A well-executed B2B Go-to-Market strategy can make the difference between a successful market launch and a failed one. Even the most experienced companies can make mistakes, and we’re here to help you prevent and correct them.
Poor market research
Go-to-Market strategies must include comprehensive market research. Many companies overlook this crucial step, leading to a failure to identify key competitors and diminishing the value they deliver when entering the market.
Underestimating the competition
Neglecting thorough competitor research can lead to a lack of differentiation, ultimately resulting in missed business opportunities.
On the other hand, conducting comprehensive market research during the preparation of the Go-to-Market strategy helps uncover valuable opportunities that the business can capitalize on. Once these opportunities are identified, it’s crucial to plan, allocate, and manage resources realistically. Given that it’s not always feasible to pursue every opportunity, prioritizing resources toward those with the greatest potential impact is essential for maximizing business success.
When developing a B2B Go-to-Market strategy, it’s essential to consider not only direct competitors (those offering similar products or services) but also indirect competitors (those offering different solutions that meet the same needs or desires) and legacy competitors (outdated solutions that may still be in use but are poorly adapted to the current market). All of these competitors should be identified, with a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, including their value propositions, pricing models, operations, logistics, and more. If professional research is not feasible, B2B SaaS businesses can use platforms like G2 or Capterra for basic competitor analysis by comparing different dimensions of various software options.
Disconnect with the ideal customer
Identifying the ideal customer for your value proposition is vital for a successful B2B Go-to-Market strategy. It’s about understanding who benefits most from your solution and knowing their needs.
In B2B, the ideal customer usually refers to companies, which means multiple people with different roles (user, prescriber, influencer, decision-maker, etc.) are involved in the decision-making process. Each role has its own incentives and reasons for buying or not buying a solution. When designing a Go-to-Market strategy, it’s crucial to understand these different motivations for each buyer persona in the purchasing committee. This understanding allows you to tailor your value proposition to each persona, ultimately improving the conversion rate from potential customer to actual customer.
Recommendations:
- Focus your market research on gaining a deeper understanding of your target customer, known in B2B marketing as the Ideal Client Profile (ICP). Consider their primary pain points and how these issues impact their daily activities.
- When presenting your value proposition, personalize your marketing campaigns to address the specific incentives, benefits, and motivations that drive each buyer persona to advance in the sales cycle.
- Leverage data analysis from primary sources, or if necessary, from third-party sources, to gather insights into your ideal customer’s purchasing behavior across different phases of the sales cycle.
Focus on information that doesn't matter
Relying on inadequate or out-of-date market data can result in poor decision-making in your B2B Go-to-Market strategy. Similarly, getting overwhelmed by the vast amount of data available today can be just as detrimental, especially if the data doesn’t significantly impact your business.
The real challenge lies not only in obtaining quality data but also in identifying which data truly matters for the success of your B2B Go-to-Market strategy.
Recommendations:
- Avoid confirmation bias (focusing only on data that reinforces your initial hypotheses while dismissing the rest). Instead, broaden your perspective by seeking out information that challenges your ideas. Be critical of your value proposition to ensure it can address all possible objections from your ideal customer.
- Make sure to collect high-quality market data and validate and update it throughout all stages of creating your B2B Go-to-Market strategy.
- Ask the right questions to obtain the data you truly need to understand. Remember that many of the answers can be found in your buyer personas profiles, which will often serve as your guide.
Inappropriate communication of the value proposition
Many companies find it challenging to clearly articulate and communicate why they are the right solution for their ideal customers. This often results in unclear messaging that causes potential customers to lose interest quickly. Unfortunately, recognizing this mistake too late can lead to the failure of many B2B Go-to-Market strategies. However, this outcome is avoidable if the product and business are properly aligned from the start.
Lack of differentiation, commoditisation and price wars
When a value proposition isn’t clearly differentiated or superior to the alternatives available to your ideal customer, there’s a risk of becoming just another commodity. In such cases, purchasing decisions are driven primarily by price, leading to reduced profit margins and often sparking an unsustainable price war.
Recommendations:
- Build your B2B Go-to-Market strategy around a value proposition that clearly showcases your business’s competitive advantages.
- Accurately define your market segment, identify your competitors, and create high-value cases tailored to your ideal customers, ensuring they fully grasp the value your solution provides. This approach will put your B2B Go-to-Market strategy on the right track.
