The SaaS domain is anything but static and orderly. Getting a grip on the market and customer dynamics is critical to SaaS go-to-market success.
A Gartner report reveals that only 55% of product launches are executed as per schedule. The delay in the product launch is often because of the absence of formal processes like a clearly defined go-to-market plan.
Successful marketers mitigate such issues by building a strong SaaS GTM strategy.
In this post, we will share everything you need to know about the SaaS GTM plan. We have included a template that will help you navigate through this process.
Different Types of Go-To-Market Strategies
Let’s begin with understanding who needs a SaaS GTM strategy.
If you find yourself in any of the following scenarios:
- Introducing a new SaaS product to the market
- Rolling out your existing SaaS product in a new target market
- Gauging the growth potential of a new SaaS product in the market
Then, a strategically-planned go-to-market (GTM) strategy is crucial for you!
Check out this guide to building a revenue-focused GTM strategy for your SaaS.
Now let’s discuss the key types of SaaS go-to-market strategies to consider.
#1: Sales-Led GTM
Principle: This SaaS GTM strategy leverages the sales force to maximize customer acquisition and business revenue.
Crucial Aspects:
- Realistic Goals: Define specific sales goals, such as increasing customer value, higher customer acquisition rates, etc. This practice helps the sales team understand and work on realistic expectations.
- Target Market and ICP: Make sure your sales team does thorough market research. This can help them understand the target market and create an ideal customer profile (ICP) aligning with the SaaS product.
- Sales Playbook: Build an exclusive sales playbook highlighting your value proposition, sales process, and techniques. This makes it hassle-free for the team to conduct the sales process and acquire customers.
- Personalized Communication: Train your sales reps to proactively listen to customers’ pain points and identify unique needs. This can help them pitch and highlight value propositions in a language that customers understand, thus streamlining acquisition.
- Sales Performance Tracking: Leverage state-of-the-art tools to track sales performance. Monitor metrics, such as customer acquisition costs, revenue generation, customer lifetime value, etc. Besides, leverage customer feedback and market insights to refine your SaaS GTM strategy.
- Sales Team Empowerment: Invest in the right sales software and resources, and conduct sales training and product knowledge sessions to build a skilled and proactive sales team.
#2: Product-Led GTM
Principle: This go-to-market strategy for SaaS relies on the SaaS product to drive revenue. Product-led GTM involves building a user-centric product, providing self-service adoption, and leveraging word-of-mouth marketing to acquire, engage, and retain customers.
Crucial Aspects:
- Product Design and Development: Create a state-of-the-art SaaS product based on the target market’s pain points and needs. Iterate on the product design so it meets and exceeds audience expectations to provide a seamless user experience.
- Free SaaS Product Trials: Offer free trials of your SaaS product to help prospects understand its usability and benefits. This practice can foster SaaS product adoption rates, thus increasing conversions.
- Self-Service Onboarding Process: Create an easy-to-understand, self-service onboarding process for users. Ensure it allows them to sign up and use the SaaS product without human intervention. Besides, include product tutorials to help users understand SaaS products’ capabilities.
- Word-of-Mouth and Viral Content: Provide end-to-end customer support services to help troubleshoot and ensure a positive customer experience. Furthermore, include social sharing buttons and incentive programs to encourage users to share reviews. This can drive word-of-mouth marketing and boost viral product adoption.
- SaaS Product Iteration: Leverage customer feedback and market trends to improve your product’s functionalities. This can help you stay ahead of competitors.
#3: Problem-Led GTM
Principle: This SaaS GTM strategy centers around understanding and addressing specific customer challenges. SaaS businesses should conduct market research to create solutions that address customers’ concerns, thus driving revenue.
Crucial Aspects:
- Market Research: Perform market research to identify your target market’s particular challenge or pain point. Understand the audience expectations and demand for SaaS solutions. Track ever-evolving market problems to ensure your product resonates with audience expectations.
- SaaS Product Development: Build a SaaS product to resolve the identified challenge. Ensure it’s user-friendly, effective, and innovative.
- Value Proposition: Create brand messages highlighting the features and benefits of the SaaS solution for the target audience. Conduct free-of-cost webinars, events, and more to demonstrate your thought leadership and expertise for customer acquisition.
- Content: Use digital and social channels to share content depicting real-life examples, case studies, and testimonials. This can help determine your SaaS product’s effectiveness and boost your credibility.
What SaaS GTM Strategy Should You Choose?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to choosing a SaaS GTM strategy.
However, identifying the target audience, their needs, and your SaaS product nature can ease the decision-making.
Check out the below-shared table to unlock the best suitable SaaS GTM strategy for your business.
How Is a GTM Strategy Different from a Marketing Strategy
A SaaS GTM strategy encompasses the entire customer journey, from product ideation to development and post-sales support.
