Go-to-Market Strategy — Diogo Serino

The Definition

GTM is a system, not a launch plan

Most "go-to-market plans" are really launch checklists: a press release, some social posts, a product hunt page. A real GTM strategy is a system that defines who you're selling to, what problem you're solving, how you'll reach them, and what you'll measure to know if it's working.

Launch checklist (not GTM)

Press release published
Social media posts scheduled
Product Hunt page submitted
Email sent to existing list
"We're live!" announcement to team

Activity without strategy. Generates noise but not systematic customer acquisition.

GTM strategy

ICP defined with firmographic and behavioural criteria
Positioning mapped against 3 specific alternatives
Primary channel selected based on where ICP buys
Conversion funnel instrumented end-to-end
Success defined: €X ARR in 90 days with Y% retention

Systematic. Every decision is traceable to a hypothesis about the target customer.

Ideal Customer Profile

Defining exactly who you're selling to

The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the single most important input to a GTM strategy. Everything else (messaging, channel, pricing, sales process) flows from it. A vague ICP produces a diffuse strategy that works for nobody.

The ICP test: Can you name 10 specific companies (B2B) or specific people (B2C) who are your ICP right now? If not, your ICP is still an aspiration, not a definition.

Firmographics (B2B)

The structural characteristics of your best customer. Industry, company size (employees, revenue), geography, funding stage, tech stack, team structure. Example: "SaaS companies, 10–50 employees, Series A funded, EU-based, with a dedicated growth team." The more specific, the more useful, and the more honest about who you're actually serving.

Psychographics

How they think and make decisions. What do they read? How do they evaluate new tools? Do they buy top-down (executive decision) or bottom-up (team adoption first)? Are they data-driven or intuition-led? Psychographics determine your messaging tone, channel choice, and sales motion, arguably more than firmographics do.

Pain triggers

What event makes them start looking for a solution? ICPs rarely buy proactively. They buy reactively, after a trigger. A new hire. A missed quarter. A competitor launch. A regulatory change. Knowing the trigger event tells you when to reach out (timing), what to say (messaging), and where to be present (channel). Trigger-based outreach converts dramatically better than broadcast messaging.

Positioning

Positioning: what you are in the mind of the buyer

April Dunford's definition: positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares deeply about. It's not your tagline. It's the context in which buyers evaluate you.

01

Define your competitive alternatives

Not your "competitors," but what buyers actually do today when they don't use your product. The alternative might be a spreadsheet, a manual process, an internal tool, or a combination of three different apps. Your positioning is always relative to these alternatives, not to an imagined set of direct competitors.

02

Identify your differentiated value

What do you do uniquely well compared to the alternatives? Not "better" in every dimension. That's marketing speak. Specifically better in one or two dimensions that the ICP cares about deeply. Faster to implement? More accurate? Doesn't require an IT team? Works natively with Slack? Focus on the one thing you're genuinely best at.

03

Map to the value the buyer cares about

Features are not value. "Real-time sync" is a feature. "Your team always has the same data, with no more meeting prep time or version conflicts" is value. Every feature should be translated into the business outcome it enables for the ICP. Position on outcomes, not capabilities.

04

Write a positioning statement

Format: "For [ICP], [product] is the [category] that [differentiated value], unlike [alternative], which [limitation]." This statement is for internal alignment, not for marketing copy. It gives the whole team a shared frame: product builds to it, marketing translates it, sales uses it to qualify leads.

Channels

Channel strategy: where you meet your buyer

The right channel is the one your ICP already uses to find and evaluate solutions like yours. Channel choice is not a marketing decision. It's a product-market insight. The ICP's buying behaviour determines your distribution strategy.

Direct Sales

Outbound outreach (cold email, LinkedIn, calls) combined with inbound follow-up. High touch, high cost, essential for enterprise deals. The rule: if your ACV (annual contract value) is above €10K, you probably need a sales team. Below €1K, self-serve is more efficient. Between €1K–€10K is where hybrid models emerge.

Product-Led Growth (PLG)

The product itself is the primary acquisition and conversion channel. Users discover the product, try it for free, and convert when they hit the value wall or need collaboration features. Requires a product with fast time-to-value, a natural sharing mechanism, and low friction onboarding. Slack, Figma, and Notion are canonical PLG examples.

Content & Inbound

Attract buyers through content that ranks for the problems your product solves. SEO, YouTube, podcasts, LinkedIn thought leadership. Slow to build, but creates compounding organic traffic that reduces CAC over time. Best for products where buyers search for solutions before they know any brand name exists.

Launch

How to structure a launch

Launches are not binary. There are multiple phases, each with a different goal and a different audience. Most companies skip straight to the full launch and miss the learning that earlier phases generate.

01

Closed Alpha: internal and design partners

10–20 hand-picked users who represent the ICP and have agreed to give structured feedback. Goal: validate core assumptions about the problem and solution before any polish. These users see a broken, incomplete product, and their feedback shapes the MVP, not the product roadmap.

02

Closed Beta: invite-only, warm leads

100–500 users from the waitlist or outbound ICP targeting. Goal: validate that the core value proposition works at small scale and identify the friction points in onboarding. Instrument everything: activation rate, time-to-value, D7 retention. A beta that shows strong retention signals is the best possible basis for a full launch.

03

Public Launch: activate all channels simultaneously

With validated onboarding and measurable retention, activate all channels: Product Hunt, press outreach, paid acquisition, community, partner announcements. The goal is to spike awareness and feed the top of the funnel. Without a validated funnel underneath, a big launch is expensive noise.

Metrics

How to measure GTM performance

Watch out for these

Time to First Customer: How long from launch to first paying customer (not trial, not free, but paying). This is the most important early signal. If it takes more than 30 days post-launch to find a paying customer, the ICP, positioning, or channel is wrong, not the product.

CAC Payback Period: How many months of revenue are needed to recover the cost of acquiring one customer. Healthy SaaS targets sub-12 months. Above 18 months means the GTM motion is too expensive relative to the contract value. You need a cheaper channel or a higher ACV.

Sales Cycle Length: Average days from first contact to closed deal. A 90-day enterprise sales cycle requires a very different GTM than a 3-day self-serve motion. Tracking this by ICP segment reveals which customers convert fastest, and where to focus GTM energy in the early days when runway is limited.

Win Rate: Percentage of qualified opportunities that close. Below 20% in B2B usually indicates a positioning or ICP problem. You're reaching the right people but failing to convince them. Above 40% often signals underpricing or underestimating demand. You could be growing faster.

Takeaway

GTM is a hypothesis, not a plan

Start narrow, then expand

The most common GTM mistake is targeting too broadly. Start with the tightest possible ICP: the 50 companies most likely to buy. Win them. Learn from them. Then expand outward. "Land and expand" beats "spray and pray" every time.

Sales learns before marketing scales

Before scaling paid acquisition, do the sales calls yourself. Until a founder or PM has personally closed 10 customers, they don't understand why people buy. That understanding is what makes marketing copy, channel selection, and pricing defensible, not intuition.

GTM never ends

GTM is not a launch event. It's a continuous motion. As the market evolves, new competitors enter, and the product matures, the ICP, positioning, and channel mix all need to evolve with it. The companies that win are those that treat GTM as an ongoing discipline, not a one-time project.

Go-to-MarketStrategy