Ineffective communication
In B2B Go-to-Market strategies, effectively communicating the value proposition is just as crucial as developing a strong product or service. What makes B2B unique is it’s not only about achieving broad visibility; it’s also essential to ensure that each buyer persona perceives the value proposition as the best way to achieve their specific goals.
Recommendations:
- Tailor your messages to each buyer persona. For a technical audience, use language that is specific and detail-oriented. Conversely, if your buyer persona is more business-focused, emphasize the economic benefits of your value proposition.
- Use clear and direct language that effectively communicates what you offer and how it benefits them within the context of your B2B Go-to-Market strategy.
Incorrect distribution channel
Let’s explore two common ways wherein choosing the incorrect distribution channel can undermine the success of a B2B Go-to-Market strategy.
Inefficient selection of distribution channels
Choosing unprofitable channels for Go-to-Market strategies can result in low market visibility and missed business opportunities.
When selecting distribution channels for a product or service, it’s crucial to prioritize those that align with the needs and preferences of your ideal customer. Keep in mind that both can change over time, and it’s essential to adapt your business to these market shifts to avoid obsolescence and maintain competitiveness.
Recommendations:
- When designing your B2B Go-to-Market strategy, carefully assess the available distribution channels and prioritize those where your ideal customers are most likely to find you.
- If your distribution strategy involves third parties, make sure to maintain direct and continuous communication with your partners and distributors to prevent any gaps in your value chain.
- Additionally, evaluate whether outsourcing your distribution is truly beneficial, or if it would be more profitable to absorb those costs to maximize control over the entire customer experience.
- Ensure a robust logistics system that supports your strategic sales plan aligning, seamlessly with your overall commercial policy.
Poor customer experience
Failing to properly integrate communication channels can result in an inconsistent customer experience and the loss of users. Likewise, a product or service that is difficult to use or fails to meet customer expectations will lead to low retention rates and high churn rates, particularly in B2B SaaS businesses where exit barriers are low.
Recommendations:
- Develop a customer experience that coordinates and integrates all the necessary communication channels to offer a seamless, frictionless, and personalized customer experience. Eliminate unnecessary channels to focus your customer’s attention on what truly matters: your value proposition.
- Align your B2B Go-to-Market strategy towards multiple channels whenever it makes sense. Omnichannel strategies often deliver better results because today’s B2B buyers expect solutions similar to those they experience in B2C interactions. Your B2B marketing strategy should take inspiration from B2C customer experiences to meet these expectations.
- Leverage your distribution channels not only to deliver your service but also to gather feedback and data from your customers, enabling continuous improvement and personalization of the experience you offer. Instead of relying on surveys, establish systems that directly collect user behavior data.
Lack of prioritisation and coordination of resources
It’s a common yet critical mistake: failing to properly organize the available resources for a B2B Go-to-Market strategy often leads to suboptimal results. It’s essential to be realistic not only about the company’s financial resources but also about the human and technological resources that are either available or lacking.
Disconnection between Marketing and Sales
When teams are not aligned around the same goals for the Go-to-Market strategy, it’s common for team leaders to encounter issues like role redundancy among members and the misallocation of resources—investing too much in low-impact areas while neglecting critical ones. This misalignment makes it nearly impossible to achieve strategic objectives.
From the customer’s perspective, they often notice a lack of consistency in the messages they receive throughout their customer journey, which leads to confusion and negative perceptions of the brand and the value proposition offered.
From the customers’ perspective, they often perceive inconsistencies in the messages they receive throughout their customer journey, leading to confusion and negative impressions of the brand and its value proposition.
Internally, this lack of alignment can demotivate teams, as their efforts fail to produce tangible results, resulting in a decline in morale and productivity. Ultimately, the business suffers as ROI decreases and resources are depleted before objectives are met.
Recommendations:
- When defining your B2B Go-to-Market strategy, it’s essential to outline not only strategic objectives but also the milestones and success indicators that will help you assess whether you are on the right track.
- Fostering communication and collaboration between teams is not optional but mandatory when it comes to optimizing the performance of available resources. Cooperation between departments becomes exponentially easier when goals and tools are shared.
