Go-To-Market Uncovered E-Book

Paul Sullivan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 365

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A proven blueprint for long-term operating success for entrepreneurs, marketers, sales leaders, and customer success teams

In Go-To-Market Uncovered: How to Successfully Launch a Product and Drive Sustainable, Long-Term Revenue Growth, celebrated entrepreneur and go-to-market strategist Paul Sullivan delivers a hands-on discussion of the ARISE framework for bringing B2B SaaS, fintech, and tech-enabled businesses to market. The author shows you how to fully implement this framework in just 30 days. It offers a proven blueprint for long-term success you can apply to your own organization immediately, whether you work in a startup, a scale-up, or a large enterprise.

Practical, scalable, and filled with foresight, every stage of the ARISE framework is designed to be thorough and agile, empowering your company to increase its ROI on tech investments and strategic initiatives. You'll also find:

• Explorations of critical key performance indicators outlining what exactly you need to keep track of and what can be safely disregarded
• Strategies for aligning your sales and marketing goals to create a unified customer journey
• Enlightening case studies that illustrate the most common challenges faced by companies and how to overcome them

Packed with strategies, templates, worksheets, links to additional resources and reading materials, and valuable lessons, Go-To-Market Uncovered demonstrates how to anticipate potential market forces, position your firm relative to the competition, and overcome performance challenges with startling effectiveness.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Testimonials for Paul Sullivan and ARISE Go‐to‐Market

®

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

PART I: Introduction to Go‐to‐Market Strategy

1 The Importance of a Robust Go‐to‐Market Strategy

What Is a Go‐to‐Market Strategy?

Why GTM Strategies Are Crucial for Business Success

Common Pitfalls in Your GTM Strategy

What Does a Good GTM Outline Look Like?

2 The Eight Pillars of GTM Strategy

Pillar #1: Discovery

Pillar #2: Personas, Segmentation, and Jobs to Be Done

Pillar #3: Positioning, Messaging, and Value Proposition

Pillar #4: Pricing Strategy

Pillar #5: Sales Enablement

Pillar #6 Marketing Tactics

Pillar #7: Onboarding and Retention

Pillar #8: Product Development

PART II: Overview of the ARISE Methodology

3 What the ARISE Go‐To‐Market Methodology

®

Is

Who the ARISE Framework Is For

ARISE for the HubSpot Customer Platform

How ARISE Is Delivered

How ARISE Is Tailored for B2B SaaS, Fintech, and Technology‐Enabled Businesses

PART III: Assess

4 Evaluating Your Current GTM Strategy

Assessing Your Current Content

PART IV: Research

5 Market Research Techniques

Primary and Secondary Research Methods

Tools for Market Analysis: SWOT, Porter's Five Forces, Win/Loss Interviews

Integrating Insights into Our ARISE Framework

6 Competitive Landscape Analysis

Identifying and Analyzing Competitors

Analyzing a Company's Market Placement

Analyzing a Product or Service

Analyzing the Positioning

Analyzing How Companies Communicate

Analyzing Sales and Customer Success

Using Competitive SWOT Analysis

Creating a Competitive Matrix

7 Customer Insights Gathering

Methods for Gathering Customer Feedback

Analyzing Customer Behavior and Preferences

Map Your Customer's Journey

PART V: Ideate

8 Brainstorming Innovative GTM Approaches

How I Used Service Design

Leveraging Research Insights to Generate Creative Solutions

Tools Incorporating AI

9 Exploring Channel Strategies

Direct Sales, Partnerships, and Digital Platforms

Marketing Channels

Inbound Marketing

Demand Generation

Product‐Led Growth (PLG)

Account‐Based Marketing (ABM)

