When you are thinking about your go to market strategy, it is so hard to build messaging and messages from where you are standing.. You are deep, deep inside the bottle. Your frame of reference usually starts with the particulars of whatever service you offer, is shaped by the strengths & experiences of your team, is configured around your previous result sets and FINALLY pointed at your market. At that point, your frame of reference is pretty fixed. Your GTM efforts are wholly built around finding a market match that fits your shape.

Starting with your service & team & results is limiting, because you are defining the shape of the problem you solve in advance. But in the world of GTM, it is rare that you can know the precise shape of a problem in advance. Yes, there may be signals that indicate that a prospect might have the right shaped problem, but in many ways, you’ve turned yourself into a hammer…so all problems start to look like nails.

This going to sound 100% nuts…but:

I know, I know…it sounds wrong. It feels wrong. You have likely made a career built around specific expertise - channel expertise, media expertise, acquisition or retention expertise… After all, you run a business DOING that stuff all freakin’ day. If you are a Brevo expert, shouldn’t you be looking for Brevo shaped problems?

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Brevo might ne an incredible marketing automation tool…(tbh, it pretty damn good and is less expensive AFAIK compared to Active Campaign, and more full featured than MailChimp or some others…) but you aren’t looking to solve Brevo problems, or problems with Brevo. You are looking to solve problems…and Brevo may be your tool of choice.

The difference in thinking there is profound. In order to solve problems, your investment has to be in UNDERSTANDING the problem, not in the solution. If you are solution first (or solution only), you are artificially limiting the size of your market & moreover limiting the number of quality discussions that you can participate in.

A long time ago, I sold my agency and was heading up SEO & Social for the acquirer. My counterpart who headed up the paid media side of the business and I had a friendly rivalry. I used to tell her that I just didn’t understand why anybody would spend money on paid media before that had ramped up their SEO presence. She used to tell me that SEO seemed like a great way to waste money that could be spent on paid search.

While this banter rarely made it outside of our internal meetings, I was serious about my opinion…as was she. We were both convinced that what we understood best was the solution to effective growth for clients. Our thinking was <channel> then <result> then <client>. While we won TONS of business together, more than 15 years later, I wonder how much more business we would have won if we had a different thought process.

If we had thought about it as <client issue> then <do we understand it> then <what are the array of solutions that might have an impact> THEN <is this something we are suited to solve> THEN <which mixture of services is the right mix of risk, reward & impact>, I believe that we would have won 5-10x the amount of business we did together.

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We’ve all received those “we will do ‘X’ in 90 days or you don’t pay” kind of outreach. On some level, that stuff must work because so many people do it. But the GTM strategy is based around financial risk mitigation.

That size and depth of that market is limited specifically to the number of people who know that ‘X’ is the solution, and 90 days is an acceptable timeframe. The market of businesses that have a problem, but may not know that ‘X’ is a solution or feel like 90 days is a reasonable timeframe is substantially larger.

Most businesses are pretty good at describing the problem as they understand it- in my line of work, the most common expressed problem is “not enough leads”. So you’d think that my life would be simple…just GTM with promises to double leads and my Nantucket dream house is just a few cold emails away, right?

The prospect thinks that they need more leads…and that is what they will tell you. If that were ACTUALLY the case, lead gen agencies would be in the Fortune 500. But the truth of the matter is more complex.

The business owner knows that they have a problem. They’ve identified it as a lack of leads. So any of these “guaranteed or you don’t pay” or “only pay for qualified meetings” sort of GTM strategies would be RAKING in the cash. But “we need more leads” is just the language the owner can find.

If it were just MORE leads, this is a problem any business owner could solve. They would just do MORE of whatever is already driving business. More outreach, more networking, more whatever…that is a SIMPLE solution.

The real problem isn’t “more leads”…it is always more nuanced.than that. It is “better leads” or “we can’t close leads” or “we can’t close leads that will pay enough” or “we don’t know why they aren’t saying yes” or “nobody is responding” or, or, or…

Your GTM strategy needs to start with a nuanced understanding of the actual problem. In my “we need more leads” example, I need to:

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Yes, your list is important. Your tactical approach is important. Your content and case studies are important. Your website design is important. Your clarity, professionalism and all that jazz is important.

But NONE of that matters if you don’t understand the target market’s problem well enough to articulate so that the potential prospect base can recognize themselves. With no self-identification, there is no way that a prospect can possibly devote their time or energy to finding a solution.

GTM kind of feels like a destination, sort of “Kids, get in the car! We are gonna Go To Market!” But IMHO (ok, maybe IMNSHO (In My Not So Humble Opinion)) GTM doesn’t start with a messaging strategy, or a distribution strategy, or thinking for a second about DKIM, SPF and mailbox warming.

It starts with an UNDERSTANDING STRATEGY.

GTU - Get To Understanding - is the real job here. There is no market to go to without showing the depth of your understanding.

Your focus should be on creating moments of market awareness during which the right people in the market raise their eyes and pay attention.

That doesn’t happen through cold email templates or ad swipe files. It happens though understanding problems well enough to create messages deserving of attention. Attention is the currency you earn when what you say is radically relevant. It crowds out other messages.

Your GTM motion converts that attention into engagement and your sales process converts engagement into mutually beneficial relationships.

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