- Team leaders should consistently prioritize available resources based on objectives, applying the Pareto principle to focus efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
Missed opportunities for improvement in execution and work culture
Even with proper planning, poor execution or a lack of follow-up and coordination between resources can result in an ineffective implementation of Go-to-Market strategies. In this regard, it is crucial that the team responsible for deploying and developing the B2B Go-to-Market strategy is equipped with the necessary resources—financial, technical, know-how, and technology—to ensure success.
Recommendations:
- Accountability: Develop an action plan with clear objectives, ensuring each team understands the direction of their efforts rather than just focusing on specific tasks. This approach, known as accountability, is highly effective in managing teams as it shifts the focus from individual tasks to the outcomes of the work performed. It also facilitates the identification of gaps in execution and resource allocation, enabling continuous monitoring based on the metrics that truly matter during the deployment of the B2B Go-to-Market strategy.
Inadequate measurement and optimization
The phrase “What cannot be measured cannot be improved, and what is not improved always degrades,” attributed to the renowned British physicist and mathematician William T. Kelvin, should be approached with care. While the statement highlights the importance of measurement in any improvement process, it’s crucial to recognize the inherent risk in deciding what to measure and, consequently, what to manage.
In other words, selecting the right key metrics is far more critical to the success of a B2B Go-to-Market strategy than merely tracking them. Common pitfalls in executing a B2B marketing strategy include attempting to measure and manage everything or choosing metrics simply because “they are common.” In many cases, it doesn’t make sense to measure or manage everything, and doing so can even harm the business’s performance.
One of the most recent examples of this issue is Nike, whose shares dropped by more than 20% in June 2024, marking the worst day in its history as a publicly traded company. In an article, its former Director of Brand and Corporate Communications, Massimo Giunco, explained how marketing decisions based on incorrect data led to this significant setback.
Recommendations:
- As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, focus on what truly matters. Before setting the objectives for your B2B marketing strategy, ask yourself: “How do we need this strategy to contribute at a business level?”, “What do we hope to achieve in the short, medium, and long term with this strategy?”, and “If something were not going well during execution, what indicators would signal this to us?”
- Once you have a clear understanding of the metrics that truly matter, translate them into a control dashboard and establish a methodology for tracking these indicators. This will serve as your compass during the strategy’s implementation, allowing you to accurately gauge when things are going well and when they are not.
Biased interpretation of available data
Since the selection of metrics should be aligned with the strategic objectives of the business, these metrics will vary from one company to another and even from one stage of the company’s development to another. For example, in the early stages of a Go-to-Market strategy for a B2B SaaS company, the primary focus might be on acquiring new users, regardless of whether they are paying or not. However, after the initial months (or years, depending on the business strategy), the focus may shift towards converting those users into revenue-generating customers. In each case, the metrics to be tracked will differ accordingly.
Recommendations:
- Incorrect metrics can lead to undesirable consequences. It’s essential to ensure that the metrics you choose as indicators of success for your B2B Go-to-Market strategy truly reflect progress toward your intended goals. Consider how these metrics might be manipulated and whether there could be any unintended consequences. Carefully evaluate before continuously focusing on the usual metrics.
- Remember that customers and people are more than just numbers, and both the planning and management of B2B Go-to-Market strategies should always prioritize the customer. Recognize that some success indicators cannot be measured as precisely as you might wish, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored or that resources should be reduced for actions that generate them.
- When a metric becomes a goal, it often loses its effectiveness as a good metric. Be mindful of the risks this entails and avoid assuming causal relationships between variables that may be mere correlations or coincidences.
Decision-making without business vision
This is another critical area in the B2B Go-to-Market strategy. Decision-making can sometimes be clouded by a lack of business vision or by prioritizing issues that don’t significantly impact progress. To avoid this, it’s crucial to rely on high-quality data, supported by transparent and traceable data collection processes.
Recommendations:
- Avoid extrapolation bias. Be careful when drawing conclusions from a limited data set and applying them to broader and different situations. Do not oversimplify complex scenarios. In designing your Go-to-Market strategy, you may not always have all the data needed for definitive conclusions. However, this doesn’t mean you should make difficult-to-reverse decisions due to the lack of available data, nor should you reduce complex data to simplistic conclusions that miss important nuances for your business.
- Ensure that your results tracking system is aligned with the incentive structure of the teams involved in achieving those results.
- Implement a solid, transparent data structure that is shared by all the teams involved in your B2B Go-to-Market strategy.
- Make sure that the data you collect is properly processed to avoid misinterpretations when making critical decisions.
