HOW TO GUIDE

Go-to-Market-Slide

We show you how to build a stunning problem side for your business pitch deck.

THE SLIDE EXPLAINED

Go-to-Market slides: What Should You Include and Examples

What happens when you have a game-changing product but no strategy to win your target customers? You fail to grow and reach your startup's potential. And without customers, a business will fail. That's why every investor will be interested to read and understand your go-to-market (GTM) pitch deck slide and go-to-market strategy.

This how-to guide will list what you should include in your go-to-market slide and show you famous examples of what your pitch deck should contain.

The go-to-market slide describes how you intend to distribute your product or service to a specific group of customers. In most pitch decks, this means where and how you will start promoting your product or services.

The most common elements you can find on a GTM slide are:

  • Distribution (Which marketing and sales channels are you using?)
  • Your Target Customer (Which persona are you targeting?)
  • Focus Activities for your Go-to-Market (what will you do on a day-by-day basis?)
  • Product Changes over Time (What are you offering, and how does this increase your customer base?)
  • Your Competitive Advantage (Why do clients choose your product over competitors?),
  • Business Model (How you are making money E.g. B2C / B2B),
  • Timeline (When you are doing what?).

Of course, it always depends on what you want to highlight.

For example, if you are planning an approach where you sell to end customers first and move to corporate clients through them, it makes sense to talk about how the marketing channels and product change over time.

Another example is selling a product direct to consumer (D2C) first to create leverage for retailers to list your product. As you can see, your go-to-market slide really is your chance to convey confidence and a clear strategy on your pitch deck.

The critical part is about explaining your reasoning behind it. 

Why is a Go-to-Market Slide Important?

Customers and clients are a core part of any successful business. The ability of a business to reach its target audience and appeal to them makes the difference between its success and failure. This is why customers are often called the lifeblood of a business.

However, before delivering quality products or services and ensuring customer satisfaction, businesses need to reach their customers. Your customers need to know that you exist and offer certain products or services. Every investor looking to inject funds into your business will be concerned about your plan, strategy, or approach to reaching customers. This is where you need the go-to-market slides.  

A go-to-market slide lets you show your strategy and approach to reaching your customers. In other words, the slides help you highlight how you will distribute your products or service to your target audience. 

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INSTRUCTIONS

What should be Included in a Go-To-Market Strategy Slide?

Content of the problem slide pitch deck

  • Marketing & Sales Channels you are using
  • Focus or Launch Customer Group
  • Focus Activities for your Go-to-Market
  • Product Changes over Time

01
Content of the pitch deck slide
Questions to answer with your pitch deck
02

Questions your slide answers

  • Who is your customer?
  • Which customer are you focusing on first?
  • What are your go-to-market channels?
  • What is your go-to-market strategy?
  • How will your customer change over time?

Common Slide Mistakes

  • Focusing on too many customers for the Go-to-Market
  • Trying too many channels without having mastered one
  • Waiting too long for your Go-To-Market
  • Slide overfilled with content
03
Common Mistakes in Pitch Deck Slides
How to design a nice pitch deck slide
04

Slide design

  • Use a clear and quickly readable font style
  • Make sure to use high-resolution pictures
  • Keep the design simple
  • Be specific around your activities and use visual elements
LOOKING AT THE PROS

Example Go-to-Market Slides of Algolia, AirBnB & Co.

These are real examples of Go-To-Market slides that unicorn companies like Algolia used. As you can see, the slides can differ depending on what the founder wants to show.

For Algolia it was more about the distribution, while Bunch tried to show how they are moving from a B2C to a B2B model.

Airbnb, in contrast, uses its GTM slide to show exactly how they think about customer acquisition. They were using events to promote their listing widget and, besides, used several Partnerships to tell the people about their product.

What is a Go-to-market Strategy?

A go-to-market strategy refers to an actionable plan to reach your target audience and ensure that your business achieves a market advantage over competitors. 

Like the go-to-market pitch deck slide, the idea behind the go-to-market strategy is to create a plan that sees you delivering your products or service to your customers while factoring in variables such as pricing and distribution. The difference between the go-to-market slide and the strategy is that the slide provides a graphical or visual representation of the plan contained in the strategy. 

Understanding the importance of the go-to-market strategy makes it easy to see that it applies in various use cases. These use cases include relaunching a product, brand, or company, launching a new product, or introducing an existing product into a new market. 

With the go-to-market strategy, you will understand the reason for launching the product, your target audience, how to reach them, and the plan for convincing them to buy the product or patronize the service. 

Once you have this strategy, building the go-to-market slide becomes much easier.

How to Build an Effective Go-to-Market Strategy

The process involved in the creation of an effective market strategy includes;

Creating and Understanding Personas for Your Target Audience

Understanding the target audience is the first and most important part of creating a go-to-market strategy. The success of the product, brand, or service is based on the product or service's ability to resonate and be accepted by the target audience. This places the target audience as a crucial element of the strategy and go-to-market slide.

Thus, it is essential to understand the target audience or customers. The best way to understand the target audience is to create a persona for them. You may have already included this person in the market or customer acquisition slides.

A persona is a representation of an individual or a group of individuals (could be a demographic) created using your research or survey results. The persona allows you to understand the traits of the individual or group you are trying to represent. 

In this case, the persona seeks to represent the prospective buyers of your product. This way, you will see your prospective buyers' motivation, pain points, and objectives. With this information, you can craft a launch and marketing approach that appeals to your prospective buyers' pain points, motivations, and goals - making it much more likely they will purchase your product or service.

Another benefit of creating the buyer persona is that it allows you to understand the buyer's journey. By buyer's journey, we refer to the buyer's steps and decisions before buying the product. By understanding this journey, businesses can fit themselves into one of these steps or processes. 

Create a Value Chain

The value chain, also known as the value matrix, links the product or service being launched to the needs of your target audience. This process helps you and other stakeholders in the business understand why you are launching the product, service, or brand in the first place. This value matrix also helps you establish the criteria with which you should judge the success of the launched project. 

While a value chain may not fit on the go-to-market slide on a pitch deck, putting it in your strategy will make your deck much clearer.

Create a Marketing Approach

The first two steps help you understand the place of your product in the market. Up next, you need to devise a plan to raise awareness about the product in the market. This plan will ensure that your business uses the right marketing approach and platform.  

The marketing strategy will include lead generation, a marketing website, branding, and marketing content.

Looking at the go-to-market slide above, this is how you will get out of stage 1 of your business's journey and reach stages 2, 3 and 4.

Create a Sales Strategy

A sales strategy is different from a marketing strategy. While the marketing strategy devises a plan for raising awareness about the product, the sales strategy creates a plan to get the product to the customers and buyers. 

In the sales strategy, you will have to decide on;

Tools and resources: This includes equipment, items, and resources that the sales team needs to identify, engage, and create a working relationship with prospective buyers. These tools will also include those needed to demonstrate a product and service for prospective buyers, such as Zoom, a website and CRM.

Training and Support: This includes all training required to provide the sales team with enough knowledge to confidently sell the product to buyers. 

Customer Acquisition: This includes the approaches required to identify the ideal customer for the product or service. 

Identify the Place of the Product in the Overall Company Roadmap

Remember that you have identified the place of the new product or service in the target market. However, you need to understand the place of the same product in the company's roadmap. 

By understanding your product's or service's place on your roadmap, you will set priority levels for the product concerning other offerings from the company. This helps you understand if you should direct more resources to the product after launching or if you should focus on other offerings from the company. 

Many go-to-market slides will include details of the DMU (decision-making unit) of a business. This is a key part of a company roadmap as it lists the people that have a say in whether your product or service gets purchased.

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