Earlier this year, Caroline Clark released a great 43 slides playbook on go-to-market strategy titled “Getting to Nirvana, on how to scale your go-to-market.”
Caroline worked at Atlassian as one of the first go-to-market hires for their Jira Service Desk product. Basically, the playbook consolidates her learnings and views on figuring out the go-to-market at B2B companies. The three main components of the playbook are:
- Who is your ideal customer?
- How are you going to reach them?
- How are you going to scale?
First things first
Who is the ideal customer?
In every company, ultimately, an individual is making the buying decision. Identifying who is the most typical buyer takes time and many conversations with prospective clients. What is their job title, how large is the company, their daily activities, and many more.
As you talk to more prospective buyers, you start recognizing patterns, and it gets clearer. Over time you need to iron out all the details and have a crystal clear picture of your ideal customer profile and buying personas.
But who are they really?
How do you determine buyer personas?
How are you going to reach them?
In phase two, we figure out how to reach target customers and personas. Early on in a startup's lifetime, you will rely on referrals and your friends’ support. As the company is growing, understanding which channels to explore becomes an increasingly important task.
Experimenting with different marketing channels is important as it helps you test and learn what works and what does not, given your unique model and resources. As you are testing, you need to be analytical, measure outcomes, and spend accordingly.
Acquisition Channels
Example on acquisition channels by Front
“I should have spent more time on finding out who the typical buyer of Front is. Without this information, outbound or paid acquisition cannot be successful.”
- Mathilde Collin, Front
How are you going to scale your go-to-market?
Scaling correlates with your pricing. Understanding when to charge, what structure to have e.g. volume, discounts and free trial are powerful drivers behind your scaling strategy.
“Scaling means thinking about how to price our product and when.
Many B2B companies have different pricing strategies. These are mostly relevant once your product is outside of its first ~5/10 users.
Pricing is another important metric. Most users think about pricing in terms of level (the amount to charge), when it's really important to think about metric (when to charge), and structure (volume, discounts, and free trial vs. not).”
- Caroline Clark
Bringing it all together
- Invest in product, and build something customers love
- Define your ideal buyer persona
- Come up with your acquisition strategy // build your flywheel
- Determine your payment model
- Drive towards efficiency
The complete deck is available below 👇
Google Docs
Our team reached out to Caroline to ask for permission to write this article and summarize her insights in a quick blog post.
