Go-to-Market Strategy · GTM
Go-to-Market Strategy
What is a go-to-market strategy?
- A comprehensive plan for how to sell a new product
- Aligning target, value, channel, price, and sales
- Even a great product fails without GTM
What GTM really changes is not 'who you sell to' but putting in writing 'who you will not sell to this year'. Until the product is finished, the target exists differently inside the company: in the head of sales, in the marketing team’s plan, and in the development team’s requirements document. GTM merges these three into one page and forces decisions that cut into someone’s territory. That’s why GTM meetings are rarely cheerful. But if you cut nothing, you spend the six months after launch responding to every inquiry that comes in, and the budget runs out without a single proper success story.
Types are usually split into sales-led, product-led, and partner-led, and the dividing line is annual contract value (ACV), not preference. If ACV is under KRW 10 (≈ US$1) million, a deal can’t even cover one salesperson’s salary, so you need self-serve sign-up or inside sales. Above KRW 50 (≈ US$1) million, finance, legal, and the business units join the buying decision, so field sales and same-industry references become essential. The boundary with a marketing plan is also clear. A marketing plan is accountable for awareness and leads, but GTM also covers the price list, sales compensation, partner margins, and the staff for onboarding. For the first six months, a more realistic goal than revenue is '5 to 10 credible references'.
The most common misconception in the field is treating GTM as launch material prepared two weeks before release. By then, price and target are already set and there’s no room to adjust. The second is defining the ICP too broadly, such as 'all mid-sized companies and above'; a broad ICP dilutes the message, so neither the content nor the sales script lands with anyone. The third is the most fatal. If you keep the existing product quotas and just add the new product on top, salespeople naturally sell the sure thing. Then six months later the product quietly disappears, with a report that 'customers weren’t looking for it'.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Euijung KimBrand strategist with 30 years in advertising, formerly a division head at Daehong CommunicationsThe concept evolved from discussions of product launch and market entry strategy, and became a core framework with the spread of B2B and SaaS.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A, an industrial measuring-equipment maker with 140 employees and KRW 32 billion (≈ US$23,941,300) in annual revenue, launched a new equipment-management subscription service. Development took 1 year and 8 months and KRW 900 (≈ US$1) million, yet in the 3 months after launch it signed only 2 paid contracts. The sales team’s reaction was 'We’re busy enough selling existing equipment. How are we supposed to sell this?'
- The head of business development went through three years of purchase history for 420 existing accounts and cut the first ICP down to just 68: those with 30+ pieces of equipment and a dedicated quality team. The head of sales initially objected, asking 'Why are we throwing away the other 350?'
- After meeting practitioners at 12 of the 68 accounts in person, the team heard the same thing again and again: 'Every month, three days vanish into building audit-response reports, not into failure prediction.' So they changed the value proposition from predictive maintenance to 'ISO audit report automation'.
- With average contract values in the KRW 20 million (≈ US$15,000) range, they judged field sales wouldn’t pay off, so they narrowed channels to three: 2 inside sales reps, webinars, and referrals from after-sales service engineers. They dropped the KRW 40 million (≈ US$29,900) trade-show booth budget.
- Every Tuesday for 30 minutes, the head of sales and the marketing manager went through some 20 incoming leads together and wrote the MQL criteria into a document: '30+ pieces of equipment and a contact at manager level or above'.
- After creating a separate incentive just for the new product, within 5 months they secured 18 paying customers at an average contract value of KRW 24 million (≈ US$18,000) and a pipeline of KRW 1.18 (≈ US$1) billion, while the average sales cycle shrank from 94 days to 61.