These are some reflections I've had over the past couple of months on go to market for products.
Nothing formal, just getting some thoughts down on paper.
It's a checklist of sorts to better scope solutions, competition and so on.
This scopes down to the following high level process:
Research / Background
- Who writes the final check?
- What's the cultural in that organization or that part of the organization? How are buying decisions made?
Decisions
- What's the most important question in that domain or for our business? How can we resolve that?
Some failure modes
- Failure to launch - you don't even get anything off the ground. While this isn't what you want, it's actually kind of nice because it means that it was not the right direction anyways.
- Evidence goes against you - in the process of answering that most important question, the chips start stacking against you and you and the team realize it's not worth comtinuing - at least not in that particular direction.
- Lightning in a bottle - you make it happen, one way or the other, but when it comes time to replicate - it's 10x the effort. This is a danger zone because there are false summits and false promises.
The approach
Systematic experimentation is kind of the only way and it has to be with a strong outbound process unless you've got an organic engine going that you can use for data generation.
In the b2b domain, you're probably going to need to go outbound to prove it out.
It's iterating on those questions, then establishing the repeatability that's critical. The point is to try and get some baseline metrics that you can start hill climbing to improve.