Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello, I am Carlota and I am the host of this podcast. Product Marketing Stories is the first French podcast dedicated to product marketing. Every week, listen to an episode where product marketers, but not only, share methodologies, tips and concrete learnings so you can apply them in your daily job. The aim of this podcast is to make product marketing understandable and accessible to the French tech ecosystem. In this episode, I sit down with Maya, go-to-market expert and author of the bestseller book Go-to-Market Strategist. to break down the seven go-to-market motions and how to choose the right one for your business. We cover the seven go-to-market motions and what makes each of them unique, how to build systems to scale your go-to-market strategy efficiently, the key factors to consider when selecting the most effective motion, and why most companies struggle with go-to-market and how to avoid common pitfalls. If you want to refine your go-to-market approach and make it truly scalable, this episode is for you. Hi Maya, I'm so happy to be with you today on the podcast. How are you?

• Speaker #1

  Hey, hello, hello. Thank you so much for reminding me. It's my very first time to record like a podcast for a French-speaking audience, so I hope to bring a couple of interesting insights to you guys.

• Speaker #0

  Can you present yourself to the French PNM community?

• Speaker #1

  Yes, but not in French. So hi, my name is Maya Voyer. For the last year or something like that, I have been very intensively talking about go-to-market. after launching my best-selling book go-to-market strategist things have been wild so i have been around europe working with a lot of companies from the us as well and i'm just like tackling these problems how to get to product market fit and later on how to scale how to grow your company and you were talking about the systems can you go a little bit deeper on that okay i'm trying to make like a really cool quote but i'm totally not there yet like the whole idea is that the processes that we are building today will be a pillar of our company's future i know it's not catchy yet but i think the idea is really powerful so how to create these systems that will enable us to work weather in future and when it comes to go to market motions ways how we can get customers there are seven that i typically define but then from the organization to another we can change it and tweak it a little bit. So the first one is inbound. Inbound is naturally you creating content, preferably in the channels where you've got target audiences and adding leads, aka organically. The second one is outbound. Outmount is like to these days, I think still severely, severely undervalued because it's just awkward to do. I don't know how to tell you, but like we have fear of rejection. And then what about if people are going to think that I'm an idiot if I just like write to them? But hey, I just like try to embrace the idea that there are two ways how to get customers. Either they find you or you find them. So, yeah, this is something to consider, especially if you. don't know your target audience too well and that you have like a very inexpensive product. For example, if you are launching something on product hunt, you will probably inevitably have to do like this type of work on LinkedIn or wherever your audience is. Okay, so we had inbound, we have outbound, now we are moving to paid digital. Paid digital is something that I started to work in post-product market fit in my business. So after I knew that I have like a very nice, reputable and sustainable business, but some people even do it in earlier stages. So I had a team that was doing like a symptom checker for medical symptoms and they just got first thousand users by putting $200 in Google Ads because there was such volume for it. Right. So not saying that like you should dismiss anything, it can work. but the question is what is your unit economics what are your skills and where your audience is so okay we had like paid digital next we have communities the more technical the product is um usually the communities are even more important so for example when we have developer tools or something like that it's incredibly important to just like be on github to be present on those platforms because this is where target audience is and they have ad blockers so you cannot really buy their attention uh so yeah this is community element also in some enterprise spaces a lot of decision making is done through enterprise communities so definitely something which is not like this super scrappy startup environment um then a lot of my clients in software as a service space are betting on account based marketing or account based sales in the next year so the difference from outbound to abm in a very simple way would be Okay, I'm trying to in outbound find five people who will buy something for me. For that, I will probably have to send like 1,000 emails. And let's hope for the best. I can defy ICP a little bit, but, you know, I still need to produce like massive volume. But if we go to account-based marketing and sales, this is like, I really want to work with Carlota. I really want to do business with her. Now, how... can i create this very good plan of touch points that create value to her and her work in order that she will one day be perceptive to do business with me i mean it's not my secret agenda maybe it is but uh you know what i mean so like one too many versus like a very very very surgical plan how to get somewhere and then for products that are literally technological products so product-led growth has been like the cool kid of the block for the last three years or so. The idea is luring. I mean, it's very, very tempting that people who use product would just like through growth loops or any sort of other mechanism, attract new users to your product and even upgrade to like larger options. But still, if you are so early, if you are just starting out, you will still need to acquire those first users with different methods. So it can be a goal, but it's rarely the case that you can just like bet that something will go viral just because you like it so much. You have to see good retention and good evidence.

