What Is a Go-To-Market Motion?

What Is a Go-To-Market Motion?

A go-to-market motion is a company’s plan for getting its product in front of customers or clients. There are several different go-to-market motions that companies use when planning their go-to-market roadmap. These approaches include: 

• Bottom-up: The bottom-up approach is also referred to as a product-led growth go-to-market motion. The bottom-up go-to-market motion involves offering a version of your product to customers to try to entice them into choosing to pay for a more premium version. The product sells itself, with simple onboarding and an easy-to-use interface, and customers choose to upgrade to use more advanced features. Marketing departments typically do the heavy lifting in helping customers discover the product. Once enough people are using the free version, a sales team can be utilized to help upsell them the premium version. 
• Middle-out: The middle-out approach utilizes some product-led growth and also a sales team to discern prospects with the potential to land larger contracts. Companies that use the middle out approach involve sales teams earlier in the product growth cycle than those that use the bottom-up approach. Companies that use a middle-out go-to-market motion usually have a product that is more technical and requires more long-term management from a customer success department. 
• Top-down: The top-down approach has become less popular in recent years but involves a sales team identifying prospects at the C-suite level who make decisions on what their companies or departments will use. While the top-down go-to-market motion usually results in the highest contract values, it takes considerably longer to close these contracts. 

The product-led or bottom-up go-to-market motion has transformed the way B2B companies sell their products by introducing a free option that helps customers test the technology before paying for it.