It helps strategically launch and make your SaaS product thrive in the competitive landscape. Hence, design it in the early stages of your product life cycle.
On the other hand, marketing strategy focuses on the later part of the product development.
It helps promote your SaaS product effectively.
It allows you to create and track the effectiveness of personalized campaigns for different marketing channels, including website, PR, and social.
It empowers you to reach relevant audiences once your product hits the market.
The outcome? Enhanced brand awareness, higher leads, and increased customer engagement!
Think of it as a long-term SaaS success strategy that evolves according to customer trends and preferences.
The Crux: GTM strategy builds a solid foundation to launch SaaS products and help gain an edge in the market. It creates a roadmap for your SaaS product success.
On the flip side, marketing strategy fuels your brand’s long-term growth. Its primary focus is to boost customer awareness, engagement, and sales through promotion and tailored messaging.
Here’s a table summarizing the differences between the two.
Pro Tip: Your go-to-market strategy initiates lead generation, whereas marketing campaigns help accelerate conversions and revenue.
The best bet for you is to set KPIs and collect valuable data when implementing GTM and marketing strategy.
A few key metrics, such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), net promoter score (NPS), revenue generated, and more, can help you assess if your efforts are paying off.
Revlitix can help you achieve this goal.
This all-in-one revenue marketing platform leverages advanced analytics and makes the process of collecting data, tracking KPIs, and gaining customer insights a breeze!
It crunches and stitches colossal volumes of data from multiple sources, eliminating endless hours of understanding insights and building accurate, data-driven reports.
Inbuilt with predictive and prescriptive analytics, Revlitix lets you understand upcoming market trends and offers actionable recommendations.
This can help optimize GTM and marketing campaigns, thus skyrocketing your revenue!
The best part?
Revlitix -
- Allows you to create customizable dashboards. These are designed and vetted by experts with > 15 years of experience.
- Offers 100+ pre-designed, eye-grabbing drag-and-drop dashboards with a 30-second set-up - Not kidding!
- Effortlessly integrates with key Martech platforms. This can help streamline your SaaS business operations and enhances data management.
- Provides a no-code platform, thus saving you from the hassles of coding. Unlike other solutions, you do not need to write codes.
Bonus: Revlitix’s Exclusive GTM Template
Take the guesswork out of your GTM strategy with Revlitix's ready-to-use template. Download now and unlock the roadmap to a successful SaaS product launch!
SaaS Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy Examples
Along with the template, it will help if you go through the success stories of these brands that make great SaaS go-to-market strategy examples.
Saas Go-To-Market Strategy Example #1: Slack
Strategy: Product-led GTM
Product: Team communication platform
Aim: To launch Slack successfully
Key Challenge: Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack, and his team stumbled upon the idea of creating a robust internal communication platform.
Their key challenge was to put forth the benefits of Slack to brands using emails for communication.
They had to implement a powerful GTM strategy to stand out.
The Solution: The Slack team recognized email as the most used solution for internal team communications.
So, it strategically positioned itself as the “go-to” solution for team communication.
They highlighted its user-friendly features (voice calls, video calls, text messaging, and more) that could eliminate the chaos of long, boring email threads.
Besides, they projected the convenience of using Slack rather than emails.
And that’s how “the email killer” was born!
Being a thought leader, Butterfield emphasized in a memo to his team that they weren’t just selling “software” but a solution to minimize communication hassles.
And guess what? This customer-centric strategy helped them earn 8,000 signups with 1.1 million active users within 24 hours of its launch.
Their messaging and solution resonated well with the audience!
Today, despite the growing number of internal team communication platforms, Slack sticks to its commitment and keeps implementing tailored features to reduce its target audience challenges.
No wonder, its word-of-mouth game is still running strong!
The Result: The results have been nothing short of remarkable.
With 10+ million daily active users, Slack is now the leading team communication platform provider.
Saas Go-To-Market Strategy Example #2: Gong
Strategy: Amalgamation of product-led, sales-led GTM
Product: Revenue intelligence platform
Aim: To create a new visual identity and establish a “more sophisticated” image
Key Challenge: Gong grew exponentially and started considering its future as a global enterprise.
Their sales team was targeting customers to become their business partners.
To sell to this demanding crowd, Gong wanted to move beyond the “youthful, startup past” image created by Bruno (the dog that made the brand more human-like and approachable) on their website, advertising, and more.
However, bringing in the transformation while maintaining brand values and recognition was challenging.
The Solution: The company started by redesigning its logo.
Gong’s team cleverly incorporated its brand drivers in the logo, capturing the essence of celebration (vibrant burst of energy), individuality (depicted by the G-mark), and conversation (social bubble).