Direct Sales

Partnerships

Digital Platforms

PART VI: Strategise

10 Developing a Clear Value Proposition

Define Your Value Proposition

Characteristics of a Great Value Proposition

Testing the Value Proposition

11 Creating Messaging Frameworks

Build Your Messaging Framework

12 Positioning Strategies in Competitive Markets

Creating a Positioning Statement

13 Aligning Sales and Marketing Goals

Creating a Unified Customer Journey

Developing Sales Enablement Materials

14 Pricing and Revenue Models

Pricing Models

Pricing Strategies

Building a Pricing Strategy Framework

Optimizing Revenue Models for SaaS and Fintech

PART VII: Execute

15 Creating a Comprehensive GTM Plan

Integrating Insights from Previous Stages

A Go‐to‐market Strategy Planner

Product Launch Checklist

16 Resource Allocation and Budgeting

Identifying Required Resources

Budgeting Strategy for GTM

17 Setting KPIs and Success Metrics

Defining Success Metrics for GTM

Sales KPIs and Metrics

Tools for Tracking and Reporting

18 Building an Effective Sales Process

Defining Sales Stages and Aligning with the Customer Journey

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Implementing Sales Enablement Tools

19 Developing Customer Onboarding Strategies

High‐touch vs. Low‐touch Onboarding

Best Practices for Onboarding

20 Reducing Churn and Increasing Customer Retention

Identifying Churn Risk Factors

Proactive Retention Strategies

PART VIII: Case Studies and Practical Insights

21 Real‐World Applications of ARISE

Case Studies of Successful GTM Strategies Using ARISE

A Strong Partner in HubSpot Implementation and Growth Strategies

Interview with Heidi Humphries, Executive Director of Sales and Marketing at DSSI (Acquired by ProcureAnalytics)

Lessons Learned and Best Practices

22 Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Addressing Common GTM Challenges

ARISE GTM Strategy for Continuous Improvement

Arise GTM Strategy for Continuous Improvement

Conclusion The Future of Go‐to‐Market Strategy

Appendix

Glossary of Technologies

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 Company structure for executing the business plan.

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 Funnel vs flywheel approach to customer acquisition and retention...

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1 A Value Proposition Canvas

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Testimonials for Paul Sullivan and ARISE Go‐to‐Market®

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Begin Reading

Conclusion The Future of Go‐to‐Market Strategy

Appendix

Glossary of Technologies

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

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Testimonials for Paul Sullivan and ARISE Go‐to‐Market®

Professional and Effective Team

We hired Paul's team based on a recommendation from our ABM technology partner, and it has been one of the best experiences we've had. The whole team caught on very quickly to our business model and was able to help us effectively create customer personas, associated messaging, and create relevant content quickly. Their comfort level with our tech stack (ABM, HubSpot Marketing, Sales and CRM, and Cognism) was impressive and critical to moving quickly. I have truly come to think of them as part of my marketing team.

—Heidi Humphries

Sales and Marketing Director

Direct Sourcing DSSI, Inc

Marketing Strategy, Content and HubSpot Setup for Outsourced Software Development

Paul and the team are not only experts in marketing strategy, the tech sector, and HubSpot, they also take great care and ownership of the campaigns they work on. I can highly recommend them as a collaborative, honest, and results driven agency—particularly for fast growing B2B tech/SaaS businesses.

—James Hodgson

UK CEO, 300Brains

BIAS Helped Take Our HubSpot Instance to the Next Level!

We recommend the team at ARISE highly. After deciding that our HubSpot instance and pipeline were no longer fit for purpose, they helped us to completely revolutionize our approach. Rob took the time to listen to our specific requirements and helped create a bespoke setup that included automated repeat tasks, task workflows for our Account Execs, and reporting dashboards for easier analysis and optimization. We now have a solution that is scalable, ready for our next phase of growth, and enables our SDRs and AEs to focus on what really matters—driving and converting pipeline. If you're looking for a trusty HubSpot partner, then get in touch with Paul.

—Jody Leon

Chief Marketing Officer

DSMN8

A Unique Combination of Strategy, Tech Know‐how and Implementation

HUBX decided to migrate from Pipedrive to HubSpot to take advantage of a fully integrated CRM and marketing automation solution that seamlessly connected customer information through to the customer success and service teams. We also use Drift playbooks extensively for visitor tracking and comms. We needed an agency that understood how to optimize multiple elements in our sales and marketing tech stack to deliver the best insights and customer experience, understand what converted and why, as well as lead the migration, making sure that all valuable data was retained.

I found Paul extremely insightful, knowledgeable, and also up for challenging many assumptions we'd made along the way. The difference with Paul at BIAS is that not only does he understand the what and why but he also knows the right way to deploy the tech to get the best result. Paul was a pleasure to work with and was doggedly determined to make sure that challenges we met along the way were solved, putting in extra hours and going the extra mile. I would highly recommend Paul and ARISE GTM to any B2B SaaS organization looking to optimize their tech approach to CRM and inbound marketing.

