Go-to-market strategy
Your go-to-market strategy is the plan for how you'll actually reach customers and turn that into revenue. It answers three questions: who you're selling to, how you'll get in front of them, and how the deal closes. Get it wrong and you build something good that nobody buys; get it right and the same product grows three times faster. The big fork is usually motion: do you sell it (a rep talks to every buyer), do you let the product sell itself (people sign up and pay without talking to anyone), or some mix.
Three ways this plays out in practice:
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Sales-led, mid-market deal. Say you're selling a 12k/year platform to operations teams. Your GTM is a defined target list, outbound to book demos, and a pipeline you actually manage. Run that pipeline in a CRM like Pipedrive so every deal has a stage and nothing slips, rather than a sales rep guessing from memory.
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Outbound-first, finding your first customers. Before you have inbound demand, you go and get it. Say you're cold-emailing 40 founders a week with a sharp offer , you'd run those sequences through Instantly, warming inboxes and measuring reply rate so you learn which message lands before you scale spend.
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Product-led, self-serve signups. Say people sign up free and you want them to hit the "aha" moment fast. Here your GTM is lifecycle, not a rep , trigger onboarding emails off real product behaviour with something like Customer.io, so a user who stalls gets the right nudge automatically.
The honest test of a GTM strategy is whether it matches your price and your buyer. A 50/month product can't carry a field sales team; a 100k enterprise deal won't close from a signup form. Pick the motion the maths allows, then build the channels around it.