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Once you have an understanding of your USER / BUYER journey, it’s time to develop your strategy for getting your product into the mix of solutions your USER is considering to solve their problem.
At large companies, marketing teams are composed of people with skill sets ranging from product marketing to graphic design and even technical roles. Of course, in the early stages of building your company you won’t have teams of people (yet) to fill all of these functions. However, you'll find that you need to make decisions and do work across all marketing specialties in order to design and execute your Modern Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy.
It's important to keep in mind that the Modern GTM is a team sport. If planned and executed properly, your teams will collaborate on a company-wide strategy that requires coordination and a shared understanding of the role each team plays.
Together you will collaborate to define funnel stages that map your strategy and activities to the steps of the customer journey. This coordination encompasses everything from awareness to product strategy and even sales processes. You’ll need to define funnel stage entrance and exit criteria as well as company and stage-specific goals and metrics. You’ll track everything through a shared dashboard and weekly GTM meetings where the entire team will do an honest assessment to identify problem areas and plan improvements.
Once you have an understanding of your USER / BUYER journey, it’s time to develop your strategy for getting your product into the mix of solutions your USER is considering to solve their problem. Ultimately, your strategy will include content creation, community building, developing an engaging product trial, and more. But before you jump into any specific activity or program, you need to design your GTM funnel. Your funnel is a means of organizing your activities, metrics, and goals and aligning them with the appropriate steps of the USER / BUYER journey.
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The fundamental objective of your GTM strategy is that your USER finds your awareness activities and content so compelling that they continue their journey with you until they become a happy customer and advocate for your product with peers and colleagues.
Unfortunately, the reality is that not all USERS who start their journey with you will also complete it with you. So, how will you know if your strategy is working? The better question is: how will you know which GTM activities are performing well and which are not? The answer is to define funnel stages and goals and track goal-specific performance metrics.
In my experience, every company ends up creating a unique GTM funnel. We’ll get you started with common terminology and definitions. Going forward you will iterate on funnel stages and metrics, which will become fundamental to how your company talks about GTM.
Your first funnel should be designed something like the following. Here we’ve mapped the Modern GTM USER / BUYER Journey steps onto our funnel so that you can see how to leverage marketing methodology in the Modern GTM.
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We offer our product in three editions: FREE, MID, and ENTERPRISE. FREE has a limited set of features and can be used forever. MID has more features than FREE but is less expensive than ENTERPRISE, which has all the features.
All of our products are delivered as cloud-based services. We do not offer an on-premises option.
Everyone starts off with a 21-day free trial of ENTERPRISE. During the trial (and after), USERS can purchase MID directly in the product. A USER may initiate a sales conversation at any time during the trial to purchase ENTERPRISE or MID.
The primary call-to-action (CTA) on our marketing website is for the visitor to start a free trial. This CTA appears in the hero section on every page. Our secondary CTA is to request a product demo. This is included in our navigation, footer, and pricing page. We also have an ebook and recorded webinar that are gated, meaning the visitor must fill out a form in order to access the content.
We need to make sure that trials are successful and that the USER continues their journey with us after the trial expires. Our product team has established the following product engagement milestones. We track the USER’s progression through these milestones in the product. Tracking is integrated with our marketing automation system to trigger activities, such as email with links to helpful content, that assist USERs in progressing through the milestones.
Milestone 0: USER creates a product account and starts free trial
Milestone 1: Confirms email address and watches getting started video.
Milestone 2: Installs SDK and configures settings.
Milestone 3: Create a report combining data received via SDK and our amazing insights (aha! moment).
Milestone 4: Invites one or more teammates.
Anyone who's completed a sign-up form on our site who's not a student, doesn't work for a non-profit, and has an accepted email domain.
MQLs become SQLs when one or more of the following occurs:
Any SQL that meets the following criteria:
- Google Analytics
- Hubspot
- API integration between our product and Hubspot
- Amplitude for tracking product engagement metrics
With this product example in mind, now we'll take a look at each funnel stage and the way a USER might move through this funnel as they consider our product.
Technology plays a critical role in executing the tactics and programs of your Modern GTM strategy and in collecting and analyzing metrics along the way. Metrics provide the insight you need to analyze the performance of your funnel and take corrective action as necessary. Metrics also serve as triggers to ensure content and activities reach the USER at the right time in their journey.
It all starts with awareness, which we go deep into in this article — Building awareness with target USERS — later in this module. For that reason, I’ll keep this description brief. Awareness is the first stage in the Modern GTM funnel and encompasses the activities and programs you execute to make your USERS aware that your company exists and that you have a product that solves their problem.
For our example product, awareness activities in our funnel look something like this:
Your awareness goals and metrics will be based on website activity. I realize that everyone already knows what website visitors and pageviews are, but to be comprehensive, let’s define them here anyway. When someone says they had 1,000 website visitors last month, that should mean that they had 1,000 "unique visitors" (aka people) visit their website last month.