—Ray De Silva,

Chief Commercial Officer

HubX Capital

Vantage Accelerator Workshop Partner—Amazing Job!

Paul has worked with us to support 3 of our accelerator cohorts and more than 50 startups this year by delivering workshops on PLG. The content and advice given to the founders has played a vital role in refining their growth strategy pre and post‐fundraising. Feedback from the founders after the workshop was amazing. Paul delivered an interactive and engaging workshop that demonstrated his extensive knowledge on all things PLG and more!

—Sophie Scoular

Head of Program, Vantage Accelerator

A Strong Partner in HubSpot Implementation and Growth Strategies

We recently partnered with ARISE to take our marketing efforts to the next level. Our goal was twofold: improve our search engine optimization (SEO) ranking and leverage the HubSpot platform to generate more qualified sales leads for DSSI (www.directsourcing.com). We're happy to report that ARISE exceeded our expectations. From the outset, ARISE impressed us with their in‐depth knowledge of HubSpot's capabilities. However, what truly set them apart was their commitment to understanding our unique business model. They conducted a thorough competitive analysis and took the time to delve into our specific needs and goals. This resulted in a customized implementation plan that directly addressed our challenges and opportunities.

But ARISE’s expertise extended beyond the software itself. Their team showcased a keen understanding of current marketing trends and how to utilize them within the HubSpot platform. They provided valuable insights into inbound marketing strategies, content creation best practices, and marketing automation techniques—all meticulously tailored to our industry and target audience.

This forward‐thinking approach ensured that we not only implemented HubSpot effectively, but also optimized our overall marketing strategy for maximum impact. Throughout the entire process, BIAS maintained clear and consistent communication. They kept us informed every step of the way and readily addressed any questions or concerns. A special shout‐out to Paul and Fawn, whose professionalism, courtesy, and unwavering support throughout the project were invaluable.

—Amit Mendiratta

Leader in Source To Pay and Supply Chain Digital Transformation

Direct Sourcing, DSSI Inc

PAUL SULLIVAN

GO‐TO‐MARKET UNCOVERED

How to Successfully Launch a Product and Drive Sustainable, Long‐Term Revenue Growth

Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Images: © Ilham/Adobe Stock, © MicroOne/Adobe Stock

Author Photo: Courtesy of PAUL SULLIVAN

I want to dedicate this book to my grandfather, Arthur James Henry Sullivan, who was one of my biggest admirers even when my actions weren’t always admirable. Always there to listen, guide, and support me. You were a critical voice in my ever‐expanding desire for growth and adventure. I miss our conversations and hope this makes you proud when you look down on me.

Gone but not forgotten, ever x.

21.02.1929–12.06.2014

Preface

Go‐to‐market (GTM) strategy isn't just an area of specialism for me; it's a driver of my daily routine, and those that know me for it have often referred to me as a kid in a playground when I make something happen that makes it easier for others to understand their current predicament.

In early October 2024, I had been working on a dashboard for HubSpot that my clients could use to quickly identify their correct Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) from their data, not some reverse‐engineered profile from the sales team. Not that it's an impossible task, but one that not everyone using HubSpot would quickly figure out. I'd been in the office that weekend trying to figure it out because building a GTM strategy should include segmentation for companies that have been in market for some time.

Once I solved it, I immediately dropped it into my customers' portal thanks to Supered, a tool designed to help with internal product and process adoption. It also allows you to build in HubSpot, save it to the cloud, and one‐click deploy it to multiple client portals afterward.

On the following Monday, I immediately ran upstairs to my client, who is based in the same building as me, grabbed Sam, their CMO, and asked for feedback on what was missing. We settled on understanding how long contacts from their best‐performing ICP sat in a particular lifecycle stage in the marketing and sales funnel. This is because you can then dive into where those contacts typically engaged with the business and see how you can optimize those stages to improve velocity across the revenue lifecycle.

I now use this report and a data hygiene report to immediately assess the health of a HubSpot portal, a crucial part of my product and service offering and to help my clients immediately understand where to focus their efforts and why.

