- 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 talk with Maya, go-to-market expert, about her journey from working in-house to building her own business and publishing a bestseller book, GoToMarket Strategist. Together, we discuss about the real reason she decided to write a book, the biggest challenges she faced, what she would do differently if she had to start over, why she chose the solopreneur path, and the importance of showcasing your work, because action speaks louder than anything else. Your voice matters, your work matters, and this episode might just inspire you to take action. Hi Maya, I'm so happy to be with you today on the podcast. How are you?
- Speaker #1
Hey, 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 brook 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 but the history behind is even more interesting so i come from let's say growth growth hacking background and everybody told you that you need product market fit But nobody really told you how to get there. So I went on a mission. I locked myself in a house for a year, did a bunch of research and just like reflecting on what was going on in my consulting career with the companies that I've been working with. And voila, here we go. This is the blueprint now. And so far, so good.
- Speaker #0
Before writing this book and being a consultant for a go-to-market, what was your experience? Did you already did go-to-market or did you do other experiences as well?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, but I didn't know it was called that way. Yeah, whenever we had companies that were launching and preparing for launch, we kind of did this work, right? But we always said like marketing or early growth. We didn't have like the appropriate word for it. So I was very happy to just like finally coined this expression. What are we doing when we are bringing new products and services to market? So that was like a mini epiphany.
- Speaker #0
And how many companies have you been working with so far?
- Speaker #1
I cannot tell you because otherwise you will calculate how old am I.
- Speaker #0
That's not the objective.
- Speaker #1
Yeah but seriously like in my career I think that there have been like more than 700 who's counting I mean if you have a multiple company workshops you know things pile up really quick from the big ones I have been working with Heineken with buyer with Google and a couple of other like corporates but I don't know I was always just like this passion that had this passion from doing something with very small and creating this effect of magnitude. So something really big. So just this inception is something that I guess excites me as a person.
- Speaker #0
And with all the companies you've been working with, did you see some patterns, even depending on the domain is really different, the context is different, but at the end, did you see patterns that are the same to go from zero to the scale?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, I mean, this is a very meta exercise, right? So I really want to sound smart now, but in reality, every company is very different. So for example, I was just talking with a guy who does product marketing at Schneider today. So Schneider are elevators, right? And it is just like this B2B project done for resellers. And he's trying to do like go to market as a product marketer there. And I asked him, What are your specific challenges? And he literally said to me, like, we are talking about passengers in the elevators, but in reality, we are communicating to B2B audience. So like to people who are building buildings and something like that. So yes, just like this plurality of decision makers in a decision making unit and like users and customers gets a little bit confusing. But to its fundament, I always think about value transfer. right so a job of every company is to create value added and also to capture some of the value added back with pricing with packaging but nevertheless i do think that as long as we are focused on value and really in touch with our users what they are saying where they are how can we best serve their needs that the company will survive so that's kind of this common nominator that i see a lot in practice plus there are a couple of biases right because psychologically when you are building something it would be as you ask me like which is my favorite dog and I have two dogs so I can literally not select which is my favorite dog I love them both dearly same thing happens with products right so sometimes it's very difficult to admit that maybe like the product that we vision need some fixing or a little bit of a facelift in messaging these are difficult things to comprehend but I think that us as a community that we are getting there and that we are evolving towards, let's say, more agile and feedback friendly environment.
- Speaker #0
I would like to deep dive with you on the go-to-market topic, which is your field of expertise. And my first question for you is, for you, what is the vision of go-to-market? What is it concretely?
