The 8 Essential Elements of a Killer Go-to Market Strategy

so what time is it now we're about two hours behind and everybody's hungry this is just the greatest time to present to people isn't it go for it I love it following a finance guy and hungry people okay so um I'm going to talk to you about the eight Essentials to a killer go to market strategy I met with I think around six startups at the break and I I shared this I'm not afraid to share this feedback that I gave them I had no idea what their businesses were after spending 10 minutes with them a lot of the time because I think a lot of times startups this is a big challenge to explain what you do in if you can't do it in 10 minutes then we're in big trouble so we're going to talk about that today um so shift Hub was a company that I invested in and I was a co-founder in and uh when I got there my job was to drive Revenue we had $500,000 in the bank and I did all the things that I thought I was supposed to do I got a fancy CRM spent money on AdWords we went to trade shows we hired some salespeople uh we got a fancy sass looking website and fast forward one year later we had zero money in the bank and we were had sales of a whopping $2,000 a month so needless to say that was a bit bit of a a challenge um so what went wrong uh that's what I'm going to I'm going to cover that today and I'll I'll go over that I think that uh oh I'm going the wrong way here there's these eight Essentials of a go to market strategy okay you've got focus and you've got value proposition that's where I'm going to spend my time today uh I think that a lot of startups get Focus they they try to be too many things to too many people and and that goes into the value proposition of the message is very confusing because they're trying to message too many people so when you have things like we all know that the website is your number one sales tool people make a decision within one to three seconds of landing on your page whether they're going to bounce whether they're going to hang out whether they're going to go to another page but guess what that goes back to if you haven't figured out who you're focusing on and you haven't figured out what your value proposition is and that it's a value proposition that people can actually understand it doesn't matter how good of a website and how good it looks you've got to segment your buyers and your customers you can't message and talk to every segment the same way you've got to create personas for your buyers but again it doesn't matter if you haven't figured out what a what your value proposition is and most importantly that it's a value proposition that people understand advertising promotion and events is a obviously an essential part of a go to market strategy AdWords might be really important to you search retargeting might be uh the Hidden Gem you've got to go to events all these things but again it's not going to surprise you I'm going to say here if you haven't figured out where to focus what industry to focus in on who the buyer is and you don't have a good value proposition you're going to waste a lot of money like I did at shift Hub of trying to be everything to everybody growth hacking is a new terminology and it's really it's about bringing engineering into marketing uh I won't pretend to be an expert on it but I know that if you can use your product to sell your product you're going to win but guess what if you're not focused on the right industry and you don't have a good value proposition it's going to be a waste of time and money outbound and nurturing there's still even though people there's all kinds of laws coming into effect in all many countries about email and spam it's still the number one tool to grow your business 99% of people aren't going to be ready to buy when you contact them but when you do find that 1% that's ready to buy and that email lands in their inbox or you're nurturing them through a campaign because they were a warm lead if you don't have the right value proposition and it's confusing you're going to lose them and finally Channel Partners can be that uh I'll call it another Hidden Gem a channel partner is somebody who can give you thousands tens of of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of customers because they like what you're doing and they want to bring your product to their customers but if you haven't figured out where to focus it's not going to matter you're going to be confusing to a channel partner if you don't even know your own value proposition so what is focus focus is choosing an industry or a vertical so at shift Hub we are trying to build a product for retailers for call center for hospitality and restaurants for manufacturing so our product team didn't know who their user was our marketing team couldn't figure out what message we should create because we had so many different uh Industries and buyer personas so it's really essential as a startup to get Focus nailed if any of you have read uh Jeffrey Mo's 1991 1991 book Crossing the chasm this may look familiar to you and you've got to get focused right you've got to have it nailed because in order to cross this Chasm you might be able to go into a bunch of different Industries and find some innovators and Visionaries but in order to get the pragmatists and the early majority and the late adapters it's going to be impossible you're going to fall into this Chasm uh and you're just going to fail you're just going to do okay mediocre in a number of Industries so I I I did do a little bit of translating here for you so I'll let you guys read this I won't