Throughout this book, we'll explore:

The fundamental importance of GTM strategies in business success

Common pitfalls and challenges in GTM planning and execution

A detailed overview of the ARISE GTM Methodology

®

and its application

Practical insights for startups, scaling teams, and enterprise organizations

The integration of GTM strategies with modern tools like HubSpot

As we journey through the chapters, you'll gain a deeper understanding of how to craft a GTM strategy that launches your product successfully and ensures long‐term growth and customer satisfaction. We’ll explore a modern GTM playbook and discover how the ARISE GTM Methodology® can transform your market entry and expansion approach.

The ability to effectively bring products and services to market can mean the difference between success and obscurity. As a veteran of the technology industry and a witness to countless product launches, I've seen firsthand the critical role that a well‐crafted go‐to‐market strategy plays in a company's journey.

This book—which you hold in your hands or perhaps view on your screen—is more than just a guide; it's a compass for navigating the complex terrain of modern market entry. The ARISE Go‐To‐Market Methodology® presented here represents a significant leap forward in how we approach GTM strategies, especially in B2B SaaS, fintech, and technology‐enabled businesses.

What sets this work apart is its practical approach. While many business books offer theoretical frameworks, this one provides a concrete, actionable methodology that has been tested and refined in the real world. The ARISE framework—Assess, Research, Ideate, Strategise, and Execute—offers a comprehensive road map that can be adapted to businesses of all sizes, from nimble startups to established enterprises.

As you delve into these pages, you'll find insights that challenge conventional wisdom and strategies that push the boundaries of traditional GTM thinking. You'll find this book to be jam‐packed with real‐world examples, clear and detailed explanations, and practical tips.

Whether you're a seasoned marketing executive looking to refine your approach, a startup founder preparing for your first product launch, or a business student eager to understand the intricacies of bringing innovations to market, this book has something valuable to offer you.

We live in a world where the pace of change is relentless and the margin for error is slim, so having a robust GTM strategy is not just beneficial—it's essential. This book equips you with the tools and knowledge to craft such a strategy, helping you turn your product vision into an in‐market reality.

As you embark on this journey through the ARISE methodology, I encourage you to approach it with an open mind and a readiness to apply these concepts to your unique business challenges. The insights you gain here have the potential to transform not just how you approach market entry but also how you think about your entire business strategy.

May this book serve as your guide to navigating the complexities of modern markets, and may the ARISE methodology illuminate your path to success.

Introduction

As the creator of the ARISE Go‐to‐Market Methodology®, I've spent more than 15 years shaping GTM strategies for tech and service companies. This experience led me to develop ARISE, a comprehensive framework that combines proven optimization techniques with cutting‐edge technology to drive growth for B2B SaaS, fintech, and technology‐enabled businesses. Its comprehensive nature ensures that no aspect of your go‐to‐market strategy is overlooked, giving you a heightened sense of security about its thoroughness.

ARISE stands for Assess, Research, Ideate, Strategise, and Execute. Each stage is designed to be thorough yet agile, empowering companies to rapidly increase their ROI on technology investments and strategic initiatives. What sets ARISE apart is its practicality. It doesn't require a large team or extended timelines. In fact, we can often implement the full methodology in just 30 days for early‐stage startups, giving you the power to make significant changes in a short time.

One of the key strengths of ARISE is its proactive approach to experimentation and adaptation. We anticipate potential market forces and performance challenges, building contingency plans directly into our recommended tactics. This level of foresight and flexibility is rare in the consultancy world.

While ARISE was initially built for product companies, we've successfully applied it to service providers as well. The practical and scalable methodology works equally well for startups, scale‐ups, and enterprise teams. It provides a clearly defined, best‐practice model that allows us to operate at the right speed, depth, and scale for each unique situation, giving you the reassurance that it can be tailored to your specific needs.

In this book, I'll guide you through each stage of the ARISE methodology, sharing insights and practical strategies you can apply to your go‐to‐market efforts. Whether you're launching a new product, entering a new market, or looking to optimize your current GTM approach, the principles of ARISE can help you achieve sustainable growth and competitive advantage.

The primary goal of your go‐to‐market strategy is to enhance customer experience by offering superior products and/or competitive pricing and creating a clear plan to penetrate a defined market or target audience. Your initial focus should involve defining the target market, determining if prospective customers exist within that base, and deciding on a value proposition.