- Speaker #1
So I like to think about this as a journey, right? And the journey starts with aligning a couple of elements. I think there are six elements in go-to-market. So there is market, the research we have to do. Then we have the customer, we have the product, we have positioning, we have pricing, and we have just like finally what we call go-to-market motion, which is predictable in a repeatable way how to bring customers to the product. But in reality, many people see go-to-market as simply either like launch or that you are just like selecting the channel. So I had a client who said, my go-to-market strategy is LinkedIn. And I was like, cool. Then we should like focus on other elements as well. So yeah, it's very holistic and it's all about prioritization. Because if you really think about this, right, every company is operating with limited resources and we are trying to just like do the best we can with the resources that we have at disposal. plus with our knowledge of the market, of the certain stances that we are in. So I always like to think that the strategy part of it is our intelligent response to certain stances, to whatever is going on. And as such, go-to-market strategy is dynamic because we are learning all the time and environment is changing.
- Speaker #0
And based on that, what is for you the biggest challenge? Because as you said, there is like six core elements. And how do we work all this? six during a specific amount of time. We have limited resources. We are not expert in all the six elements. So how do we manage it?
- Speaker #1
This is such a good question, Carlota, because in reality, this is where things get extremely messy, right? If you think about this, like who's responsible for go-to-market in Decathlon? Is it brand manager? Is it product marketing? Who's responsible?
- Speaker #0
It's more about product marketing, but co-ownership because we are working with the product. We are working with the brand, the marketing to make this go-to-market live. It's more about the product marketing is the one who will be at the center to really coordinate all the different teams.
- Speaker #1
I love this definition. And I see more investors even recognizing the role of product marketing in the go-to-market process. But oftentimes when you are dealing with more technology companies, there would be somebody like founder. or product manager or just like whoever's a little bit more businessy uh being taken care of this go to market function as the company so as such i mean go to market as a position it can exist but it can also be done as a team as you described as you mentioned or it can just like live in a different function what is the most important is that we start as soon as possible right so that we don't come in the situation when everything would be set and then they say to us like we now need 10 000 users when we launch good luck here's a product here's a pricing now make some magic happen but that we can do research and support decision making in earlier stages of the process as well the second thing is that it is really like a multiple player game so when it comes to product i mean product was for me the most difficult chapter to write So I literally admitted that it is just like a black box for me because I am very familiar with value propositions and how to create like different use cases. This is my forte. But whenever it comes like to product roadmaps and product visions or something like that, it was just not my history. This is not something that I have been doing before. So therefore, I personally needed a lot of help from product managers to tackle this chapter as well. And as long as we communicate and we... search for help in the areas where we are not the strongest, I think that we are still on a very good path to win. However, something which is increasingly important, especially in these economical times, is pricing. So pricing in larger organizations, it can be done like super secretively, like with focus groups and market research agencies. Some of the companies are just like, okay here's the price let's fingers cross and we hope for the best So yeah, pricing is something that in practice can turn out to be very problematic. But other than that, I think that us as a community, that we are gaining so much more understanding about positioning and messaging and the entire like, let's say, channel game. So go to market motions. I think this is being talked about a lot and you can get like really good information if you just like set yourself on an educational path.
- Speaker #0
Usually there is also the confusion about go-to-market, marketing plan, growth strategy. What is your point of view about that? How does everything live between the go-to-market, which is at the end a lot, is not only about launch, it's about the value proposition, about how we will communicate, about to who we will communicate and the marketing plan and everything.
- Speaker #1
I like to think about this as, okay, in a company, like business strategy is the main one. right the business strategy goals that we are getting are just like our traffic light this is how we are making decision then it depends really from one organization to another who is responsible for this type of planning and if you just like think about this from the product perspective like product life cycles those old diagrams i do think that go to market is fun fantastic discipline to consider whenever you have like early adopters and early majority but for the scaling and let's think about even like later stages when you are searching for additional product market fits on new markets with product extension or something like that this knowledge can come super handy again but in the beginning it is absolutely essential so where do we sit in a normal organization it heavily depends But I do think that just like business objectives are the ones that stick us together and create this single source of truth, how we can align our functions in larger organizations.
