Great products start with angry customers.
And those customers don’t necessarily have to be your own customers — all it takes is a little bit of digging on the top software review platforms like Gartner Peer Insights, Capterra, and Software Reviews to pull valuable insights that, when implemented into your own product, can make it better.
It does take a lot of research and feedback to strategically imbibe data that you collected from customers, internal stakeholders, and review platforms into your go-to-market strategy. So, we broke down the entire process into digestible pieces to help make your work more streamlined.
1. Discovering Pain Points
Sales Team Insights
Engaging with your sales teams through regular meetings, workshops, and one-on-one sessions can help you quickly gather insights into customer pain points. You should also establish an open line of communication and create a safe space for sales reps to share their experiences and challenges.
But for the sales teams to dig out pain points from customers easily, you will have to train sales reps on effective questioning techniques and active listening to uncover underlying pain points during customer interactions.
Once you think the sales teams are well equipped to understand customer pain points and start delivering them to you, look for trends and prioritize them.
Support and Demand Generation Teams
Fostering collaboration between support, demand gen, and sales teams will help you gain a holistic understanding of customer pain points. You can schedule regular cross-functional meetings, leverage support ticket data and even go through customer feedback to identify recurring pain points.
Demand generation teams’ active engagement with customers through surveys, webinars, and user forums can also aid you in gathering direct feedback.
Direct Customer Interaction
Another way to collect feedback would be to directly contact the customers and conduct in-depth customer interviews and surveys to gain first-hand insights into their pain points, challenges, and unmet needs. Using open-ended questions to encourage customers to share their experiences and frustrations would be an ideal start to this activity.
You can also set up your calendar to regularly meet with your customers or your customer advisory board to check in on them after every quarter or after major releases.
While we will discuss how to implement their feedback into your GTM plan further down in this blog, creating a customer feedback loop at this stage where customers are regularly updated on how their feedback is incorporated into product development efforts would help build trust.
2. Listening with Empathy
While we have already mentioned how your customer teams must be active listeners, it is equally essential for them to provide empathetic responses.
Encourage your team members to validate customer concerns and emotions during interactions, demonstrating genuine empathy and understanding. Also, avoid dismissing or downplaying customer issues, even trivial ones.
Help them practice reflective listening techniques, such as paraphrasing and summarizing, to ensure that customer pain points are accurately understood and addressed. It isn’t just about you getting the picture of the customer’s problem; repeating back will show the customer that you are actively listening.
3. Creating the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
At this stage, you can start creating detailed customer personas based on pain points, demographics, psychographics, and behavioral attributes.
You can also develop customer journey maps to visualize the end-to-end customer experience and identify pain points at each touchpoint. Start mapping out key interactions, pain points, and opportunities for improvement throughout the customer lifecycle.
Once you’ve created customer journeys for different personas, share them with cross-functional teams, including marketing, sales, product management, and customer support, to ensure alignment and consistency in addressing customer needs.
4. Prioritizing Pain Points
Aligning Priorities
Establishing a cross-functional task force can help you with quickly prioritizing and aligning strategic initiatives.
Conduct regular meetings or workshops to review and prioritize identified pain points based on their impact on customer satisfaction, revenue potential, and strategic alignment with business goals.
Using a collaborative decision-making framework, such as a prioritization matrix or weighted scoring model can help you objectively evaluate and rank pain points according to predefined criteria.
Joint Customer Calls
Organize joint customer calls or meetings with representatives from product management, marketing, sales, and customer support to gather feedback and validate pain points.
Encouraging dialogue between the teams is also important, allowing them to share their perspectives and insights on customer pain points.
After each call, assign ownership and accountability for follow-up tasks to relevant team members.
Updating Product Roadmap
Use the prioritized pain points to inform product roadmap decisions and prioritize feature development efforts. The best way to start updating the roadmap would be to align product investments with areas that address the most pressing customer needs and pain points.
However, you must provide rationale and context for prioritization decisions to foster understanding.
Ensure you communicate product roadmap updates transparently and proactively to internal stakeholders, customers, and partners.
5. Drafting GTM Messaging
Starting with Customer Problems
Begin your messaging by clearly identifying and articulating the specific problems or challenges your target customers face. Use market research, customer feedback, and persona insights to inform your messaging.
You would also have to frame the problem statement in a way that resonates with your target audience, highlighting the pain points and implications of not addressing them. Use language and examples that evoke empathy and understanding.
Position your product or solution as the answer to these problems, emphasizing its unique value proposition and how it addresses the pain points identified. Brand Positioning is about focusing on the outcomes and benefits customers can expect from using your product.
Here are a couple of sample pain points and messaging to help you understand better:
Pain Point: Slow and inefficient project management processes.
Messaging: Accelerate project success with our agile project management software. Streamline collaboration, boost productivity, and deliver results faster than ever before.
Pain Point: Lack of data security and compliance.
Messaging: Secure your data with our robust security software. Protect against threats, ensure compliance with regulations, and safeguard your business from cyberattacks.
Benefit-Oriented Messaging
Craft messaging that focuses on the tangible benefits and outcomes that customers will experience from using your product or solution. Highlight your products’ value proposition and competitive advantages that set your offering apart from your competitors.
Using customer testimonials, case studies, and success stories showcasing concrete examples of how your solution has helped others will help you build credibility and trust. Talk to your early customers for quotes, testimonials, and positive reviews, and use them appropriately in your messaging.