This is where the ARISE GTM Methodology®, Strategy, or Framework comes into play. It's a playbook that delivers a revenue operations outcome, designed on strong product marketing principles and optimization frameworks, coupled with buyer enablement and customer onboarding. However, it wasn't designed with revenue operations in mind.

In truth, I think most GTM sucks because there's no widely accepted definitive explanation of what it means; for example, salespeople will call selling go‐to‐market, and marketers will consider marketing part of the go‐to‐market motion. Yet product marketing is a different skill set to today's marketers; they are multi‐disciplinarians who unite the product with the rest of the organization. On this basis, I decided that the current understanding of GTM was broken and ARISE was born.

Why Now

Between 2010 and 2022, the VC and PE taps were wide open, and cloud‐based technology firms were raising round after round after round. Then came COVID, and the money fizzled out. I was already ahead of the curve, calling out poor fiscal management when your strategy was “I'll raise (bail myself out) when I had burned too much cash,” but hey, it seems when the money's in, the wits are out.

I have been calling out the ABM, ABX, and AB Everything Acronym merchants as “just good marketing,” publicly saying on LinkedIn that they should accept account‐based marketing or a target account strategy as the proper way to do business.

It's widely acknowledged that I have been asking why, if your GTM planning was so accurate, you couldn't name the few hundred or thousand good‐fit prospects or target accounts in any geographical location your product was fit for. If you could, the tools are there to only target and focus on them, which would reduce wastage in marketing spend, increase brand awareness within the niche or market segment, and improve win rates, customer acquisition costs (CAC), and payback. Win‐win.

We've been calling for better alignment between marketing and sales for as long as I can remember, and the same with personalization at scale, again forever. But in the search for evermore differentiation and category creation, people added more acronyms, bringing more complexity to something that should simply be part of solid business governance. Believe me, there's nothing hard with alignment except ego, lack of discipline, or a poor company culture.

Did I say Revenue Operations?

As the owner of a strategic B2B go‐to‐market consultancy, I find it quite rewarding to see the rise of Revenue Operations, but come on, should it really be such a big deal? No slight meant to revops people, but tech, process, and alignment should be business 101. It should be the norm, not the exception and as I said previously, something straight out of the gates, not a maturity model.

You have to do things properly for anything to work well. Anything less isn't best practice, and that's when you open yourself up to leaky funnels, shitty customers that churn and hurt your internal culture, the payback on your cost of acquisition goes through the roof, and the business starts creaking under the realization that status quo just isn't good enough.

But I digress. There will be plenty of time to discuss these models later in the book, and I was just telling you that I was ahead of the curve.

I formally designed the ARISE GTM Methodology® in 2019 during COVID‐19. The driver was the constant expansion and contraction of my agency, ARISE GTM®, and the fact that whenever I scaled the business, it often coincided with an increase in churn, and I hated that. It got me thinking about how I manage and retain long 3, 4, or 5‐year relationships with myself and the freelancers and offshore teams, and yet every time I try to build my local or in‐house team, we'd see clients churn out in six months, and I’m too competitive and care too much about my client’s experience and my business reputation to allow that to happen.

So when COVID came along, I had to decide what type of business I wanted, look at the staff, and decide if they could get me there, and they couldn't, so no furlough, I went back to scratch. I kept four clients, took a bounce‐back loan, and decided to rebuild from the ground up. During COVID, I took everything out of my head, put it down on paper, and took 14 certifications: MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, Product Marketing Leadership, a raft of HubSpot Certifications, Positioning Masters, Storytelling Masters, and more. I was all in, and I wasn't going to fail again (but I did, and that story comes later).

That was the first time I had put the process into a playbook. It was nothing fancy, and if I'm honest, I still have version one sitting in a project template in my Basecamp 2 project management tool. I know, how old, but I'm now tooled out. We have ClickUp, which I still don't know how to use, and I'm looking at PSOhub because it's been designed and built to work with HubSpot, our core Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Platform. Tools form a key part of this book, and HubSpot sits at the center of the ARISE GTM Framework®. As a HubSpot consultancy partner, I designed it to be delivered and executed on the platform.