pretend that I can read that so I'll just let you guys read it I think this quote is especially true for startups and for those of you who actually can't read it either I'll uh I'll read it the great mystery isn't that people do things badly but they occasionally do a few things really well the only thing that is universal is incompetence strength is always specific so why I like this as it relates to focus is um typically a startup will say we have a huge Market opportunity there's a hundred million businesses in North America that can use our product and right away as an investor when I hear that I'm like oh these guys think that you know they're way they're they're not laser focused I'd rather hear somebody say there's 2750 companies that we're targeting that we know can use our product you've got to flex your strength and this is a good point as it relates to focus so how do you find your focus I think a good way is to create a scorecard for your business or your industry so you could have simply as have a column of a whole all the industries that you want to go after and start scoring and rating them so it could be something like you know you might write down one column uh pharmaceutical chemical Hospitality retail just have all of these different industries that you want to go after and remember the other thing that I I want to point out is saying smbs or Professional Services is not focused saying universities in South America that offer an MBA program that's focus and then you start scoring them so does the industry or does the buyer are they well funded that could be a really important thing to score against does the industry have um is there history of change are they Innovative that could be very important Market size again it doesn't have to be massive but you want to make sure it's not there's only 27 possible companies worldwide that can buy the product how much pain exists now I think this is a really important thing to score any industry that you're looking at is there a huge amount of pain that they're willing to spend money on because people don't want to buy a vitamin they want to buy a painkiller and this is really important what's the competitive landscape not saying don't go into an industry or a vertical that has zero competition but why go in somewhere where where there's 16 other incumbents that are already doing really well and if you are going up against your competition What Makes You Different and the final one I don't have it up again these are just five I pulled pulled off the top of my head but a sixth one I might add is if we win in this vertical what's is there an adjacent vertical that we can immediately leap into with the strength of the current vertical so I'm the CEO now at Kira Talent which is a video screening platform when I arrived the company was doing exactly what I said not to do earlier they were going after academic clients we had SMB self- serve as a SAS model I had salespeople calling on retail Hospitality they were all over the map and this is exactly what was happening we were getting innovators and Visionaries in the industries to use the product but we couldn't win in any Market so what we did was we got focused and we chose academic and specifically right now we're even more laser F focused we're choosing universities and colleges with MBA programs now that seems like a pretty narrow Focus how can you build a business off that there's thousands of Business Schools worldwide who have fewer seats than they do have applicants we sell a video screening platform so they get to to see their students and they get to ask potential students tough questions so we're winning an academic now so what's the reward that we got for Focus we're able to actually charge a higher average sales price now when you focus on one industry you can start charging more you become the expert there and people want to work with you lower customer acquisition costs again if you're focused on one industry your customer acquisition cost is going to go down there's a lower cost to serve which I think goes to this next one there's a faster internal adaption to the customer needs when we're only dealing with one customer our product team knows the customer they're not thinking about 20 different potential buyers when they're building the product they know it's one person and they can adapt to it and then there's more predictable service requirements when you're in one vertical in one Focus because so so in our example we know when a school signs up they can tell us how many applicants are going to be applying to the school on what date so it's easy for us to uh predict service requirements I like this quote I didn't translate this one so hopefully everybody understands it if you chase two rabbits both will escape so that's why Focus is important if you start chasing multiple verticals and multiple F uh channels you're not going to win in any of them and some of the startups I met with this morning that's what they were doing they were saying our product can do this for this person and this for this person and this for this person and that's not going to work you're not going to win so the world needs one thing and sometimes we try to focus and give them the solution instead of just giving them what they need so what the world needs is a dead mouse they don't need the mouse trap and again when it comes to Value propositions everyone that I heard this morning was very complicated and sometimes used big words that even I didn't understand um you got to keep it really simple that's my friend Max valette as suggest you follow