Go-to-Market Strategy

Your plan for who you sell to, how you reach them and how they buy.

Also known as: go-to-market, GTM strategy, go to market

A go-to-market strategy answers three questions coherently: who (exactly which customers first), how they hear about and buy from you (channels, sales motion), and why the economics work (CAC vs contract size). Incoherence is the norm — enterprise product with self-serve motion, consumer prices with field sales — and it kills quietly through unit economics that never close.

coherent examples:  SMB SaaS → product-led + content + inside sales (low CAC, volume)
                    enterprise platform → founder sales → design partners → field team

Write it as falsifiable choices, not aspirations: named segments, named channels with expected CAC, named motion matched to deal size. Then the first quarters test the document instead of improvising a different company monthly.

The classic mistakes:

Motion mismatched to deal size. Field sales for $50/month products, pure self-serve for $100k transformations. The motion must cost a fraction of the contract — do the division before hiring.
Five channels at once. Thin spread across ads, content, partnerships, outbound and events with excellence in none. One channel to repeatability, then the next.
Ignoring who does the work. “Partnerships will sell it” without a partner owner, or “community-led” with no community manager. Every channel needs an owner with a quota or it is a wish.
GTM as marketing’s job alone. Pricing, packaging, onboarding and support are go-to-market. The whole company executes it; marketing just advertises it.
No kill criteria per channel. Testing channels indefinitely without success thresholds burns quarters. Define what good looks like per channel, review monthly, kill fast.

Review quarterly: which channel produces customers at acceptable CAC, and double down there while experimenting with exactly one new motion. See distribution for why the channel often matters more than the product.