Right customer, right time, right message. 

In which Harrison Rose explores the highest leverage activities in GTM.

It’s easy to over complicate what it takes to build a successful go to market strategy, as of course there is a lot involved. But surely the crux of go to market success is a unique combination of targeting an ideal customer, with a message that focuses on an urgent and important problem, and doing so with impeccable timing. Whether selling large deals to an enterprise customer or bottom up in a developer led strategy, the triumvirate of right customer, right message and right time hold true. Of course, none of this matters if you don’t have a product that delivers on the promise, but lets assume for the sake of argument that is nailed on.

For me — three key elements need to be true for you to have any chance of getting in front of the right customer, at the right time, with the right message. 

1) You need to know who the right customer, i.e Mapping the Market.

• A map your market of addressable customers
• The personas and users within those customers
• A detailed understanding of why they qualify.

First and foremost you need to map your market of qualified customers. Look far and wide on this, because unless you are creative and inclusive at this stage you may well be missing possible targets. 

People spend a lot of time talking about their TAM.  They get caught in one of two traps most commonly. They think they need to show the very highest possible number they could to investors for them to be interested. Possibly that works for the VC, but its not necessarily useful for you. You want the real TAM, made up of organisations you can realistically target..

Many also struggle to actually map their market. Most people rely on black box industry reports to claim market sizing of XXX, or they are reliant on super blunt industry filters on something like SalesNav to say there are XXXX thousands companies out there, but when they start running through them, they disqualify 50% of them as there are so many false positives.  Mapping the market is critical, most fail to do this effectively, and it needs to become a core competence and something you revisit every year.

2) But we need to narrow down our TAM and prioritise, i.e. Scoring customers.

• No-one has infinite resources, so we need to focus and align our resources
• So I need to know how to focus and prioritise those who have the greatest need for my product RIGHT now. 
• Focus is paramount. Contacting customers at the right time, when they have a great need for your solution. 

Having mapped your market there could tens of thousands of people you can sell to.  It doesn’t make any sense to assign our focus on these accounts at random, so we need to prioritise them based on their likelihood to buy and target the lowest hanging fruit for the most efficient wins. 

3) Next we want to deliver folks the right message, i.e.Hyper relevancy.

Having mapped the market, identified who’s most likely to buy, we want to deliver the most compelling messaging to that company and persona that we possibly can. For me — today there is too much of an emphasis on personalisation… as opposed to relevancy.

Too often, people deliver outreach based on a persona’s interests, recent podcasts, events, activities, consumption of content, etc. Not based on a publicly observable need for their solution. This results in high response rates, meeting booked, but you suffer later in the funnel. 

TL:DR — Contact the right customers, right time, right message = Profit.