Things to Keep in Mind While formulating a Go-To Market Strategy

By: Aditi Olemann, Director, Cashfree Payments

In her career spanning over 12 years, Aditi has handled key roles across various companies such as KAIST, Schlumberger, Tata Sons, and Roche, prior to joining Cashfree in 2021. Additionally, he is the Industry Advisory Board Member for School of Entrepreneurship at Rishihood University and even co-founded a company named Myelin Foundry, a deep tech company providing edge based AI solutions for video and voice data.

Women Entrepreneur recently got a chance to interact with Aditi Olemann, wherein she shared her insights on the various aspects pertaining Go-to-market strategy, especially in today’s dynamic business scenario. Below are the excerpts from the exclusive interview

Challenges facing the companies while implementing a Go-to-market strategy and the role of competitive analysis in GTM

Generally, most of the startup entrepreneurs and leaders of organizations foraying into newer regions say that the biggest challenge in terms of GTM strategy is the inability to clearly identify their target customers. Having an effective GTM strategy is paramount for any company that is launching a new product or taking its existing product into a new geography. As a result, companies that have a one-size-fits-all approach and fail to offer a customized experience to each of their clients. The next step after identifying the target customers is the branding & positioning of the company among their target audience. Also, the ability to gather customer feedback about the product in the quickest possible way and iterate the product accordingly is another major challenge that most businesses face in today’s times.

Competitive analysis plays a critical role in every organization’s GTM strategy, as it enables business to have a bird’s eye view of the industry and get insights about customer pain points and preferences. This way, companies can have a clear visibility of what might and what might not work for that particular customer segment, thus, saving itself a lot of time and money.

Few ways to measure the success of their business strategy.

There are a multitude of frameworks available in the market today to measure the effectiveness of a business strategy. All these frameworks are formulated by well-renowned industry experts and are inclusive of all the aspects that are necessary to effectively measure the success of a business strategy. While formulating a business strategy, business leaders must ensure to have all the necessary KPIs in place to precisely measure the effectiveness of that strategy once it is implemented. Also, having an efficient customer feedback system and carefully monitoring customer attrition/retention rates are few other effective way businesses can ascertain the success of their business strategy. Lastly, employee satisfaction & retention is also yet another key metrics to measure the impact of their business strategy.

How can leaders stay updated with the market trends to device effective business strategies?

For any business leader, it is very important to stay updated with the ever changing market dynamics.  Networking with other industry professionals also helps a leader to clearly understand the pulse of the market. Furthermore, staying active on professional networking platforms like LinkedIn not only helps the leaders to network easily with other professionals, but also enables them to have a decent knowledge of other industries. This way, leaders can easily decide on implementing new technologies if ever the need may arise in the future.

B2B marketing tactic to convert cold sales leads to warm ones? How can a leader manage different decision makers within a B2B organization?

In order to convert cold sales leads into warm ones, the most effective marketing technique in the B2B segment is to create though leadership with continuous learning in terms of building and sharing knowledge. This will enable the organization to become an expert in the field and thus become the most sought-after company in market. Thus, becoming a top-of-the-mind choice through thought leadership is the best strategy to convert your leads especially in the enterprise B2B space. B2B buying is a very complex process involving multiple decision makers from various departments. So understanding the pain point & perspective of each decision maker is paramount in formulating a sales approach.

Few strategies about how a business leader can handle objections and negotiate in B2B sales.

In terms of negotiation, the key lesson that I have learnt being in the B2B space is that negotiation has to be collaborative and there is no winning or losing in this. This is because you can never win as a business if your customer ends-up on the losing side. Whatever conclusion we come-up with has to be beneficial for all the stakeholders involved in the business. Thus, I always ensure too approach negotiation with a collaborative approach instead of viewing it as a competition. Also, one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t apply for any B2B negotiation due to the diverse nature of customers’ demands & preferences. Furthermore, always keep in mind that negotiation is not always about money; it also includes many other key essentials such as quality of service, personalization and many others.

On the other hand, when a company faces any objection from its customers pertaining to its offerings, it has to be transparent and be very clearly about what it can provide and what it cannot. Also, every organization must view objections as an opportunity to showcase your expertise and strengthen their customer trust.