• Speaker #0

  And is there a last one? Partners, I think it is.

• Speaker #1

  Partners is something that we forgot to mention beforehand. So sometimes when you have, let's say, a more delicate geographical market where you cannot really do servicing like with Schneider elevators or with some sort of printing software, when you need a local partner for implementation, for example, partnership can be like a super important channel and even for software right because some of the software clients that i'm working with they work a lot with agencies and they are marketing to agencies as partners and then agencies find the end customers for their let's say analytical or ad optimization programs so it's definitely something that i think comes at the later stage in most cases because you just need traction right Who wants to be a partner of a product, product market fit? If you don't have any case studies, that's a little bit more delicate.

• Speaker #0

  So can we sum up what are the seven? You talk about the inbound, the outbound, the paid, the ABM, the growth and the partners and community.

• Speaker #2

  Quick break to present you Appunite. The two biggest challenges I hear from product leaders are one. how to pursue growth without losing focus, and two, how to make the product vision a reality the fastest way possible. But as you know, resources are increasingly limited in the tech industry. Hiring those high talents to build the product takes forever, and working with agencies expensive for the values they deliver. That's why I am very happy to partner with Appunite. They are not just another dev shop, they are a product development powerhouse. From user research to coding, Their team embeds with yours, deeply analyses your strategy to define how to positively impact your business metrics, and builds high-performing apps that scale. Whether it's fintech, health tech, or SaaS, they co-create products that grow businesses. So if you're tired of delays, bad code, or agencies that just don't get it, check out apponite.com. Let's build something great. Let's go back to the discussion now.

• Speaker #0

  The last question on that, Maria, is how do we choose them? Like, should we try a little bit of all of them and see what is the traction, is about the instinct? How do we do it?

• Speaker #1

  Please don't select all of them and do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, because you will never create a critical mass, right? Whenever you are testing new channels, you need to first of all be good at them and stick around for at least like two to three months. That's you see the realistic results. Imagine like if you are launching a new meta campaign, so you need to spend at least like 2000 euros in order to get like a healthy traction. It will be impossible to just like test with 50 euros in the year that we are in, whenever you're listening. So yeah, this is something that requires more work and more resources, two to three months to test it. Now we do have some rules. How do we make this decision-making? The first one that we need to know is where is your customer. If you don't know where is your customer just ask them. I mean where do you find information, inspiration, education in this line? of products and you will easily grasp what the landscape is. You can do this via email, interviews or even in social media groups. So no excuses. Definitely do it. The second one is what competition is doing. So with some channels, for example, we often see this with paid search. The competition is just like ludicrous, expensive keywords, and you can just like not break through with your budget. So that's probably not the right bet for you. You must rely on less saturated channels and a little bit more subversive channels. So it's very important to consider the competition element as well. Then everybody has some strengths, what we are good at, naturally good at. Maybe like a person is very charismatic and they can do video. Maybe a person is very technical and they can build like cool site apps and cool engagement mechanisms. Right. So play on your strengths. Always the winning strategy. and on enemies' weaknesses. So that's a very good one as well. And last but not least, you need to understand the realities. How much does something cost you, right? And what your unit economics are. So for example, I was just like preparing an outreach campaign today with a new tool that I'm testing. And we had like three options, which products would we want to go and like test through outreach. The first product was just like 500 euro worth. the second one was 5 000 and the third one was something approximately 10k so um just like from the fact from the numbers that we understand that still like with paying the software and paying like work uh it would cost us at least 150 dollars to acquire a lead we decided for the most like most expensive ones because from our calculations from our projections we kind of anticipated that this is where we can break even that we can have like a good uh result after this so yeah with some go-to-market motions are unfortunately not like within your budget and that happens a lot with events as well so events sometimes people ask me when i'm presenting those seven go-to-market motions where are the events and i'm like you can add them if they are important in your industry but i don't really want to add them because events i mean they can be paid they can be like community they can be inbound i mean i'm still open to develop and like adjust the model to best of the liking and general consensus but they haven't convinced me not yet maybe one day