Go-to-Market Strategy Template



Whether you’re innovating within an existing industry or charting an entirely new entrepreneurial path, a well-developed go-to-market strategy helps to ensure success.

Fortunately, you don’t have to start from scratch—and using a go-to-market (GTM) strategy template is one way to help make sure your strategy covers all the necessary bases. 

But what are the key components of go-to-market strategy, and how do you create a go-to-market strategy template that maximizes your chances of success? Keep reading for these answers and more, as we explore how to create a repeatable strategy template for your business’s GTM needs.

What Are the 2 Types of Go-to-Market Strategies?

A go-to-market strategy for a new product or service can be broadly categorized as either sales-led or product-led:

With a sales-led GTM strategy, the sales team leads the charge—engaging with prospects, gauging their interest, and developing quality leads for your product or service. While this might sound like cold-calling, it’s more sophisticated than that, as the target market should be well-defined before beginning outreach.

A product-led GTM strategy, on the other hand, leads with the product or service itself. Before they’re contacted by company reps, prospects have the opportunity to explore the offering for themselves. This type of GTM strategy is especially effective for software companies, who can offer a free product trial in order to entice prospects and let them discover the value for themselves.

From a more granular perspective, we could identify 7 specific types of go-to-market strategies: inbound, outbound, product-led, channel-specific, ecosystem-based, community-led, and event-led. For the most part, each of these strategy types is self-explanatory—but if you’d like to read more about them and how they can be leveraged within a go-to-market strategy framework, we recommend checking out our Ultimate Go-to-Market Guide (or watching this brief YouTube video).

What Are the 7 Components of a Go-to-Market Strategy?

No matter the specific industry or objective(s), an effective go-to-market strategy should consist of, at minimum, 7 key components:
  • A well-defined ideal buyer/persona, so you can align your strategies with buyers’ priorities and preferences as they seek out solutions.
  • Fine-tuned brand messaging that engages prospects, communicates value, and builds trust.
  • An understanding of where your customers are, so you can determine the most effective marketing channels to leverage.
  • Pricing and payment models that are appropriate for the products and services being offered, and reasonable when compared with the competition.
  • Innovative sales strategies that are in tune with your ideal customers’ buying journeys, patterns, and behaviors.
  • A set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor success over time.
  • A plan for producing compelling content and product messaging that tells the story of how your brand—and its products and services—can solve prospects’ challenges.
In a moment, we’ll get into a step-by-step GTM strategy framework you can use as a template to develop and implement your own strategies, including the 7 key elements of a go-to-market strategy. But first let’s (briefly) explore why an effective—and intentional—go-to-market strategy is so important…

Why Do I Need a Go-to-Market Strategy Template?

Creating a repeatable go-to-market strategy template helps reduce the time it takes to develop—and implement—a winning (and cost-effective) strategy. Ultimately, using a strategy template makes it easier to get into the nitty-gritty details of developing your specific strategy or strategies. This can look like:
  • Understanding your prospects’ expectations, needs, and priorities.
  • Connecting with the right people at the right time to build interest and drive conversions.
  • Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales and marketing campaigns.
  • Increasing brand recognition among one or more target audiences.
  • Reducing costs by identifying the most impactful and cost-effective sales and marketing channels to use.
  • Improving customer relationships by demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of your buyers and their buying process.
Next, let’s look at how to create a GTM strategy template your business can use to develop a consistent and repeatable process for successfully taking a new product or service offering to market.

How Do You Create a Go-to-Market Strategy Template?

Here’s a repeatable, 7-step GTM strategy template you can adapt to your own strategies:
  • Step 1: Defining the Ideal Buyer/Persona
  • Step 2: Fine-Tuning Your Brand’s Messaging
  • Step 3: Determining the Right Marketing Channels to Use
  • Step 4: Considering Pricing and Payment Models
  • Step 5: Developing Effective Sales Strategies
  • Step 6: Setting—and Monitoring—Success Criteria
  • Step 7: Producing Content that Engages Prospects and Decision-Makers

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Let’s look at each of these go-to-market components in a little more detail, including the role each plays within a comprehensive go-to-market plan.

Step 1: Defining the Ideal Buyer/Persona

Not every prospect or customer is going to be a perfect fit for any given product or service. It follows, then, that the better you understand your ideal customer or decision-maker profile, the better you’ll be able to reach them with the right message at the right time. 

There are several different ways to break down your audience into subsets—for example, you might consider factors like industry, ARR, employee count, and persona. As you develop your GTM strategy, you can further refine your ideal customer profile by either narrowing or broadening your focus. It’s similar to Goldilocks and the three bears: you won’t want your ideal customer profile to be too narrow or too broad, as you’ll encounter challenges. Instead, you want the specificity to be dialed in just right. Using a platform like Aptivio reduces the guesswork, enabling you to discover real buyer intent and develop strategies accordingly.

Step 2: Fine-Tuning Your Brand’s Messaging

Once you’ve created one or more specific customer/buyer profiles for your GTM strategy, you can start fine-tuning your brand’s messaging in order to align well with what each subset of your audience will find valuable and compelling. This doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch with your messaging—it simply means tailoring your value propositions and language to each audience (even if the product/service offering is consistent across multiple audience subsets). 