PART IIntroduction to Go‐to‐Market Strategy

“70% of GTM strategies fail as a result of misalignment between teams.”

—Gartner

1The Importance of a Robust Go‐to‐Market Strategy

What Is a Go‐to‐Market Strategy?

Before starting this first chapter, I want to define what a go‐to‐market (GTM) strategy is so that readers of this book understand my perspective. I see GTM as a holistic thing, not the domain of one single team or department but that of the whole, the entire organization. It's reflected in the business culture and philosophy, processes, technology, leadership, grassroots teams, finance, operations, and social policies. Ultimately, I think your customer experiences, or views, your go‐to‐market as your brand.

According to Gartner, an American technological research and consulting firm, “A GTM strategy is a plan that details how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy its product or service and gain a competitive advantage. A GTM strategy includes tactics related to pricing, sales and channels, the buying journey, new product or service launches, product rebranding, or product introduction to a new market.”

In short, it's a strategic plan for launching a product or service. Let's unpack that for a minute. The easiest way I can explain go‐to‐market strategy is that it is how a company executes its business strategy over a given period. This period is typically 12 months, although you can have a 2, 5, or 10‐year strategy. For the most part, anything longer than two years is more of a plan or a hypothetical guess, as you simply cannot forecast or predict market forces (Figure 1.1).

This diagram lays it out as clearly as I can envision it. The business strategy sits at the top of the chart. Your operations, finance, and product teams are on the next layer, and then your customer‐facing teams and product user data sit on the lower level.

For Startups

For early‐stage startups, potentially pre‐ or just post‐product‐market fit (PMF), I expect to see the business strategy, product team, sales team, and at least a single marketing resource. However, I am a massive fan of selling your product or service first and marketing it second, as it's more straightforward to pay for marketing from a revenue‐generating position than to burn through your runway marketing something to an audience you might not yet fully understand (or an audience that might not understand you).

In my experience, many startups do not have a proper finance function. Early‐stage founders typically adopt a founder‐led sales approach with maybe a few sales or business development reps (BDRs) until they are comfortable they have fit and forego everything else.

Figure 1.1 Company structure for executing the business plan.

A strong GTM play often feels like a maturity model in the business's developmental process for early‐stage founders, as is a RevOps model, when, in fact, building with the end in mind is the ideal approach. There are many tools out there that can help you do this. With my expertise in HubSpot and our HubSpot CRM‐enhancing GTM engine, we can remove the barriers to best practices and see more growth, data‐driven decision‐making, and tactical analysis with the AI.

Any founder launching a business, and it doesn't matter if it's a tech platform or a service business, should follow the three best practice principles and answer them clearly:

How do I convey the value of my product or service to my end user or customer?

How do I enable my buyer to buy from me?

How do I plan to onboard, retain, and expand my buyer?

This oversimplifies the GTM process, which must be redundant to digest this concept. I want to forego buzzwords and industry jargon where possible and lay out clear, easy‐to‐follow pathways and guidelines as we examine each stage in‐depth to get your GTM firing on all cylinders.

How do I convey the value of my product or service to my end user or customer?

Value proposition

Positioning

Messaging

Storytelling

Customer feedback

Win/loss research

Competitive analysis

SWOT

Porters Five Forces

Jobs‐to‐be‐done

Buyer/user persona research and interviews

How do I enable my buyer to buy from me?

Jobs‐to‐be‐done

Buyer/user persona research and interviews

Win/loss interviews

Competitive analysis

Sales enablement (training, assets, technology)

Pricing strategy

Buyer funnel stages and tactics

Marketing tactics (content, events, ads, social media)

How do I plan to onboard, retain, and expand my buyer?

Customer onboarding framework

Customer journey map

Automated email sequences

Customer portals

Renewals playbooks

Usage‐based upsell/cross‐sell

What new features to ship or services to develop?

How do I measure it all?

As you can see, the exercises you perform often impact more than one stage of the GTM strategy cycle. Therefore, they must be implemented and executed repeatedly to ensure your GTM continues to align with your buyer and user audience.