You can get slightly more granular and track total, new, and repeat website visitors to get a better sense of how many visitors are coming back to get more information. You can also try to exclude customers and other cohorts that you don’t want to count as being in the awareness phase.
For now, though, just keep it simple and assume that all of these visitors are in the awareness funnel stage and our goal is to get them to start a free trial of the product. The one exception to keeping it simple relates to our next funnel stage, which is education.
Need help calculating expenses in taking your product to market? Be sure to use the GTM Planner tool.
The Education funnel stage includes the set of activities and programs you execute to educate your personas about how your product solves their problem and how the product actually works with detailed product tutorials and documentation. Example activities include:
Assuming your education funnel stage relies predominantly on webpage content and that anonymous website visitors can consume this content, then, like the awareness stage, you will use website activity to set education goals and track with metrics. You'll need a way to distinguish between awareness visitors and education visitors. The easiest way to do this is to track unique pageviews on the webpages hosting the educational content, including product documentation and videos. If the content can be consumed off your site — say, on YouTube — then you'll need to pull in the metrics from the distribution platform.
Free trial conversion is one of my favorite Modern GTM funnel stages. You’ve worked really hard up to this point to build awareness and educate USERS about why they need your product. Now we just need to get them to try it! Again, I have a dedicated article on this funnel stage later in this module. But to summarize, here are example activities and programs you execute to get USER personas to start a free trial and create an account in your product.
This stage is pretty straightforward when it comes to defining metrics and goals. It’s simply how many people successfully filled out the form that creates the USER’s product account and starts their free trial. You might get more creative with your goal and metric definitions to account for specific circumstances that repeatedly misrepresent the actual health of this funnel stage.
Both of these example circumstances artificially boost your free trial conversions metric and artificially lower your conversion rates further down the funnel. Assuming these special circumstances aren’t that problematic, meaning they only represent a small percentage of your trial conversions, then just count them all. The next funnel stage — trial engagement — will distinguish between engaged and not engaged trial USERs and the conversion rate from free trial conversion to free trial engagement will inform the quality and change in quality over time of your trial conversions.
Getting a USER to start a trial is not an end. Once the USER has started the trial, you’ll need to help guide them toward their aha! moment with your product and content.
Activities and programs you execute to get trial USERS to engage with your product and reach the aha! moment include:
Determine what USERs must do and/or experience with your product in order to be engaged. Your product team, likely with support from your sales team, will identify these engagement milestones based on working with real USERs. From there, the product team will instrument the application to collect the necessary metrics to determine when USERs reach these milestones. Ultimately, you will identify a specific milestone or set of milestones that officially determine when a USER is engaged.
When you hire a sales leader, they will implement a sales methodology with several distinct sales-specific stages, activities, and metrics. We reuse your sales methodology’s sales opportunity stage as an optional stage in your Modern GTM funnel. It is optional because some USERs may choose to purchase your product directly in your application (self-serve) rather than through your sales team.
See the Field Guide module on Selling to your early market for more practical guidance on this stage.
The final step is when a USER or BUYER purchases your product for the first time either through your sales team or through a self-service experience. This is described as a land deal because it typically covers only one application/use case (and is priced accordingly) with the opportunity to earn expansion opportunities to others.
This one is easy! Like the sales opportunity stage, set goals for both the number of new customers and the dollar amount of those deals (typically, the aggregate ARR or contract value).
This may be obvious but at the end of each sales cycle, you'll have either won the business or lost it. If you won it, then you consider this opportunity "closed/won" and have made progress toward your "land deal" goals. If you lost the deal, then it is considered "closed/lost." In many cases, you may continue to pursue closed/lost opportunities. However, when you’re able to get them back to the table then it would be considered a new opportunity.
With a Modern GTM, it's common and by design that your "land deals" will have a relatively low annual contract value (ACV). This stems from the fact that USERS, or their mid-level managers, are also the BUYERS, have limited budgets, and are making a buying decision for a small division or team within a larger organization. The downside is the lower ACV but the upside is adoption, transaction speed, deal volume, and lower customer acquisition costs.
The most valuable upside is that you earn the opportunity to grow the ACV by leveraging these small, yet successful implementations to identify and pursue expansion opportunities. Expansion opportunities can include purchasing additional licenses, upgrading to a more advanced version of the product, and/or purchasing add-on products.
Think about the expansion stage as kicking off another iteration of the entire funnel but highly customized to the specifics of the expansion opportunities available in your product.
Expansion goals and metrics
Since we treat the expansion stage of the funnel like a restart of the GTM funnel, the goals and metric definitions for each stage remain largely the same. However, you will need to establish a methodology that identifies when existing customers are ready to embark on the expansion journey. If the opportunity is to upsell additional products to your existing "land" USERS, then you will need to define product engagement metrics and milestones that indicate a need for the additional product capabilities. If the expansion opportunity is to identify new departments or teams within the organization, the trigger is usually a successful outcome with your land USERS that can be used to prove value to additional teams.
