Go to Market

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Go to Market

How on earth do we tackle a subject as big as go to market? Well, like everything, with a framework. And I am going to give you the essence of this framework in one sentence: it is how you sell stuff. So it is a pretty fundamental piece of what you need to do as an entrepreneur. It does not matter what you build, it does not matter how great your product or service is, and even if you are not for profit, somewhere along the line you are going to have to get your audience engaged. Whether it is donors, or if you are in the B2C world it is fans, you are going to have to develop that initial traction with your proposition.

Go to market turns out to be one of the biggest parts of the execution for most startups. In fact, when you look at companies’ P&Ls, they spend on average triple more on sales and marketing than they do on product development even in steady state, and in the early stages it is usually significantly more than that. So this is worth getting right.

I will say up front that this is a framework mostly based on my own experience of B2B and mostly in software. But there is nothing here that is exclusive to that. We have case studies on the site for people doing not-for-profit and NGO type things: Diagnostics for All, One Laptop per Child, and others. This is a living, breathing thing. There is no single answer here. It is just some things to think about, and the whole point of the Startup Secrets series is to give you the mentorship I wish I had thirty years ago, so you can fast forward through the mistakes I made rather than collect the scar tissue yourself.

The marketing and sales cycle

Down the left hand side of the framework I have an extremely simple marketing and sales cycle. There are many ways you could describe this. These are just terms that help you think about how you take a potential customer from being aware of you, all the way through getting interest, understanding what it is and how it could solve a problem for them, engaging them, trialing it, to the point where they actually want to purchase. Any one of those steps could be broken down or collapsed into a different set of steps unique to your situation, but the point is there will be a series of steps. People do not walk in and say, “I know what you are selling, I just want to buy it.” Usually they go through some of these steps, particularly in the B2B world. If you are dealing with the enterprise it gets much more complicated and you will have more steps. If you are dealing with consumers it is not as obvious what these steps are, because people make decisions based on fashion or peer pressure or lots of other things that are hard to put up on a cycle like this. But there is a cycle nevertheless.

I have no pride of authorship in this. It was developed years ago in the form of AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action). I just changed some of the terminology. The point is there is some cycle you are going to create, and you will learn what it is as you engage your audience.

The whole framework

Think of the framework as three connected dimensions. Down the left is that cycle to engage your audience. Across it there is a series of strategies and tactics you might use to reach them (branding, positioning, messaging, social media, PR, and so on). And then there is a series of channels you work through to ultimately get to that audience. Tonight we target, through the sales cycle, the right tactics, through the right channel, to reach the right audience.

At the top of the framework sits the strategic stuff: branding, positioning, and messaging. Without clarity about where you are headed, it is very hard to get into the rest of it. Then there are lots of tactics: social media, PR, and the like. And then there is the channel-centric part. If you think about it in the simplest sense of you personally delivering your message to an audience one at a time, you run into a big issue: a small startup with a small number of people trying to reach a large audience. You need a multiplier, and the multiplier is basically the channel. It is how you get other people delivering your message, other people selling or integrating your product. It is very strategic for startups to figure out how they can stand on the shoulders of giants and get a megaphone working for them.

On the other side, if you are just in the ready-fire-aim business, you are going to miss a lot. Targeting is a critical part of what you have to do early on: how do you pick the audience, how do you segment them, and how do you focus in on where you are going to be most successful delivering your value proposition.

Results-oriented, metrics-driven execution

The key thing with marketing, which is so hard, is to figure out how you actually measure the progress you have in engaging your audience and turning them into buyers. A big part of this is getting results-oriented marketing to work for you so you have metrics-driven execution and can continuously improve the cycle. Even things that seem less measurable, like how your brand is perceived, are measurable today. You have tools like Net Promoter Score that did not exist when I was starting my first companies. The web has really helped with that. So these things are all measurable if you take the time to figure it out.

I will say the obvious at the end of the day: this is all about execution. But if you do not know where you are headed, any road will get you there. That is why strategy is so important up front.

The one word that matters most: focus

I find it very hard to pull any one thing out of such a broad subject, and yet there is one thing. Do not be afraid to focus. In everything we cover here, whether it is which target audience to go after, which pain point to start with, which brand attribute to build on, which channel to reach them, or which segment to go after, it all comes down to one word: focus.

Unfortunately it is almost invariably the last thing startups are good at, because you start out trying to change the world, so you have these grand visions and you are desperate to prove you can go after so many things that will make such an impact. The trouble is this: would you rather expand on success or contract on failure? Honestly, most of our time in the boardroom is dealing with this very issue. People go too broad, and so they are busy having to cut back to figure out where they can get traction. Whereas if they had just started really, really focused, got some success, and started building on it, it would have been so much easier.

So every time you are at a junction about whether to go big or get focused, ask yourself: how could you focus? And imagine the pain of going too broad and having to cut back. That is just so much harder.

Startup Secret: Would you rather expand on success or contract on failure? Start incredibly focused, win, and build on it.

Vision versus execution

I get asked about this a lot: “You keep telling us to focus, but we are told to have a big vision. Are you talking out of both sides of your mouth?” The answer is that you need both. They just have a different time scale. Your starting point needs to be incredibly focused. Your vision in the long term, for years out, can be as broad as you like, defining how you will dominate the world in the future. But do not go to customers with a vision and try to sell it. Go to customers with the first set of needs you can answer uniquely well, and then talk to them about how, if they are seeing that success, they might enjoy the vision with you.