Tag: digital-marketing

“Moving Fast” is killing your GTM

I’ve been working with more GTM teams again, and I’m seeing consistent self-sabotage that kills their messaging from the start. They’re “moving fast” and skipping basic research and positioning strategy. This guarantees mediocre results.

Here’s a common scenario. You want to build an outbound campaign targeting their “IT Buyer” ICP. You hand off an ICP profile with Name, Title and Company and a couple use cases to mention. 

Pretty standard, right? 

But when you start to build, the gaps start to show: 

  • What use cases are we prioritizing to this vertical?
  • How are we positioning to this specific company size and maturity profile?
  • What’s their current tech stack?
  • How are we positioning against the incumbent or other named competitors? 
  • Are they genuinely ready to buy, or just browsing?
  • Which channels will actually cut through the noise?

If you can’t answer these questions, you have major blank spaces in your go to market strategy.

These are the four strategy gaps kill your GTM strategy and performance:

  • Product Clarity: Most teams struggle with answering the fundamental question: “How does our solution solve X problem for Y person?” They can list a ton of features but can’t explain why any of it matters to the specific human who needs it most. And then they fumble explaining why their approach beats competitors.
  • Competitive Intelligence: Surface-level competitive knowledge is dangerous. They check the big brands box and skip the niche competitors that even a simple web search would uncover. That’s the “knows enough to be dangerous” zone. It’s false confidence and buyers smell that from a mile away. Deep competitive knowledge builds confidence that comes through in the content and conversations.
  • Contextual Content: Shallow ICPs limit your content and guarantee you get ignored. Rich behavioral and contextual signals transform your ICPs and make the rest of your messaging and content stand out. A robust ICP should tell you:
    • Core customer pain points
    • Specific use cases that resonate
    • Compelling reasons to choose you
    • Actual market readiness
    • Priority engagement channels
  • Behavioral ICPs: Most ICP builds stop at basic metrics: Geography. Revenue. Headcount. Title. This targeting is table stakes and commoditized. That’s not good enough. The real competitive advantage lives in behavioral signals that show true buying intent. Behavioral signals are the real GTM strategy gold that screams “ready to buy”:
    • Recent leadership hires
    • Active social engagement
    • Competitor product follows
    • Detailed product reviews
    • Engagement with industry content

This is what a high value actionable ICP looks like:

US IT Lead

  • VC-Backed, $100MM Revenue
  • Raised funding in last 90 days
  • Currently using specific competitor technologies
  • Showing hiring signals (job listings, social posts)
  • Active social engagement across LinkedIn, Reddit, industry forums
  • Following key industry competitors and thought leaders
  • Confirmed (4) contact pathways
  • Demonstrable site or social engagement in last 30-90 days

Paints a different picture, right?

The best part? This level of insight is available without slowing you down. 

With the right AI-assisted workflow you can get:

  • Deep Marketing and Competitor Research
  • Precise Market and ICP Data
  • Build Actionable Insights
  • Tailor your GTM Assets to the ICP + Use Case + Individual LevelWanting to “move fast” isn’t a valid excuse when anyone can do it right the first time now.

Go-To-Market Positioning Sprint

Let’s talk positioning.

A lot of people say you shouldn’t compare yourself to the competition.

That’s nice thing to write on the internet, but it’s totally disconnected from the reality of anyone working in a sales, marketing, product, comms or leadership role. So, pretty much everyone.

In reality, we need to know everything about our competitive set. What’s working and what’s not? Their strengths, our weaknesses and opportunities to exploit. It all goes into how we position, who we target, how we build a sales pitch, an ad, in all of our content and even when we’re onboarding or upselling our existing customers.

Yet, more often that not, I talk to teams that haven’t done even the most basic positioning exercises. And it shows.

So, let’s fix that.

I use this progressive list of questions to guide positioning in some way or another in pretty much every client engagement. It’s a short sprint that’s useful across the org, especially for non-marketing teams like Sales and Product. Work however you want. Some like to work in this same doc. I like to use a workbook template I’br built over the years. I find it faster for filtering and focus when sharing to multiple teams.

