 Hello everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining in on another product school webinar. This time we'll be talking about go-to-market strategy and we have 30 minutes together today and I'll try my best to see how we can do justice on this topic. Of course there are many different takes on this topic and I've chosen kind of the classical approach to go-to-market strategy and since I'm not sure what kind of audience we have today, I've tried to be more generic with the frameworks and I'll also try to frequently call out examples from both the B2C as well as the B2B site so that we kind of cover a wide variety of examples. So let's jump right in. So let me introduce myself. My name is Gopi. I'm a product manager at Microsoft. I'm part of the specialized workloads team at Azure and within this group I work to lead emerging technology and solutions where the goal is to evaluate and nurture new workloads from concept right up all the way to the pilot and private tribute. A little bit about myself. I started my journey in engineering. A few years later went to Berkeley to get my MBA and during the program made some switches in my career, went from engineering to technical marketing and then later into product management and along the way I worked for a few organizations so probably I'm a good resource to talk to in terms of like best practices for these organizations. So I worked at Oracle, Juniper, Amazon and now at Microsoft. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, you can always reach me on my email or LinkedIn. My email is right at the bottom of the screen. It's my first name Gopi underscore my last name Sunda Resan at Berkeley.edu. So just to set a little bit of context on what we're going to talk about, I did a talk back in product school a couple months ago and that was on the product management lifecycle. I would say that this talk kind of extends a bit from that but you don't have to have had to listen to that talk in order to follow what we're doing here today. So during the lifecycle talk, I had introduced an acronym called Code. Code stands where C stands for like concept and idea or this for market opportunity. D is for design and development and E is the execution piece for the code and go to market strategy. So we also spoke about how along each step of the way the product manager wears different hats and how it's important to be able to like context switch between these personas to effectively perform the role during every step. So this talk will focus particularly on the execution and go to market strategy piece where typically as a product manager, you're expected to wear the hat of a strategist and we'll look at how we can think about strategies to lay out a go to market for the product you're working on. Also left a link to the previous talk at the bottom of the slide. So you should have access to it. It's on YouTube as well if you just search for it. So a go to market strategy is I would say a universally important topic. So that's why it chose to start like right at the bottom. It applies to all kinds of products whether you're trying to break into a new market or trying to reach deeper into your existing current market that your company or product already has a presence in. It's a step by step plan created to successfully launch a product to market. I like to think of go to market as always in terms of distinct pieces that I can visualize. So in terms of three pillars, the three Ps, a product marketing plan, a pricing plan and a sales and strategy plan. So the market, the marketing plan typically helps identify the user or the buyer personas for the product and how as a team, we can get awareness about our product and its value proposition to the right target buyer. The marketing plan also helps to identify what, of course, we would have thought of all of this prior but the marketing plan kind of solidifies this. It helps to distill the distinct market problem that we have and the position the product plays in the solution to that problem. Pricing, again, this is something that we would have thought about in earlier phases but the exact pricing of the product kind of lands in the GTM phase, I would say. So it's one of the single greatest levers you have as a PM in order to land or make a splash in the marketing place and also to improve long-term profitability of the organization that you work for. Pricing requires a deep market understanding and an understanding of the long-term business plan. We could do a whole new talk on pricing and we would still fall short of the things that we need to cover up but I'll do my best to cover some of the basics today. The last pillar is building a sales strategy and while each product and company would be different, no go-to-market is complete without planning for how you want to achieve sales and scale the reach for your product in the marketplace. So we'll talk briefly about that although yeah we'll just talk briefly about that. I'll keep popping this title slide every so often so that one, you know where we're going with the talk and two, I know that how I'm doing in terms of time. So yeah, the first piece that we'll talk about is the product marketing piece of it. So when you think about product marketing, I like to consider it with two distinct steps. The first step starts always with the customer. So you start with mapping out who your customers are, what are their trades, what are the needs, what are their pain points and what are their concerns and