Next, they refined their color palette with splashes of secondary colors.
Furthermore, they replaced the sales professionals’ pictures with striking illustrations of smiling individuals from various cultures.
This undoubtedly reflected Gong’s strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I).
The Result: Gong’s strategy created a buzz across channels like LinkedIn, inviting endless conversations and debates.
Nonetheless, everything worked in the company’s favor. This strategic move helped solidify its position as a sophisticated enterprise, earning 5-star reviews on G2.
Saas Go-To-Market Strategy Example #3: Clari
Strategy: Sales-led GTM
Product: Revenue operation platform
Aim: Clari wanted to position their revenue operation platform as the best in the market. Their goal was to drive business growth by empowering the sales team.
Key Challenge: Clari’s team wanted to establish a distinctive value proposition that could set their product apart from competitors.
The Solution: Clari’s team realized that relying on their SaaS product wasn’t enough for long-term revenue growth.
They required effective sales processes to transform their image.
So, they worked on creating strategies to turbocharge sales efforts for revenue growth.
They ensured the sales and marketing teams’ alignment.
Besides, their team implemented customer data analytics and sales intelligence tools to bridge gaps.
This initiative helped them identify target market needs and prioritize the right customer segments.
A firm grasp of the ideal customer profile (ICP) accelerated the sales cycle.
What’s more?
Since 84% of B2B sales start with referrals, they left no stone unturned in providing exceptional customer support. This enhanced customer satisfaction rates.
The Result: Clari’s relentless efforts helped them position as a leader in the revenue operations space. Clari’s new $2.6 billion valuation is more than four times higher
than its worth a few years ago.
Saas Go-To-Market Strategy Example #4: Outreach
Strategy: Problem-led GTM
Product: Sales execution platform
Aim: To help sales leaders resolve the underlying issues across the sales cycle. They should be able to create and close the sales pipeline seamlessly.
Key Challenge: Sales leaders often deploy multiple tools and platforms. As a result, their valuable data gets siloed. Besides, the entire sales process becomes complex, thus depleting the team’s productivity. So, the Outreach team wanted to develop a product that could provide a complete picture of the sales cycle.
The Solution: The Outreach team conducted market research and understood their target audience’s key pain point.
The next step was to improve their sales execution.
So, the team designed and developed a sales execution platform that helped unlock seller productivity.
That’s how Outreach - a single source of truth for sales reps - came into existence!
This platform emerged as the brainchild of streamlining and processing sales information from a centralized location.
The cutting-edge platform empowered sales reps with what they needed.
It could connect data across every interaction from each deal.
The software surfaced valuable insights to enable salespeople to drive better revenue while lowering costs and risks.
The Result: Outreach has a proven record of increasing win rates by 13% while revenue by 9%. The firm helps sellers close 2+ million opportunities every month.
No wonder, over 5,500 global customers trust Outreach.
Saas Go-To-Market Strategy Example #5: Mutinyhq
Strategy: Problem-led GTM
Product: Personalized website optimization platform
Aim: To help businesses deliver customized experiences to visitors through website personalization, account-based marketing, advertising, and paid media optimization services.
Key Challenge: Mutiny team wanted to develop an intelligent, no-code, AI-driven platform to guide underperforming customer segments.
The Solution: After diving deep into the target market, their team unraveled several things.
Team Mutiny concluded that companies leverage manually-intensive processes and A/B testing tools to meet website personalization goals.
They experiment with hundreds of landing pages and hire growth engineers and data scientists to build customized solutions for different audiences.
And guess what? None were using AI-based solutions then!
Furthermore, they were spending over $450B on online advertising alone.
What’s worse? 95% of their money gets wasted on poor conversion!
That’s when Jaleh Rezaei, the CEO & Co-founder of Mutiny, decided to create an innovative AI-powered tool to help marketers.
So, she designed a solution to offer personalized experiences and increase website conversions.
The best part is its AI system’s capability to learn from different customers’ site data.
Moreover, it can create a copy for a website based on the successful strategies of its competitors. However, it never discloses any data or violates the privacy of any firm.
The Result: Via AI startup OpenAI’s API, Mutiny taps GPT-3 to produce human-like text. It offers personalized, well-crafted suggestions to help its customers thrive. No wonder, over 12K businesses trust Mutiny.
Summing Up
Every SaaS business aiming to launch or relaunch its product and services in the market should have a powerful go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
From helping you define the right target market to establishing a position as a market leader, the GTM strategies shared in this post can do it all!
All you need is to choose a GTM strategy that can effectively differentiate your SaaS product from competitors.
Besides, deploying tools like Revlitix can help you track each step across the journey and beyond!
So, take charge of your SaaS business revenue growth with Revlitix today!