In this book, we will discover the ARISE methodology, my trademark approach to GTM strategy. While it's primarily focused on B2B product companies, we have successfully used it on service companies, too. One example is a small two‐person company, The Reinhart Group, run by a couple, Christina de Bueklaar and Emmanuel Stiels, where we used it to rebrand and productize their services for a Health and Wellbeing business and private health practice. I dive into this in more detail in the case studies section of the book.

For Scaling Teams

Post PMF, I expect the company to have a proper finance function, either full‐time or fractional. The product team should be sharing user data into your CRM, and from my HubSpot expertise, you can connect your product to HubSpot through APIs or, as I prefer, use Mixpanel and HubSpot as a combination.

This is especially useful for product‐led (PLG) companies, where user segmentation and CRM segmentation are crucial to understanding user segment drivers and translating that into marketing and sales tactics. This is a slimline tech stack, as you should use the HubSpot Customer Platform, including marketing and content hubs, sales hubs, and service hubs, simply because the single‐code platform makes it easy to scale. Their embedded app cards further simpify life by dropping other third‐party apps directly into your user interface, giving the ability to experience your third‐party apps directly inside HubSpot, which changes the game.

Where HubSpot drops off in reporting, use Databox. Pete Caputa, the CEO, is an ex‐HubSpot employee, so he knows how and why the two tools connect to enhance financial reporting right out of the CRM while keeping HubSpot at the heart of the business. It also focuses deeply on other areas of reporting so everyone across the organization benefits from the product.

Later in this book, I'll share how you bring product teams into HubSpot so that a business's revenue focus becomes a shared experience. You can make smarter decisions by reporting how feature releases impact usage through user data and correlating that with sales and marketing data. This also helps identify where significant financial impact or lack thereof comes from with feature releases. But this is how I see the world; you can disagree.

For the Enterprise

My experience with enterprise companies is in two places: strategic account‐based marketing (ABM) and when they spin out a new product including moving from sales‐led to product‐led as a business model. The use case for the ARISE Go‐To‐Market Methodology® has been proven in both situations.

When the largest companies use ABM, it is almost always to outcompete their rivals in landing key accounts, so the heavy research‐based element of ARISE plays a significant role in enabling this as it focuses on deep understanding of target accounts and competitive landscape.

When enterprise teams spin out a new product, you might think this should be easy due to their current size and longevity in the tech space. However, often, you hire people with different skills for enterprise business management than you would for a startup, so the skill set is ill‐fitted. This is where ARISE comes into its own, and to be clear, my simplified diagram wouldn't fit most enterprise companies as they have large product marketing teams, enablement teams, multi‐regional sales teams, and more, but the premise remains the same without the nuance and granularity of team specialisms.

As we traverse the book, I'll discuss innovation and account‐based marketing and how the two complement each other.

Why GTM Strategies Are Crucial for Business Success

As a product and business owner, I can't stress enough how crucial it is to have a robust go‐to‐market strategy. I've seen firsthand how it ensures a successful product launch by providing a clear road map and helping to avoid common pitfalls. It's amazing how a well‐crafted GTM strategy can streamline your processes, reducing time to market and giving you a competitive edge. However, it's just as amazing to see how many people shortcut and discount a thorough GTM approach. The number of times I've been told by prospects that they don't want to spend months on research, they want to get going, like there's some magic bullet we consultants and agencies have that immediately solves their leaky or underperforming funnel. Get real; months, maybe not, but none at all, that’s sheer stupidity.

I've learned that it's not just about getting the product out there quickly; it's about doing it smartly to minimize financial risks and delay achieving PMF. You can address potential challenges proactively and use your marketing budgets more effectively by identifying those challenges early. And to do that, you have to keep speaking to people, and that starts at day one.

One of the main aspects I love most about a solid GTM strategy is how it enhances the customer experience. When we truly understand our target audience and their needs, we can tailor our product, marketing, and sales efforts to meet those needs, building customer loyalty and driving repeat business. I've seen how this approach significantly improves your customer acquisition effectiveness, helping identify the most impactful channels and messages to reach your audience. By understanding this, it makes the creative process far easier as you know the best mediums, assets, and channels to engage with.

From experience, a comprehensive GTM strategy is invaluable for market penetration and growth. It gives you a clear plan for entering or expanding within existing markets, outlining the steps you need to take to gain market share and achieve sustainable growth. It's incredibly effective in aligning your organizational efforts, ensuring that all departments, from product development to customer support, work toward the same goals.