behaviors and buying patterns. So typically I would say like for a B2B product, this would be identifying what the buying center for your product looks like. So who are the different stakeholders and whom do you need to convince in order to make a sale. For a B2C product, typically this would be to identify the target customer persona and think about what are the different things that that persona cares about and how your product is solving a problem for them. So once you figure out who your customers are, then you can build a marketing message on how to reach these target customers and influence their buying decision positively. The message needs to clearly capture the pain point and the value in a meaningful way that they can understand easily. So an excellent product plus a well thought out marketing plan is important to ensure that the dollars you spend for the outreach translate to meaningful sales. I forgot to advance the slides, but what I essentially meant is the first piece is the customer and the second piece is the message that you're trying to convey to them. So a relevant market message that I said, like I said, would be tying this problem and solution together. In the B2C world, of course, the marketing messages would translate to ads or promotional campaigns or flyers or whatever. But on the B2B side, this is typically the deck or the pitch that you make to your buying center in order to help them understand more about the product, its features and the pain points it's solving for. So as cliche as it might seem, we have, like I've repeated several times in the last 10 minutes, customer is the first focus for any product. And I've divided the know your customer piece into two parts. So first is the B2C cycle. So first the B2B cycle and the second is the B2C cycle. So for B2B cycle, even if you take like several firms like Gartner who are who classify the typical buying group involves six to 10 decision makers. Of course, here I've identified only a few of them, but this kind of typically gives you the idea of how a buying center is constituent of several people in the loop within an organization. So typically, the sales starts with an initiator who starts the buying process or goes out trying to sell the product. This is typically a sales rep or sales team. The user is the user for your product who uses your product regularly. Say, suppose you're selling a CRM software, this is typically your engineering IT team who uses it. Next, you have an influencer who is a person or a team within an organization who as a group or as an individual collectively or individually convinces others in the company to buy the product that is needed. A decision maker is typically like a CTO or CFO or a VP or whoever is the authority to sign off on the financial who gives the final approval for the purchase. And gatekeepers are typically blockers in getting like some of these change management or if your product is actually recommending a change to the kind of thing in the way things are done. The gatekeepers are usually ones that you need to get buy in from. In the B2C side, typically what happens is you don't have a full-blown buying center but you have a single user or a category of users who have similar buying patterns. So this is why B2C products typically depend on customer personas and grouping of these customer personas by similar variables. So buying personas are the individual and identifiable groups of people who basically buy your product. You can put together this buying persona either by like market research or data observation or by sending out surveys and typically these surveys in the marketplace aim to collect details like demographics, motivations, pain points, willingness to pay and things like that. So let's just talk about a simple example of a B2C example. So suppose let's take Nike for an example. Let's say that you are the PM at Nike and you're launching a women's line of shoes that is coming out next fall. So I want to know who the target buyers for this new line of shoes are and from the top of my head I can think of maybe two to three categories of people who would be interested in these line of shoes. So the runner or the runner is a woman training typically for their 5Ks, 10Ks and half marathons. The runner typically cares about the features of a shoe and decides on how much she's willing to pay based on the features offered by the shoe. The next persona I would classify as the style shopper or a woman who wants to be on the trend say like and she uses her shoes like for her workouts and she cares about the aesthetic looks of the shoe, how it looks and how it kind of fits with the existing fitness wardrobe. Then you have the dedicated sneaker head who is interested in getting any new shoe that comes out of Nike. These are the price insensitive customers who and this persona were typically by the shoe regardless of the introductory price for this product. So this is kind of the rough split of how you would do based on the product that you're dealing with in the B2C world. So buying center for B2B and a customer persona for B2C. After mapping the buying center or the persona it's kind of time to map out your messaging. Of course like I mentioned before this will vary for B2B and B2C products. A general framework of how to build a messaging structure is through the value matrix framework. A value matrix is typically a breakdown of the persona, the problems that this persona or the pain point that this persona is facing or the