As your company—and each customer or buyer profile—evolves, so too should your messaging. Again, you won’t need to rewrite everything—just make sure it remains accurate, relevant, and compelling. This is especially important for companies leveraging account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, which benefit from highly-customized outreach. With Aptivio, you can develop personalized campaigns that improve the odds of conversion.

Step 3: Determining the Right Marketing Channels to Use

All too often, companies’ marketing efforts fail due to improper alignment of their products and services with their target market’s biggest concerns. And without sufficient customer data, it can feel like guesswork—and the costs can really rack up. This underscores the importance of not only developing effective messaging but reaching the right customers at the right time, as well. 

Tailoring your messaging to specific audiences through specific channels is the best way to connect with customers and convince them of the advantages of the product or service you’re offering them. That’s where platforms like Aptivio can make marketers’ lives so much easier. With our sophisticated, AI-powered tools, you can target, personalize, and convert much more effectively—and increase your chances of success.

Step 4: Considering Pricing and Payment Models

The last thing most companies want is to expend time, energy, and money developing products and services that offer compelling value, only to have seemingly-interested customers back out when the topic of pricing comes up. Price your offerings too low, and prospects might think your solution is unsophisticated or otherwise not sufficient for their needs. At the other end of the spectrum, if the pricing is too high, you might drive prospects into the arms of your competitors—who may be offering similar products/services at a more reasonable price. 

Of course, you shouldn’t just be making up prices out of thin air—and it’s not always about maximizing revenue. This is where specific go-to-market objectives come into play. For some companies, value-based or competitive pricing will make the most sense, while others might find the best results with penetration pricing or even a freemium model.

While several businesses may balk at the freemium model, it’s a highly-effective option within many industries. Many software companies, for example, will price their offerings somewhat lower than what their true value may be, because the objective is more about getting prospects to try out their solution, knowing that other revenue drivers can pick up the slack. So keep this in mind when setting prices—and keep a close eye on the competition. That way, you can ensure that you don’t alienate otherwise highly-qualified prospects.

Step 5: Developing Effective Sales Strategies

Similar to how marketers should aim to reach the right prospects with the right messages, the same is true on the sales side of the business. Not every prospect or decision-maker is going to be moved by the same sales strategies, so sales strategies should be tailored to each potential audience. After all, what really moves the needle with most decision-makers is a compelling and competitive value proposition. If the value is clear and aligned with the right audience, the exact price becomes less important to them. 

There are countless sales strategies to consider, which can become overwhelming without the right insights and tools—tools like Aptivio. How can Aptivio help you develop the best sales strategies for your product or service and its target market? By using AI to enhance and even automate certain elements of your sales strategy. With Aptivio’s powerful platform, you can:
  • Identify the right decision-makers and influencers to target with your strategies.
  • Leverage robust account intelligence (150+ buyer/intent signals) to develop a 360-degree customer view.
  • Create and deploy automated outreach campaigns, so the sales team can spend more time conversing and converting, and less time prospecting or cold calling.
  • Integrate the platform’s AI-driven selling tools with your existing sales tech (e.g., Salesforce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, HubSpot, etc.).

Step 6: Setting—and Monitoring—Success Criteria

Your ability to gauge a campaign’s progress over time is key to creating consistently effective GTM strategies. After all, you can’t improve what you’re not measuring. While not every GTM strategy is going to have identical success criteria, there are certain data points that are largely universal, including:
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • Monthly, Annual, and Net Recurring Revenue (MRR, ARR, NRR)
  • Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
  • Churn Rates
  • Organic Search Traffic
While many of these KPIs are well understood, one of the biggest challenges many organizations face when monitoring their GTM strategies’ results relates to marketing attribution—understanding the key touch points and actions that have the greatest impact on conversions, in other words. 

In addition to enabling contact level signal-based targeting, Aptivio’s marketing solution was designed to provide the type of actionable insights required for marketing attribution. These tools help companies to better understand anything from social media impact and digital advertising clicks to how often prospects are visiting your website pages, engaging with your email marketing campaigns, and beyond.
As is the case with GTM strategy templates, you can also find presentation templates online. For example, beautiful.ai, Pitch, and PandaDoc each have go-to-market presentation templates available for download, which means you can hit the ground running.

Step 7: Producing Content that Engages Prospects and Decision-Makers

No matter what industry you’re in, it’s safe to assume that your ideal customers are intelligent and complex—typically not the type to make an immediate purchase. So while a certain outbound marketing campaign (or outreach from sales) might engage them, that’s just the beginning of most buyers’ journeys. They’ll want to do their own research, and they’ll likely compare your offerings to those of your key competitors. 

An effective GTM strategy includes a plan for helping to develop prospects’ interest and nudge them toward choosing your solution. For many companies, content marketing provides one way to continue the conversation and develop how prospects view your solution (and brand). Consider producing content that is tailored to different buyer personas (or, for a B2B company, different decision-makers within an organization). This approach not only ensures that you’re aligning the right value propositions with the right audience—it also enables you to showcase how well you understand your customers and their priorities, which builds trust.

Modernize Your GTM Playbook—with Aptivio

Hopefully, we’ve provided you with the insights you need to get started with developing your own go-to-market strategy framework or template. To learn more about the difference Aptivio can make for your business, consider reading a go-to-market strategy example on our case studies page—or booking a demo to see the platform in action.
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