What Go-To-Market means

The term is used in every executive committee and defined in none. It appears in strategic plans, in job titles, in the slides of the annual seminar. Ask what it covers: you will get as many answers as interlocutors, all plausible, all different.

This chapter sets a definition. Not the only one possible — but a definition that stands up for a company of 50 to 500 million euros, which is true of none of those in circulation.

The hidden assumption of the available definitions

The Go-To-Market literature is abundant, mature and remarkably well equipped. It is also written for someone other than you.

Open it: it speaks of launch, of market entry, of first customers, of speed of acquisition, of segments to conquer. It is built around a moment — the one where a new offering meets a market that does not yet know it. In it, Go-To-Market is a movement: a sequence, with a beginning, an intensity, and an end called traction.

This frame is coherent. It simply assumes four things: that the product is new, that the market is still to be created, that the horizon is counted in quarters, and that there is patient capital to finance the gap. Remove these four hypotheses and the apparatus no longer applies. It does not become false — it becomes moot.

Yet your company is thirty years old. It sells a product its market knows, to customers it knows, in a sector that existed before it. It has no launch. It never had a launch.

It has a Go-To-Market all the same.

Your Go-To-Market exists. It was never decided.

That is the observation this chapter rests on, and I give it for what it is: the finding of a practitioner in the executive committee, not that of a study.

In an established company, the Go-To-Market was not designed. It sedimented. A segment addressed in 2009 because a client came along. A pricing grid inherited from an executive long since gone. A distributor listed for a reason no one can any longer reconstruct. A value narrative written by a sales director who is no longer there. Thirty years of decisions taken one by one, each reasonable in its moment, never reread together.

It is a Go-To-Market. It works — the company is alive. It produces revenue, it keeps teams busy, it holds market share. And no one has ever written it down.

The difference with the company that is launching is therefore not that it has one and you do not. It is that it was compelled to formulate it in order to raise funds, whereas you were spared from doing so — because yours was already there when you arrived.

The definition

Go-To-Market is the set of decisions by which a company makes its offering accessible to a market — and, in doing so, tells that market what it is.

The sentence has two clauses, and the second is the one missing everywhere else.

The first describes a mechanic: making accessible. It is measured in conversion, in cost of acquisition, in cycle length. It is the subject of all the existing literature, and that literature handles it well.

The second describes an emission: those same decisions say something. A price says something. A refused segment says something. A chosen channel says something. They are read, and their reading does not depend on the intention of whoever made them.

A definition that stops at the first clause is not incomplete: it is misleading, because it lets you believe that a Go-To-Market that converts is a Go-To-Market that works. That is the subject of the next chapter, and it is the subject of this cahier.

The four questions

A Go-To-Market answers four questions, and four only. To whom — which segments are served, and, which amounts to the same thing, which are not. What — which offering, in what form, with what limits. Through where — direct sales, network, distribution, prescription, competitive tenders. At what price — the grid, and above all what is actually invoiced.

A fifth question hangs about everywhere: with what words? The discourse, the positioning, the promise, the storytelling. It is, in most companies, the only one of the five worked on in committee — and it is the least important. It costs nothing, so it proves nothing. Your first four decisions speak louder than your fifth, and they speak first.

What Go-To-Market is not

It is not your marketing plan. Marketing is an instrument of the Go-To-Market, not its perimeter. Confusing the two makes a single department carry what belongs to a committee.

It is not your sales organisation. The organisation executes the Go-To-Market. It can execute it faithfully and contradict it — that is even the most frequent case.

It is not your strategy. Strategy says where the company is going. Go-To-Market says how the market meets it. A sound strategy served by an illegible Go-To-Market produces a company that is right and that no one understands.

It is not a project. It has neither beginning nor end. It is the permanent state of the relationship between your offering and your market. That is why it is not launched: it is reread.

What follows from this

If Go-To-Market is a set of decisions, and if those decisions emit, then a company that has never written its Go-To-Market is not a silent company.

It is a company that has been emitting without knowing it, for thirty years, what thirty years of unreread decisions have ended up saying about it.