buying center is facing and how your product is valuable in solving these problems. The key characteristics of a well thought out value matrix are a well identified problem and easily identifiable differentiation with respect to your competitors. So typically if you end up having the same message as your competitors people tend to overlook these differentiations in spite of whether you have it or not and just make pure decisions based on the cheapest price. But unless your messaging is distinctly different from your competition you would not be able to make your persona make a different decision for their buying. The last one is a benefit and value focus message. So it takes a certain bit of training in terms of marketing to message with value as the predominant factor and the benefits that your product offer. So this enables prospective buyers to make purchasing decisions based on the value of the benefits that they would have based on owning the product as opposed to just focusing on the price aspect of it. One particular example that I like about is most of us would be familiar about Robinhood but if not Robinhood is a trading app that entered the market in 2014. Their go-to-market strategy was heavily based on kind of creating a VIP experience for their customers. They kind of even gamified the experience of getting access to the product. So basically they would have a long queue of wait list for the product and make sure that you're able to get access to the product only based on referrals. They also targeted millennials in order to expand their customer base and also have a long reach and they focused on a unique messaging which says democratize finance for all. So they wanted everyone, even folks who have never done trading in their lives, to be on their platform. So that's kind of their USP. So in this case they had a clear target audience with millennials. They mapped out the customer experience and the customer acquisition experience for the target audience and they focused on the main messaging which is democratizing finance for all. So I really like this example because they kind of nailed the first piece that we spoke about. I just want to see how we're doing in terms of time. I think we have some time. The second piece is we spoke about product marketing first. The second piece I want to touch upon is pricing. So pricing typically focuses on the questions of how can I segment the market? How do I know a customer's willingness to pay? What is the pricing strategy that I should follow for my product? And what are some of the structures that motivate best buying for the product? So pricing can be done in several ways. So common strategies or common terms that you hear in the industry are price skimming, price penetration and neutral pricing. Price skimming is nothing but where you hit the market with a high entry price and gradually reduce as time goes on. So the focus there is to capture the high willingness to pay customers at first and then gradually kind of move down the ladder. Penetration pricing is when you want to drive market expansion and that you're not first to market but want a land grab anyways. Neutral pricing is when you want to avoid any kind of retaliation from the competition. You just price right below or right on par with the competition. So that's kind of how you price neutral. These are mostly used in commodity-based markets. So irrespective of the strategy used, the most popular method to arrive at pricing, at least in the tech industry, is what we call value-based pricing. The first step towards value-based pricing is to understand the perceived value that customers have for your product. And firms often employ surveys in which potential buyers are directly asked about the perceived value of the product. So regularly you see the cost or the cost that it actually takes to produce the product or to produce a service that you're selling. This is usually the markup that you do with regular cost plus pricing, which is adding a 10 or 20% or whatever the margin that you want based above and beyond your cogs. Value-based pricing is basically figuring out the perceived value that your customer has for this product and pricing according to that. So one of the most important things to understand with respect to pricing is identifying arbitrage opportunities in order to price better and to tap the higher willingness to pay for your product. So this is typically, I'm just throwing out these examples so that you kind of get a sense of how price segmentation is done both in the B2C and B2B world. And then we'll probably do a separate talk on pricing to talk about how we do value-based pricing. How do we arrive at some of these pricing models with the detailed examples? I promise my next would be on pricing. So just to talk a little bit about price segmentation. So one common example for price segmentation in the B2C side is based on time of purchase. So there's an actual difference in time of purchase patterns for different segments of buyers and businesses typically make use of this fact in order to lure buyers to buy more during specific periods of time. So this is common where you would see Target or Best Buy or Walmart or Amazon doing Black Friday deals. So this is typically segmenting the prices based on the time of purchase. The next one is by time of use, you would see airlines typically charging different prices based on when you choose to travel. So this is from Hopper where it clearly shows your weekday prices are much