You should just get a sales rep who is also interested in both product side and market side ( just like a swiss army knives) , and he will try to figure out a repeatable go to market way.
2. A repeatable playbook is not just a good powerpoint deck and sales. But paying attention on how client moves through the buying journey. Keep an eyes on what working and not. And focus on how to ultimately let client decide to on board. The key point for the first 15–20 clients is not did we win it or not, but focus on how and why they decide to buy the product.
3. Before you hire a sales VP or bunch of sales reps, wait till you feel the urgency, meaning, if you don’t hire more reps, you will leave lots of client on the table.
4. About the sales reps, you should not just take the average number, for example, one of the rep just crushed it get the 5x more client then his KPI, but others all fail, you will still think sales team did a great job according to the average client growth, but actually had performance issue in sales team. Instead, try to keep 70% of the sales reps in organization should crushed it and you will know when to hire more person.
5. Try to keep the product simple, especially for enterprise product, the ease of use in B2B product is getting more important, so clients won’t need an army of decider to figure out what every feature is. Design, simplicity would help you win in enterprise product.

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