The full guide is below, but feel free to grab this doc and my workbook template as well.

Ways To Use

Go To Market + Product Marketing: marketing, sales and product teams can use these to build the key inputs for all things marketing and sales content and assets.

ABM/Lifecycle Marketing: sales, marketing and CX/CS teams use these as inputs to building out the targeting, messaging and offers for your target audiences, both prospects and existing customers. 

Onboarding/New Customer Welcome: sales, marketing and CX/CS teams can take advantage of the early relationship attention to re-educate and reinforce the buy decision using the key positioning points from these sheets.

Audit/Optimization: need a fresh look at how you’re positioned in the market, how it’s changed and how you’ve changed? Go back through this exercise to update the inputs that will refresh the rest of your assets. 

Positioning Inputs

  1. Core Problem: What problem(s)/challenge(s) are you solving?
    1. Shoot for at least three tangible problems. These could be:
      • Problems your specific product/solution addresses
      • Industry-wide problems
      • Customer-experienced problems
  1. Competitive Landscape: Who is the competitive set?
    1. List 3-4 companies that provide a reasonably similar solution to these problems.
      • Document with main site links and 1-2 top search results examples of each for later reference. 
    2. List 2-3 strengths and 2-3 weaknesses for each of these companies.
      • Product-specific strengths/weaknesses?
      • Company-level capabilities?
      • Pricing and market positioning insights?
  2. Your Thing: What are your solutions?
    • What is your product/service? 
    • What is your origin story or motivation for building this? 
    • Describe how your thing solves the 3-4 key problems
    • How does it address these? 
    • What outcomes does it provide? 
  3. Your Strengths/Unique Value Proposition(s)
    1. Side by side to the competitive set, what are your unique strengths and potential weaknesses against them?
    2. Summarize and rank by value. These are your unique value propositions. 
  4. Target Audience: Who cares about this? Who will use this and what value do they get?
    1. Think of at least 3-4 target buyer types. Don’t start with demographics. Start with business vertical, example company, company role, key issues/challenges, decision criteria.
  5. General Positioning
    1. List your target buyers. Map their challenges/needs to how your product specifically solves it for them. Describe the value they’ll get from your product for each of these versions. 
  6. Revenue Model: what way(s) do you plan to make money? How much will is cost? 
  7. Go To Market Base: what channels and tactics can you use to reach your customers?
    1. Customize the list to each of the buyer types from above. 
    2. Add 1-2 example tactics in each channel.
  8. Unfair Advantage: do you have one to leverage?
    1. Examples to consider…
    2. First mover?
    3. Technical advantages?
    4. Team/founder-specific advantages?
    5. Market access or network advantages?
    6. Unique insights or methodologies?

Target Audience/ICP Build

  1. Refining How You Define Your Thing
    1. What is your product/service? 
    2. What is your origin story or motivation for building this? 
    3. What problems does it address?
    4. How does it address these? 
    5. What outcomes does it provide? 
  2. Defining Your Audience
    1. Who has the same problem that your thing solves?
      1. Be specific and think of the different types of people. IT, Finance, OPS, Procurement, Founder, VP, Director, Marketing, etc. Each has a different set of needs and problems that relate to your product. 
    2. What  kinds of companies do these people work for? Use reference brands.

Tactical Positioning Build 

  1. Define your specific solution.
    1. Build a matrix that maps the specific buyer type to their issues and the solutions your thing provides. Be specific as it relates to their POV. 
    2. What outcomes can each of these buyer types expect from your thing? Be specific across a few dimensions and how it relates to their business. Think $/Commercial, Operational, Technical, etc. 
  2. Define your tailored offers.
    1. Think beyond cost here. Tell the richer story. Build a specific offer linking each of your problems, solutions and expected outcomes for your product/service. 

Have at it. I hope this helps.

And if you have any questions or want to work together…

Get In Touch: Sean Wilkins