cheaper to travel on a Tuesday than it is on a Friday. So there's your difference between your weekday and weekend travel. And this is same for hotels or whatever service that you choose to avail that are based on the time of use. There's also a popular concept used both in the, actually this is used both in the B2C and the B2B world which is product bundling. It's a common pricing practice where several different products are bundled for sale as one combined product. Here I'm showing the example of Comcast which bundles say for example your internet, TV and voice. And it's always cheaper to buy as a bundle because they want you to consume more and they want you to move into higher tiers with these combinations. So in the B2B side, we have differences in price that we've seen with place of purchase. So typically if you look at Adobe or other licensing based softwares, you would see that they have a higher price in the US compared to some of the other developing markets. I've shown an example of Adobe here. You also have segmentation by volume where typically used in the SaaS or the software world where the incremental cost of allowing another customer to access the product is very negligible on the software side. So they typically say here in Sketch the price of a single license is 99 but as the number of licenses scale up to like 18 or 25, your price keeps reducing. So this helps you attract a huge customer base and encourages your customer base to buy more. Some of the other B2B segmentation that you've seen is by product design. So someone like a LinkedIn which does based on the product features, whether you're looking for a job or whether you're a HR person looking to hire, they typically have higher end features catered towards the businesses and some of the lower end features catered towards individuals and the price also increases accordingly moving left to right from carrier to hiring which is targeted more towards businesses. You also have the more common with the advent of the cloud. You also have rental or lease agreements per minute, per hour, per day costs that are typically seen of cloud based offerings like AWS, Azure, or GCP, everyone does it. I think we spoke about the Robin Hood example previously but this is one example that I like in respect to of this product being free. They kind of created a value around this product by creating a buzz around it by allowing access to an initial set of people who are registered and then by word of mouth they spread the word about the use and the goodness of the product and then further users got access into the product. So that kind of gave a healthy pipeline for Robin Hood and the bottom line is they also had a good product which ensured that they stayed having the good market share and people just didn't check out the app and leave after a month or so. So it's important to have a good product but it's also important to get the pricing right, to get the customer outreach right, and to get the marketing message right. The last piece is around planning sales and how to scale sales beyond your first initial set of pipeline customers. So product marketing of course helps the customer and the message. Pricing helps you land the product with the right price point and also plan for future profitability and sales pretty much helps you get the dollars, helps you make the final sale to the people who matter. So again, like pricing sales is a whole new topic that we can talk about for a long time but I will briefly touch upon a basic different sales model that we see across in the industry and we'll move on to an example that kind of dives into product marketing pricing and sales. So typical sales model, typical sales models that you would see is based on the kind of product that you have. The sales service model as you see it is usually when the customer is basically enabled to make a purchase of their own. So this is typically seen for simple products, low cost points and low touch sales. It's difficult to build but once you build it, the pipeline of customers just keep coming because it's easy to buy and consume the product. So this is typical of products like say Netflix or Amazon where you have a website customers come in and buy what they want. This is also typical of some of the B2B products like cloud services like AWS or Azure who have their own marketplace in which engineers or IT staff can log in and buy the services that they want. You have an inside sales model which is pretty much the next level to self-service. So self-service is low touch, low cost products. Inside sales is usually used for medium touch, medium cost products where you use inside sales reps who either typically call up customers or run email or online channels in order to do and sell the product. This is slightly less expensive than the next option which is the field sales model where you typically employ a large team of sales engineers and put in structure for a large sales team to go sell your product. So a field sales model is usually used in scenarios where you have a high touch product and a high cost product and usually your sales cycles are much longer. The last is a channel model which is used popularly for most consumer products and also some B2B products where you want to kind of offload the responsibility of selling and deploying sales stuff to an outside organization. So in the channel model an outside agency or a partner typically sells the product for you and then you agree to the terms of the sales based