The success of your B2B go-to-market planning rests on the quality of insights and data that are the foundation of the process.
Bringing a new product or service to market is a high-stakes, costly, and potentially risky endeavor. It is absolutely vital to use reliable information to inform the decisions in your go-to market plan.
Below are the key areas of go-to-market planning where research is invaluable:
3 B2B go-to-market planning areas that benefit from research
Assessing the market opportunity
Your strategic planning process likely starts with identifying potential customer needs. While your sales force could have their finger on the pulse of the market, it takes research to go beyond the obvious and uncover a profitable market niche.
Designing a new product or service that addresses the opportunities you discover is the next step. Again, market research is invaluable in checking your product market fit and creating a pricing strategy to decide where to invest your solution or product development dollars.
Of course, the big question is new market sizing. How many customers are willing to pay how much money? To help you answer common market sizing questions and get past common market entry barriers, you need to find the right people to get an honest and accurate answer to the question. What you find out will help you decide if the juice is worth the squeeze, and how fast you can gain a return on your investment.
Before moving forward with your go-to-market strategy, you will want to know what your competitors are doing. Do they have an effective GTM strategy or solution already in the marketplace? Does the target customer see them as a viable alternative to your solution? Direct insights from customers can help you develop brand positioning and a sales strategy distinct from your competitors.
Understanding your target audience
You need a detailed understanding of the buying process and who the players are.
B2B buying decisions are often complex, involving multiple people in multiple roles. You might have a user who is different from the person who controls the budget. The person who negotiates the deal terms might still be another person. You might also need to engage a host of influencers and facilitators.
Market research and B2B sample providers can uncover who you need to persuade at each step in the buying journey, what each participant cares about, and how to best reach them.
Developing your brand strategy
Your product messaging and marketing campaign communications need to be informed by a solid brand positioning strategy.
Research can help you create the vision and mission for your solution, define its brand values and attributes, and articulate its value proposition. Finally, you can use your marketing strategy and the insights you gain to create a brand awareness and build a strong unique selling proposition (USP) position for your offer that describes how it is special, distinctly beneficial, and compelling for your target customer.
Research can also help you when designing a brand logo and look and feel, as well as inform how you articulate your go-to-market messaging in your marketing channels.
Real world examples of using research to advance B2B go-to-marketing-planning
To gain a competitive advantage, some of the world’s most innovative companies are applying pioneering research approaches to go-to-market plan processes.
Salesforce reached out to its diverse customer base to better understand their interests and needs
Salesforce needed to develop brand strategy and messaging for Dreamforce, the world’s most beloved software conference. To optimize the content across the three-day event that features 60+ keynotes and over 1,000 sessions, organizers needed to understand the interests and needs of the extremely diverse customer base. Organizers also needed to understand how to best promote the event to over 40,000 expected attendees.
Custom recruiting CFOs with deep insights into payments managed services
A global payment processing company used enhanced research to quantify the potential revenue of a new market opportunity. They used Custom Recruiting in their B2B GTM plan to identify the CFOs who could provide specialized insights about revenue operations, payments managed services and collect intelligence on competitors.
Developing a clearer persona for cloud services late adopters
To build a robust marketing plan, many companies use buyer personas as a tool for understanding their target audience and ideal customers. A prominent cloud computing platform provider wanted to hear from a highly niche audience of senior IT decision-makers about why their companies were late adopters of cloud services. It was vital to conduct the research among senior decision-makers with sophisticated enough knowledge of the subject matter to provide valuable insights—and to do so across 8 industries, including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare & life sciences, and telecommunications. To drive customer success, the insights were used to fine-tune the go-to-market planning strategy.
Explore ways to improve your B2B GTM Plan
If you want to learn more about how to improve your go-to-market planning and how B2B market research services can help your business, we invite you to reach out to us. We’d be happy to provide you with case details and strategic planning tools that you can use to advance your processes to the next level.
