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Plan Your 2024 GTM Strategy on One Slide
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This week’s research note includes:
GTM Research: Plan Your 2024 Strategy in One Slide
GTM Certified Agency Spotlight: Inverta
Better Together: Join us in NYC
GTM Events: Upcoming events around the country
GTM Research: Plan Your 2025 Strategy in One Slide
A weekly deep-dive into new GTM research and insights
As 2025 approaches, many companies are deep into the planning process, trying to align teams and ensure that every department is working towards the same business goals.
The challenge, however, is simplifying this strategy into a concise, integrated, actionable format.
In the past, GTM strategies were often synonymous with sales or marketing plans. But today, GTM is a holistic, company-wide effort. Teams across sales, customer success, product, RevOps, finance, and even sales enablement need to have aligned efforts.
Last week Bryan and Sangram did a Go-to-Market Made Simple LIVE on the subject (watch it here or click the screenshot below).
The Three Core Challenges
Product Fit and Market Alignment: When launching a new product, you must ensure it aligns with your ICP. If your team isn't asking, "Does this product serve our key personas?" or "Are we targeting the right markets?" before launch, you're setting yourself up for misalignment.
Expansion into New Personas or Markets: Every new persona or market requires a different go-to-market motion. For example, one audience may live on LinkedIn, while another doesn’t want direct outreach. Without clear insight into approaching different segments, you risk spreading your resources too thin.
Investment Priorities: If your investment strategy isn’t clear, your GTM efforts will stall. You need a clear roadmap of where to allocate resources, which areas to double down on, and which ones to abandon. Without this clarity, decision-making becomes slow and confusing, leading to stagnation.
The Power of a One-Slide GTM Strategy
So how can you solve these problems?
We’ve developed an eight-question framework that is the backbone of the Go-To-Market Operating System (OS).
Here’s a snapshot of the eight questions that can guide your GTM strategy:
Where can we grow the most?
Which products create the highest value?
What is our clear point of view?
Which go-to-market motions will help us achieve our revenue goals?
How do we optimize onboarding for time-to-value?
How do we drive expansion and unlock customer growth?
What metrics matter most to understand the health of our business?
How do we align leadership and management around these goals?
Remember to use these eight questions to include ALL your GTM teams in the planning process. This is no longer just a sales and marketing activity!
A Case Study: HubSpot
Let’s look at HubSpot’s journey as an example of how this one-slide strategy works in practice.
Back in 2012, HubSpot faced a retention problem. Their customer retention rate was only 65%, meaning they lost 35% of their revenue yearly to stay flat.
They realized they had two primary customer segments: small business owners and marketing teams in B2B companies. After careful analysis, they decided to focus on the latter, which had more potential for growth. (Read more details about this case study here).
This decision allowed Hubspot to introduce features like landing pages and CRM integrations, which were highly valued by their target audience. As a result, retention improved, and they grew from $15 million in revenue to $270 million within four years.
What was the key to their success? They had a clear go-to-market strategy that aligned all their teams—from product to sales to customer success—around a unified goal.
They could prioritize their highest-value products and markets by asking the right questions (like the eight we shared above) and build a GTM strategy that worked.
Here’s how their GTM strategy would look on one slide.
Do you need help with your GTM strategy and execution?
GTM Partners works with B2B companies who need help with GTM, whether you just need a few tweaks or a full reboot of your strategy.
We’re booking now for 2025 planning work, including:
GTM Audit and Plan: We assess your current GTM challenges and opportunities, provide a GTM Score, and offer a plan for identifying and prioritizing your biggest GTM challenges.
Advisory: We work one-on-one or with your entire GTM team to execute your plan using our proprietary GTM Operating System and the frameworks we’ve built to accelerate your growth. We can do this on a project basis to address specific needs or help you through a total GTM transformation.
GTM Certification: We offer Go-to-Market certification for individuals, teams, and agencies using our proprietary GTM Operating System.
We’d love to chat more about your needs and how we can help.
GTM Certified Agency Spotlight: Inverta
We're excited to introduce a new segment highlighting our GTM Certified Partners! These agencies and communities specialize in driving Go-to-Market success in their unique areas, and we've partnered with them to bring you their proven strategies and best practices.
When we spoke to our certified agency partner, Inverta, a full-service B2B growth agency, they provided guidance on how the Marketing organization could take the strategic Go-to-Market plan and turn it into a practical and actionable 2025 marketing plan.
Inverta’s Annual Planning Workbook outlines four distinct phases to ensure you can precisely organize and execute your marketing plan.
When we explored this resource, we were impressed by its approach to developing the marketing plan and ensuring complete clarity on Marketing’s specific initiatives (by now, you know how much we love anything that promotes GTM team clarity).
Two standouts from their workbook that we wanted to share:
Write the (Marketing) Plan
This phase is where marketing will translate the Go-to-Market goals into a concrete, one-page annual marketing plan. The plan outlines:
Key initiatives: How marketing will contribute to the business goals.
Success metrics: What metrics will be used to track progress.
Key actions: Specific tactics and campaigns required to execute the plan.
Dependencies: Identifying potential risks and what needs to be true for the plan to succeed.
We love the importance of collaboration for a marketing plan’s ultimate success. Gather your leadership team to contribute ideas and ensure the plan is cohesive and actionable.
Get Buy-in and Enact
Inverta describes how the final phase involves presenting the plan to stakeholders and getting their buy-in. This step includes:
Socializing the plan: Ensure all departments understand the goals and initiatives.
Collecting signatures: Formal approval from key stakeholders to make the plan official.
Tracking progress: Establish a reporting cadence to measure progress and address changes throughout the year.
This phase turns the plan into a guiding document that drives team efforts and ensures department alignment.
If you like what you read and find it relevant to your 2025 planning, Inverta is kicking off a three-part workshop series starting October 17 designed to help marketing leadership unlock the secrets of annual planning.
GTM is Better Together: Updates!
“GTM is Better Together” is a revolutionary new vision that the future of GTM is better together with unified teams, tech, and trust. This is a weekly feature where we will share the latest announcements related to this important initiative.
We’d love to see you at one of our last two GTM is Better Together leadership summits.
October 22, NYC: GTM is Better Together
November 20, San Francisco: GTM is Better Together
GTM Events
A list of upcoming events of interest to GTM professionals
October 14-16, Austin, TX: Pavilion’s GTM 2024 (use code GTMPARTNERS20 for 20% off your ticket)
October 16, Austin: GTM Made Simple Roadshow
October 22, NYC: GTM is Better Together
November 20, San Francisco: GTM is Better Together
Sangram, Sarah, and Karthi will be in Austin this week for Pavilion’s GTM 2024 and then our Austin roadshow, so be sure to stop by and say hello!
Love,
The GTM Partners Team
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