on some pre-negotiated terms for like profit sharing and things like that. OKRs which is again an important part of the sales strategy is made up of three things, setting an objective or time period, a list of key results and initiatives. Objectives defines the qualitative outcomes or the goals that you're looking to accomplish by your sales team. The time period is the time period that you will use to measure the effectiveness of the objective and the key results. The key results are nothing but your measurable results that you tip pretty much lay out in increasing order of difficulty. You can think of a key result as a milestone that helps your team kind of march towards an Uber mission or mission statement. And then initiatives are specifically actions that your sales team needs to take in order to progress towards the key results that you've set for them. So OKRs are specific to each company so I won't give much guidance on how to go about doing this because most companies have a process of their own but this is something to understand that yes if there's a sales planning you will need to plan for the channels and you would need to plan for how to socialize the message with your sales team and how to define OKRs for your product. I want to double click into an example that I used during my last talk but didn't go into too much detail. So I want to use again the example of the Apple Watch which was launched in 2015. The reason I used this example last time as well is because most people know what it is and right now it helps put context into what we just discussed. So the first piece that we discussed here in this talk was knowing your customer. So how did Apple Watch do it? They knew that their customer at least at the price point that they were coming in were luxury-oriented customers who were pretty insensitive about price and they were really passionate about the Apple brand. So they knew this was their target customer at least for launch and they hyper-focused on these luxury-oriented customers. So what did they do for messaging? Apple's early messaging, if you take up some of the articles around 2015 when Apple Watch initially came to market, their messaging was around the premium features, how it's cool to own an Apple Watch and what are the different things you can do with it. They spoke about how it's your health assistant and also spoke about the luxury features in the product. For marketing, Apple chose to advertise in places where typically tech isn't found. They advertised in fashion magazines. They advertised in places that you wouldn't find not in the electronic news of the world. The next piece that we spoke about is pricing. So if you look at pricing, Apple of course used a value-based approach for pricing. So definitely not based on the COGS or definitely not based on a COGS Plus model, definitely based on value and they chose a price-kimming strategy. So they had a high introductory price for the product. They lured in the luxury buyers and the influencers who would be able to spread the message about the product and then they gradually reduced the price in subsequent versions so that the rest of the market could also afford to buy it and then they could also gradually capture market share with the Apple Watch. And then the last pillar that we spoke about is around planning sales. The sales model that they used is a channel-based sales model. So they also went direct to consumer with the Apple Stores but they also went through sales like selling in high-fashion boutiques and jewelry stores in the Teslas and Hermes of the world and then gradually moving to other places like your Macy's and Nordstorms and other retail vendors as well. So they used a channel approach for sales. They used a price-kimming strategy with value-based pricing. They chose a specific customer base which pretty much dictated their messaging and marketing. So if you look closely at what they tried to do, they weren't short-sighted and reactionary on trying to get as much reach as possible with V1 of their product but they ensured that they architected their strategy for fewer sales for a specific type of buyer in V1 and then subsequently scale for other kinds of buyers. So that pretty much concludes our talk. I want to call out a few actions in case you like this talk and if you're a PM, just try to see how this framework makes sense or doesn't make sense to you. Check what applies to your product and what doesn't. Let me know if your company or product follows something completely different in terms of go to market strategy. I'd love to hear your comments and feedback. If you're an aspiring PM, I would say this is a pretty good place to start. So pick a product of your choice, maybe a BUC product that you're passionate about or the best thing is to focus on the product that your company is working on. Try to bucketize the product strategy for marketing pricing and sales strategies and make a presentation to your internal teams on your analysis. So this would pretty much, if you're someone in a different team trying to move into a PM role, I think this shows a lot of understanding on the PM side of things and your ability to dissect a go to market strategy and possibly construct one in the future. And I'd also love to hear future topics that we can cover in product school webinars. I'm happy to go with those. I'm no expert, but I'm happy to share what I know. So thank you all for listening in and I'll see you in another webinar. So thank you. Bye-bye.