Go-to-market specialists play a pivotal role in ensuring a new product is well received and goes on to become a commercial success. Within this role, go-to-market consultants act as a conduit between a company’s internal resources and external market-driven dynamics. Their unbiased perspective allows them to introduce context and objectivity into the process of bringing new products to market. By leveraging their capabilities, a company can better understand a market opportunity while undertaking a GTM strategy that yields early and sustainable commercial success.

When seeking to identify the right GTM consultant to work with, it is vital to understand how their specific capabilities map onto your project needs.

Some of the specific capabilities to look out for include:

Bespoke Go-To-Market Strategy

Go-to-market consultants offer bespoke GTM strategies customized to a business' specific needs, including target market, customer segments, and market maturity. Through in-depth internal resource analysis, they identify unique capabilities that can be leveraged to drive commercial success. Bespoke GTM planning is essential to cultivating a unique competitive advantage against current competitors and future entrants. Working with a Go-To-Market consultant will ensure the blueprint your teams follow captures internal dynamics that cut across technical capabilities like engineering and soft capabilities like corporate culture.

Opportunity Analysis

Go-to-market specialists provide a quantitative and qualitative opportunity analysis that helps a business capture more value from existing opportunities. Through the opportunity analysis, the GTM consultant will create a value matrix that indicates whether an opportunity is worth pursuing. Some of the factors they may include in the model include cost and pricing, current alternatives, market evolution trends, supply, and distribution chain dependencies and cultural trends that can influence the ability to capture the opportunity. From this data, a company will have a holistic view of an opportunity and not just one that considers a few, biased aspects.

Value Proposition Insights

Working with Go-to-Market consultants can help clarify a product value proposition faster and more accurately. Since a misaligned VP is a significant cause of product failure, go-to-market consultants dig deep into customer data to surface insights that can help direct and align your VP. In some cases, the data they collect can influence a pivot, helping save the company resources that would have been spent in launching a misaligned product. By leveraging the skills and experience of a go-to-market specialist, a company can achieve product/market fit that leads to significant commercial success.

Strategic, Commercial, and Financial Perspectives

Strategic, commercial, and financial elements must align for any GTM plan to work. Go-to-market specialists bring a wealth of knowledge and experience in each area to ensure this happens. Within the strategic element, the GTM consultant will cover issues like opportunity and competitor analysis, market size validation, and customer demand trends. Under the commercial perspective, they will analyze your commercial capabilities, including marketing, sales, distribution, and customer support, and how these align with the current opportunity. They will also offer a financial perspective crucial in undertaking cost-to-market and pricing activities. Working with a GTM consultant with an objective view of these three perspectives can increase the chances of GTM success.

Internal Resourcing

Go-to-market consultants drive GTM success by effectively aligning internal resources with market capture efforts. If these are misaligned, a company risks costly mistakes like underestimating or overestimating a market opportunity, ignoring competitors, or locking into an unsustainable resource burn rate. By working with a GTM consultant, a company can adequately quantify its internal resources and understand how they map onto available opportunities, even if it means forgoing misaligned opportunities.

Role Alignment Capabilities

GTM consultants help align roles like account management, product development, marketing, sales, technical support, and customer service with a value proposition. By engaging with these and other stakeholders, they build a unified front that can support GTM success. They also act as a liaison between these frontline roles and management to ensure both horizontal and vertical stakeholder buy-in. By working with a Go-To-Market consultant, a company can be sure of a better-coordinated approach to launching new products that go on to become long-term commercial successes.