him on Twitter please do that right now make me look good so he sees that I did have some impact on the time that he gave me helping me to prepare here but his thing is what's the one thing that your business stands for at the intersection of what it does and what your customer wants it to do stop thinking about what your product does that you think it like what you think it does start start paying attention to what your customer wants it to do and what your customer is actually using it to do so this is vinegar this is salt vinegar there on your left probably use it on salads for cooking salt you use for cooking that's what the product's for right but in my house I use more vinegar to clean I don't actually do the cleaning but I've seen it being used by people in my house so but did so I Hines vinegar do they pay attention they do because they sell it in the cleaning it's not just in the food section now I know you don't get a lot you probably don't see this a lot although it is a lot colder here than I expected more salt is used in Canada on the roads to melt the ice are you giving me a signal or you okay okay all right I'm like two minutes uh so watch observe and learn what how your customers are using the product stop telling your customers and the consumers what your products for and start observing them using it and you'll see a lot because here's an example lock 8 has anybody seen this product okay this is a bike lock that uh you control through an app on your phone right so it's attached your bike at all times you can unlock and lock your bike through the app but what they did was they watched and they observed their customers they're no longer a bike lock company they're a bike sharing company because now what's happening is people are locking their bikes up places and posting that the bike's available now it's locked in this location and if you pay x amount of money you can use the bike and then it has to be locked back up in this location by this time and it's all GPS tracked so here's a company that started as a bike law company and became a bike sharing uh platform so there's a number of different types so let's talk about the value proposition now there's what and how value propositions so unbalance build publish and ab test landing pages without it very simple there wasn't one pitch I heard this morning that they could do it in one sentence like this you've got to get it down to something like this so you can either come at it from a what and how value proposition or zendesk has a why and who relationships between businesses and their customers can be hard zenes makes it easier simple straightforward gets to the the point no no there's no words there that you don't understand uh buffer goes even simpler it's just a what value proposition buffer is the easiest way to publish on social media close.io close more deals make more sales they've kind of combined the the first two with a what and why value prop position so at its basic the value prop is the who part the customer we service is blank the situation is this is the why the problem we solve is the what then finally we solve this problem by how I see a lot of you taking pictures if you go to my blog which is right here or at my Twitter uh this will be posted tomorrow so a lack of focus is what kills startups I see it all the time they're trying to be too many things to too many people their their Market size is 1 billion and um they're just not focused so I go back to the example of Kira we're focused on universities and colleges with business degree programs very narrow when we win in that vertical then we're going to go to the next vertical then we're going to go to the next vertical it's also easier to raise money when you can tell an angel investor or a VC we know this Market inside and out and we're winning so there are eight steps but I really highly suggest that you focus on those first two because you'll waste a lot of money on the next steps if you don't get your focus and your value prop done focus on one vertical and create a value proposition just for that channel and don't assume you know your produ don't assume you know what your product is going to do you've got an idea but don't get fixed on that thank you very much any questions speak loud I can repeat it if you want concept that talking Focus that come from also bowling right um I I so I think there's two parts of focus for me focus in in on what your company where can you just you can just completely own a vertical and so I see what a lot of people do is they're like okay we want to own the SMB space we we're we're built for small businesses and there's 580 million small businesses in the us and we're going to on that whereas if you can just focus in on smbs like restaurants with less than five locations and you know you're just it's much easier to win that way but I think the the second part of focus is how do you get people internally to focus they can't if they don't know who their user is you know imagine a marketing team trying to message to 580 million small businesses that are made up of 200 different Industries I don't know if that answers your question I mean it Jeffrey Moore does talk talk about it so if if you haven't read the book it's a a definite must any other questions okay thank you very much

Channel: Global Startups

Views: 59,157

Keywords: Go To Market, Business, Trading, Analysis, Finance, Economy, latam, Market (Building Function), Economics (Field Of Study), speaker, Public Speaking (Literature Subject)

Id: d8GYM6kNy10

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 26 2014