Go-To-Market
Taking an offer to market.
ICP, positioning, segmentation and channel mix for new offerings and new-market entries: deciding who to win first, why they should care and how the offer reaches them.
What changed
A go-to-market plan was a sequence of bets about who to win first and where to focus effort. Those bets were usually too broad and too early. The work that held started with the segment where the offer was hardest to dismiss, then widened only after the motion repeated.
The diagnostic
The wedge is right when you can name the person who would be annoyed to find out you launched without telling them. If the best you can do is describe a segment, it is still too broad. Widening later is cheap; narrowing after launch is not.
The method
Four moves, in order.
Picking the wedge
Mapping the market and choosing the segment where willingness-to-pay, urgency and reachability lined up at once. Two of the three was not enough.
Sharpening the positioning
Refining it until it was a sentence the buyer could repeat without prompting.
Choosing channels by economics
Reaching that buyer where they actually were, at a cost that could compound rather than follow the fashion of the year.
Instrumenting the motion
So the second launch cost less to learn from than the first, and the third less again. Most of the value was here; almost none of the attention was.
The question that remained
The wedge worked, and rarely for the reasons written in the plan. What a playbook carries across a border, and what it quietly leaves behind, is the question that became the doctorate.
Further reading
- When a proven playbook meets a new market. The motion that worked at home crosses the border intact. The market position it was quietly standing on does not, and that is the whole problem.
- Pricing is a positioning decision. Willingness to pay is not decided at the price page. It is built from what the buyer compares you against: so the set, not the number, is the lever.
- Your pricing page publishes which buyers you won’t separate. Publish or hide is not the decision anyone is making. Half of pricing pages do both at once, and the choice underneath has been measured exactly once.
- Every growth budget is a gross number A budget records what will be spent. It does not record what wears out as you spend it, and only the second number says whether the year added anything.
Explore another area
Bring the question you're working on.
Research, a guest lecture, or a commercial question.
A short note is enough to give it shape.
Get in touch →