Perhaps most importantly, I've witnessed how a robust GTM strategy can provide a real competitive advantage. By thoroughly analyzing the competitive landscape and positioning your product effectively, you can differentiate yourself and attract customers in even the most crowded markets. It helps you raise awareness about your product among your target audience, generating interest and demand, which is crucial for success.

Ultimately, I've come to understand that a GTM strategy isn't just about the initial launch; it's about ensuring long‐term success. By continuously monitoring market trends, customer feedback, and competitive actions, we can make informed decisions and adapt our strategies as needed. In my role, I've repeatedly seen how a well‐executed GTM strategy is essential for minimizing risks, enhancing customer experience, and achieving sustainable growth. This book's road map guides you toward your goals and contributes significantly to your overall business success.

Common Pitfalls in Your GTM Strategy

During my career, I've encountered numerous pitfalls and challenges in developing go‐to‐market (GTM) strategies. One of the most common issues is failing to define a clear target market, which leads to ineffective marketing efforts and wasted resources. The ARISE GTM framework has been instrumental in addressing this. During the Research stage, we conduct thorough market analyses and gather customer insights, which helps us clearly define the target market and understand customer needs.

Another challenge I've faced is insufficient market research, which can result in misaligned product offerings and ineffective strategies. The ARISE framework emphasizes comprehensive market analysis in the Research stage, including competitive intelligence and market trends, ensuring our strategies are evidence based. Over‐reliance on a single marketing channel is another pitfall; ARISE's Ideate and Strategise stages encourage us to explore multiple channels and develop a multi‐faceted approach to reach our audience effectively. This isn't about random experimentation, it's driven by your customer research and understanding their habits and favorite channels for collecting information about products and services like yours.

I've also seen how a lack of data‐driven decision‐making can lead to ineffective strategies and missed opportunities. ARISE ensures data collection and analysis, particularly in the Research and Assess stages, so solid data backs all our decisions. Ensuring product‐market fit is crucial, and the Assess and Research stages focus on understanding market needs and validating this fit before moving forward.

Poor alignment across teams can lead to inconsistent messaging and ineffective execution. The ARISE framework promotes a holistic approach, ensuring all teams are aligned from research to execution. The fact that we've been calling for closer alignment of marketing and sales since the turn of the century beguiles me, allowing a whole industry to moan about best practice and then do little in the way of actually making that happen. Maybe the end of the latest bubble and growth at all costs mindset will see a return to proper business administration, or maybe not; maybe the people currently running businesses will delay and delay, harking back to the glory days of raising your way out of trouble rather than focusing on good business governance. But I digress.

Insufficient risk assessment is another common issue, and the Assess stage includes thorough risk analysis, helping you anticipate and plan for potential challenges. By deep diving into current underperformance and identifying gaps in your data, you move toward a more streamlined approach to customer acquisition, using data‐driven triggers with reporting that tells stories teams can understand and execute against.

Ineffective positioning and messaging can confuse customers and hinder product or service adoption. The Ideate and Strategise stages focus on developing clear, compelling positioning and messaging based on first‐party data, market insights, and competitive analysis. Additionally, inadequate sales enablement can lead to poor conversion rates. Still, the Execute stage includes comprehensive sales enablement, providing your sales teams with the right tools and knowledge they need based on the competitive and customer research previously undertaken.

Finally, neglecting customer retention often leads to high churn rates and reduced lifetime value. The ARISE framework includes customer onboarding and retention strategies, ensuring long‐term success beyond the initial launch. By addressing these common pitfalls, the ARISE GTM framework provides a comprehensive approach to developing and executing effective go‐to‐market strategies that significantly improve your chances of success in Software‐as‐a‐Service (SaaS), Financial Technology (Fintech), and the services industries.

What Does a Good GTM Outline Look Like?

To execute a solid GTM strategy, you must optimize eight pillars. Neglect any one of them, and you will severely decrease your ability to succeed in the long term. Nearly every founder, business leader, or GTM leader can tell you a story about how they are constantly pressured to cut a corner for speed or budget, which causes frustration and often undermines their ability to deliver results in a realistic and timely manner. Shortcuts are for suckers, as they almost always cost you more than you think in the end.