GTM Strategy, chapter 4: how you talk about what you are selling

In our previous GTM posts, we discussed identifying your ICP and with that in mind how you price and position, and into what channels you sell. Now we will discuss how you talk about your product - how are you communicating its features and benefits to your target audience?

Talk to the heart and mind

When considering communications, you have two elements to consider: how you want your audience to perceive you (that’s your brand) and what you want them to think about you (that’s your messaging). There is no strict delineation between these 2 elements but they each have a role in your GTM strategy.

Define your minimum lovable brand

A strong brand is an extremely powerful lever in your arsenal so do not be cheap about it. In the B2C world it will yield a price premium, among other advantages, and in the B2B world, it can be a tie breaker. You’ve likely heard the phrase “no one gets fired for choosing xxx”? That’s a brand job done well. Your brand, when it is strong, can turn the conversation from “why them” to “why not them”. You become the reference point that other options have to position against. 

There is a whole industry focusing on brand building, refreshing, and turnarounds, which we won’t cover here. The key takeaway is that you need to be intentional about what your brand is and make it one of the pillars of your GTM. While brand exercises can be valuable, you can start with a lightweight approach like what Google Ventures shared in their “3-hour brand sprint”. That will cover the basics and give you the brand source code that you need. 

Stress test your messaging with real people

The messaging element is trickier and, frankly, often underwhelming. This is where your knowledge of target customers and that of your product meet. In other terms, this is where you want to make very explicit and unique why your product is the one and only, what problems it solves and why your audience should care. The one important thing here is that you need to step in your target audience's shoes. What matters is that they project themselves into what you are saying.

One of the common pitfalls with companies offering a complex product, in software and beyond, is to focus your messaging on your product. For example, they will list out all the features of their product or tell the origin story of how they came up with the idea in the first place. There is a time and place for that (see your sales process) but that is not what you lead with. What your messaging needs to encapsulate is what problems you are solving, for whom, for what benefit and how you are different from what is out there. You should be proud if what you built but your audience won’t buy just because it was hard to build.

The best way to create inspiration for your messaging is to talk to your customers (if you have them). They will tell you why they chose you, use the language that speaks to them and the audience that looks like them. They may even let you use their name as a social proof! Once you have a version of your messaging, put it in front of real people. Either customers or recruited experts in your target industry. While programmatically A/B testing messaging can help rank options that are massively different, you need to speak to actual people to finalize the nuances and understand why a message resonates or not. Also, look for patterns or trends. The exercise of wordsmithing can be endless and the incremental value of swapping words in and out is null after a couple rounds.

It can’t just be an internal exercise

Landing the right messaging is one of the hardest things to deliver in your GTM strategy. Once again, you can’t do it with your internal audience alone, you have to get your target audience involved. What matters is what resonates with them, not your C-suite. Be ready to spend quite a few cycles on it and revise it over and over and over.

Next up: How you feed the revenue cycle. Leave your email below to get this and future posts from Facta. 

Ari & Frederic

Why Choose Facta Partners?

The Facta team has been servicing growth for over two decades. We will help you define what growth means to you, set the strategic direction to approach it, allocate resources to support it, design processes to deliver it and make sure your team and board are excited about it. We don’t stop at crafting the plan, we also help you to deliver, in the trenches.

Why Facta? Because we have done it, from Series A startups to Fortune 100 enterprises across industries. We have been operators, with people to lead, departments to align and boards to please. We know what works, what doesn't, why and have distilled those lessons into a methodology with a clear point of view.

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