8 Ways Data Plays a Critical Role in Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Whether you are launching a new product or service in an established market, or seeking out an entirely new market, one thing is certain—you will need a solid Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy, and your strategy will need the support of exceptional data. A recent survey of B2B sales and marketing leaders found that top performers enhance their GTM efforts by leveraging customer account data (firmographics, intent, etc.) to accomplish the following goals:

• 59% use data to prioritize which accounts to pursue
• 55% use data in developing competitive intelligence
• 49% use data to personalize messages and outreach

Data Challenges to GTM Success

 While the GTM movers and shakers are well-aware of the competitive edge data provides, many are still plagued by data challenges and complexities, including:

• 59% struggle with missing or incomplete data
• 56% struggle with dirty, out-of-date, duplicate and poor-quality data
• 40% struggle with disconnected and siloed data resources
• 32% struggle with turning the data they collect into actions to perform

8 Correlations Between Quality Data and GTM Success

Below, we’ve listed the eight steps of a standard GTM strategy, and shared how each step is wholly dependent on your ability to execute it with data that is consistent (standardized, normalized, etc.), current, correct, centralized, complete, enriched, utterly reliable, and ready-to-go to market.

1. Identify the Opportunity/Determine Value Proposition – The idea for your product or service is born out of observing a need you perceive customers to have and the value that your product can bring to them. To ascertain whether your idea is a winner, you must perform research to determine the market demand. Of course, all research requires high quality data in order to understand the potential opportunity and make the right decisions as you move forward.
2. Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)/Determine Target Audience – When you describe the perfect customer for your product, you are essentially amassing data in order to get a better picture of who they are, so you can better understand them and what it is they want and need. To do this properly, you need to collect a lot of data, such as: demographic, firmographic, behavior and buying intent, predictive personality profiles, etc.   
3. Perform a Competitive Analysis — There’s a proverb that states, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” On that cheery note, it is essential that you conduct market research that takes into consideration how your competitors are attempting to meet the need your product or service promises to fulfill. In performing a competitive analysis, Asana recommends using competitors’ websites and SEO analysis tools like Ahrefs, to deep-dive into the data on their service offerings and marketing strategies. 
4. Develop the Product Promise — In this step you are charged with determining the messaging that will resonate with each customer and cause them to buy into what you’re selling. Here again, you will need a wealth of enriched customer data to determine what aspect of your product appeals most to each customer. Since there are multiple buyers in a B2B sale, there will also be a diverse number of messages you need to convey, which can feel overwhelming, but this is where the magic of automated personalization comes in and makes the impossible simple to execute.
5. Map the Customer Journey — In planning how your ideal customer will go from “aware of” to “completely infatuated” with your product or service you will need to create a customer journey map. The good news is you can use the data from steps one and two of your GTM to develop your map. What’s more, we have a couple of blogs that can help you: 1) Develop a Cross Platform Customer Journey Map and 2)  5 Steps to Mastering the Art of Customer Journey Mapping.
6. Choose Customer Channels — Before you develop a brilliant multi-channel campaign that effectively takes your product to market, it’s important to refer back to your data on the channels your customers prefer, and use that information to prioritize how your marketing campaign dollars will be spent. These days it is vital to have a messaging tool in your tech ecosystem that enables you to quickly add the channels you need and automate the process of sending the right message, to the right person, on the right channel, at just the right time.
7. Enable Sales — The humans entrusted to take your product to market (a.k.a. your sales team) need to be equipped with the high-points of all the pertinent information you have gathered, such as who the ideal customer is, how the competition sizes up, what research has shown to be the most compelling motivations for purchases for different customer profiles, etc. You will also want to give them a sense of ownership of the product’s success by providing them with a library of customizable campaigns they can personalize and send to prospects.
8. Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — Marketing is a science and therefore its success is measurable. Depending on the specific goals of your GTM strategy, you will need to establish which variables will be considered the measurement of its success or failure. Monitoring this data via a centralized dashboard that allows you to create and share reports on-demand is a must, as it lightens your burden and enables you and your team to be more agile and informed in decision-making.

Let’s Get You Ready to Go-to-Market

At Sureshot, we have a team of experts and a portfolio of data solutions that are fully committed to helping you leverage your data and go-to-market with confidence. If you are ready to harness the power better data can bring to your marketing strategy and initiatives, contact us, or start by taking our FREE Martech Assessment.