The 3 Core Engagement Elements Required for a Successful B2B GTM Strategy

While there’s no such thing as an “ultimate template” for a go-to-market (GTM) strategy that addresses all potential business needs, companies do need a methodology in place to ensure they’re building an effective plan. Companies like Forrester offer recommendations on the types of “core elements” that should be included in a GTM strategy, to ensure true market alignment. 

According to them, a successful B2B GTM architecture requires a focus on three distinct areas: 

• The market strategy (segments and routes)
• The buyer strategy (buyers, their needs, and offerings)
• The engagement strategy (personas, journeys, and messaging)

The engagement strategy layer is where companies need to focus when designing the critical deliverables that will guide and support go-to-market teams. Let’s take a closer look at the three essential elements of a strong GTM engagement strategy. 

Element 1: Clear B2B Buyer Personas

One of the factors that makes developing a strong go-to-market strategy so complex for B2B businesses, is that the “consumers” they’re targeting are rarely just individual people. Most business purchases aren’t made by a single person. Decisions are made by entire teams of stakeholders, all of whom have to agree on the right solution for their company. 

This means in order to connect with these groups on a deeper level, business leaders need to build more comprehensive buyer personas for their sales, marketing, and customer service teams, focusing on all of the critical members that might be involved in a buying group. 

This starts with identifying the decision makers that hold the most value in a business for your company. For instance, a SaaS platform provider doesn’t just need to get the attention of a CEO, they also need to earn the approval of the IT executive, the chief financial officer, and other stakeholders. To generate the right results:

• Understand the decision triggers: Approach the companies you’ve worked with in the past, or interview potential customers to find out more about the people that purchasing decisions go through. How do the companies evaluate the products or solutions they want to buy, who’s responsible for signing off on the final purchase?
• Explore goals and pain points: The priorities and pain points of each decision-maker you interact with will vary. While the CEO might be focused on simply improving productivity in the business, the CFO might want to find ways of reducing operating costs. Find out what drives each key stakeholder to make decisions. 
• Find your champions and influencers: The bigger the sales accounts you aim to convert, the more corporate culture and politics will be involved in purchasing decisions. This makes it crucial to find the champions and influencers within your target account who can help drive the choices of B2B decision-makers. 

Most importantly, treat your personas as ever-evolving and dynamic. Collect feedback and insights from your existing customers and accounts as often as possible, so you can update your profiles over time. This should ensure you don’t fall behind the competition.

Element 2: Comprehensive Buyer Journey Maps

In the modern world of B2B sales, the traditional “sales funnel” is quickly being replaced by complex and comprehensive buyer journeys. These journeys can include various stages and touchpoints. What’s more, much of the journey of today’s B2B buyers happens independently, without the support of marketing and sales teams. 

Actionable engagement strategies in your Go-To-Market plan rely on your ability to understand every stage of the buyer journey, and where the most crucial touchpoints are. The more holistic and informative your buyer journey maps are, the easier it will be to create content, programs, and tactics that keep customers engaged, and convince them to buy. 

To create your buyer journey maps, you’ll need to conduct extensive customer research. You can:

• Conduct interviews with existing customers: Speak to your existing customers in-depth about how they found your solution, what influenced their decision-making, and how they’ve researched similar offerings in the past. 
• Create focus groups: Use focus groups to define the kind of questions customers ask when looking for your products and solutions, and what information they need to make educated decisions. Find out what objections they might have to making a purchase.
• Send out surveys: Gather holistic feedback from a wide range of consumers with simple surveys that ask questions like “How did you find our business”, “What channels do you use to research products”, and “When do you feel ready to speak to a salesperson?” 

Keep in mind that competitor research and in-depth market analysis can also help you with building your journey maps. Your competitor’s go-to-market strategy might not be ideal for your business, but it can give you insights into the touchpoints you need to consider. 

Element 3: Audience-Focused Messaging

Finally, the key to engaging customers, once you’ve identified your target audience, and mapped their journey, is creating the right content to guide them through that purchasing process, and towards your product. Unfortunately, we’re still living in a world where many B2B companies continue to create messaging strategies that focus too much on product features and functions. 

To really engage customers, and motivate them to purchase a solution, you need to switch your content’s focus to the needs of your target audience. Customers aren’t looking for “accounting software”, they’re looking for a solution that saves them time on accounting processes, reduces errors, or helps them to improve their company’s financial health. 

Craft your marketing message with a focus on:

• Clear pain points: Address the specific issues that customers face without your solution and the impact it has on them and their business. Highlight the “risk” of ignoring the problem your customers have, by demonstrating the downsides of inactivity. 
• Value opportunities: Tell your customers what your solution will help them accomplish, whether that’s saving time on business processes, reducing operating costs, or simply improving productivity and company culture. 
• Different personas: Build your messaging strategy to address the unique needs of each of the personas you’ve identified. Answer the most common questions each of your customers has, and look for ways to eliminate potential objections.

Focus your messaging strategy around showing customers that you have their best interests at heart, and pay attention to how each messaging campaign delivers results. Monitor your engagement rates from social media, content marketing, and email campaigns, to help drive future decisions about the kind of communication strategy you need. 

Mastering the Art of Engagement in your GTM Strategy

There are various factors that make up a successful Go-To-Market strategy. You need to know how you’re going to enter the market and present your products to customers, and you need a strategy for how you’re going to position your product in the market, against your competitors. 

However, it’s important not to overlook one of the most important elements of GTM success: engaging your audience. Without the right strategy for engagement, you can’t develop the relationships you need to ensure B2B success. Relationships in this landscape are built around a consistent approach to driving engagement. 

With the right customer profiles, journey maps, and audience-focused messaging, you can ensure you have the tools you need to forge lasting connections with your audience.