Tailoring your messaging to resonate with different segments of your target audience and emphasizing the most relevant benefits will make your message compelling to each group. Remember to personalize messaging based on factors such as industry, role, and pain point severity.
Clear Competitor Positioning
Conduct a competitive analysis to identify key competitors and understand their strengths, weaknesses, and messaging strategies — identify areas where your product excels and differentiate your offering accordingly.
Position your product relative to competitors in a way that highlights its unique value proposition and advantages. Emphasize areas of differentiation, such as features, performance, pricing, or customer support.
Your positioning claims should also be backed up by evidence and rationale.
Beta Testing Messaging
Develop a beta testing program to gather feedback on your GTM messaging from a select group of target customers. Invite participants to review and provide input on messaging drafts, focusing on clarity, relevance, and effectiveness.
Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative feedback methods, such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups, to gather insights into how well the messaging resonates with the target audience.
Feedback from beta testers can also be incorporated into iterative revisions of your messaging, refining language, tone, and positioning based on their input. Continuously test and refine messaging until it effectively communicates your value proposition and resonates with customers.
6. Taking the Product to Market
Social Media
Develop a content calendar that includes a mix of promotional content, educational content, and customer testimonials. Tailor your messaging to each platform and engage with your audience by responding to comments and messages.
Leverage social media advertising to amplify your reach and target specific customer segments. Use A/B testing to optimize your ad campaigns for maximum effectiveness.
Bringing in satisfied customers to share their experiences on social media can help communicate the value you deliver to your prospects. You can also consider running social media contests or giveaways to generate buzz around your product launch.
Events
Host webinars to educate your audience about your product or industry trends. Webinars can be used as an opportunity to showcase your expertise and engage with potential customers.
Participate in industry events, tradeshows and conferences to network with influencers, media, and potential customers. Consider sponsoring relevant events to increase visibility and reach.
Organize product launch events to create excitement and generate buzz around your product. Provide hands-on demonstrations and offer exclusive deals or discounts to attendees. These events need not also be physical.
Collaborating with third-party media or software analyst platforms on virtual or physical events can also be a great opportunity to showcase your product to a large group of interested users. Look for sponsored events or research reports hosted by such platforms.
Develop a segmented email marketing strategy to target different customer segments with personalized messaging and use email automation to send targeted emails based on customer behavior and preferences.
Create newsletters to keep customers informed about product updates, industry news, and relevant content. Use newsletters as an opportunity to drive traffic to your website or landing pages.
Use lead nurture emails to guide prospects through the sales funnel. Provide valuable content and resources that address their pain points and encourage them to take the next step in the buying process.
Website
Create dedicated landing pages for your product or specific features, using compelling visuals, clear messaging, and strong calls-to-action to encourage visitors to learn more or request a demo.
Optimize your website for search engines to increase visibility and attract organic traffic. Use targeted keywords in your content and meta tags to improve your ranking in search results.
You will also have to regularly update your website with fresh content, such as blog posts, case studies, and customer testimonials to make sure you are on top of the SERPs. A dedicated focus of SEO can yield magical results. Ideally, your focus on organic search performance should begin months before a product launch in order to build interest and create a pipeline of potential customers.
Comms
Develop a PR strategy to generate media coverage for your product launch.
Identify key media outlets and industry analysts that cover your industry — build relationships with journalists and influencers to secure coverage and endorsements.
Regularly monitor media coverage and track mentions of your product and respond to any feedback or inquiries promptly and professionally.
Digital Ads/SEM
Update existing digital ad copies to reflect new product updates or features and use dynamic ad content to personalize your messaging based on user behavior or preferences.
Create new digital ad campaigns with targeted keywords to promote your product launch.
Monitor ad performance metrics, such as click-through rates and conversion rates, to optimize your campaigns for maximum ROI.
7. Post Launch
Measure Results vs Goals
Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your product launch. Track metrics such as sales revenue, customer acquisition cost, and customer satisfaction.
Compare your actual results to the goals and targets set during the planning phase. This can help you identify any discrepancies and analyze the root causes.
Use data analytics tools to gain insights into customer behavior and market trends. Use this information to refine your GTM strategy for future product launches.
Identify Areas for Future Improvement
Conduct a post-launch review to evaluate the effectiveness of your GTM strategy and identify any areas that could be improved or optimized for future launches.
Gather feedback from customers, sales teams, and other stakeholders to gain insights into their experiences and perceptions. Use this feedback to identify areas for improvement.
Continuously monitor market trends and competitor activities to stay ahead of the curve. Be prepared to adapt your GTM strategy based on changing market conditions and customer needs.
Celebrate Your Success
Recognize and celebrate the achievements of your GTM team. Acknowledge their hard work and dedication in bringing the product to market.
Share success stories internally to motivate and inspire team members. Use success metrics to demonstrate the impact of your GTM strategy on business outcomes.
Use post-launch celebrations as an opportunity to reflect on lessons learned and identify opportunities for future growth.
While creating a GTM strategy is already a heavy lift, it is crucial that tasks, projects and goals are tracked and every stakeholder is always aware of the progress status. This can be challenging, especially considering the number of teams and individuals associated with product launches and GTM. Project Management tools can be useful in such scenarios. They help you stay organized throughout your planning and execution process and track activities effectively so nothing is missed. Here’s our review of Asana & Trello - two very commonly used project management tools you can use to track all your tasks and promote collaboration among teams.
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