- Speaker #0
Like in the day-to-day job, if for any company, for you, like the marketing plan goes into the go-to market, which is the global, or is it something that is another topic?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, it's another topic. Usually we like to keep our distance. to have this operation a little bit more independent. So maybe just like it will be easier to explain through an example. Recently, I was working with a corporate in the fast moving consumer space. And it was just like super interesting because, OK, they have like this large business objective, right? So they need to like do at least like one billion dollars in a certain business unit. So, OK, this is like single source of truth for everybody. Then they have like different brands and each brand like has to do their marketing plans as like a brand business unit. This is very important. But when they are launching new products and opening new markets, the go to market function in that specific instance is under the brand management. And it is supported by digital management who digital marketing literally supports multiple brand units. But it depends from organization to organization. So how do you do it at Decathlon? Come on, I'm curious as well, here to learn.
- Speaker #0
It's interesting because it can be very different depending on for which product you're working. And for example, for in my case, I'm working for the outdoor app. And we have a specific marketing team, a specific product team, I'm the product marketing, so I'm between the both. And we try to really combine the go to market for I don't know whether there is a new feature or we want to target a new market. We will integrate the marketing plan within the go-to-market, which is more at the end. Once we have defined who is the target, what is the strategy, what is the positioning, the key messages, then we see the marketing plan as how are we going to go to market from a marketing and communication point of view. So which channels are we going to use, how, when. And this is part of our marketing plan, which is in like the global go-to-market, which is integrated in it, for example.
- Speaker #1
It's super interesting. And this was just like the same type of logic that the Schneider guys were explaining in the morning. However, what we are trying to do, and this is like our secret agenda in organization, is to get into the process sooner. Why? Because if the research, customer research is, for example, done like as a focus group research with marketing agencies and your users are like heavily online, you are missing a bunch of insights, right? So yes, traditionally we would hop in and just like this channel selection, how to plan for a massive launch thing is, but we are trying to find our role even sooner because at least with insights, I think that we can participate so much. And traditionally, I mean, it's very interesting to observe this from organizations that are digital first. So like startups and scale ups and whatnot, and then for traditional industries and in the industries when you have, for example, retailers or like other partners, things can get like even more complex. So I do think that every organization deserves their own go to market model. But I hope that my take on it is a healthy fundament to get them there.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, for sure. And all this part of being present at the very beginning when we even don't know what will be the solution is super important because this will help us to know who is the audience and so influence the marketing plan about what type of channels, depending on where the target is.
- Speaker #1
Fantastic. Or even like sometimes do, let's say, more WECO testing that we would traditionally be able to do. So sometimes, I mean, the bigger you are, the higher the risks are, right? And I mean, if you're a corporate, you cannot just like move fast and break things because you will upset your stakeholders and you can create like irreparable damage when it comes to brand recognition. So if you have, let's say, a more savvy go-to-market function, and even like sometimes we do work with dummy brands. So we are launching those. fake brands you know what it is to just like harvest the insights to inform the company if this type of field if this type of work is investable and i have seen that done a lot like with digital marketing with online communities sometimes even in partnerships with influencers because the sooner we can just like grasp those realistic those real market insights into the process, the more likely we are going to have uninformed. this response to the certain stances.
- Speaker #0
Do you have a specific example of a very well executed go-to-market like an example of a past experience or something that you saw that you really liked?
- Speaker #1
So maybe I can just like share an example which I am like personally very fond of. It comes from a bigger organization but it was managed as a very like independent project. So there was a campaign that we did with Bayer, which was super focused on like female intimate health, right? And you know how it is. I mean, we are both women. If you have like this type of issues, you get like a little bit embarrassed that it is not something that you would like talked about on phone, like with 10 different friends. So that's a little bit delicate, intimate relationship. So we created just like this awareness campaign. that this is normal. I mean, everybody could talk and should talk about this. They don't have to go like to forums to find like dangerous cringe advice with some sort of medicines that are like perfectly not okay to put in human body. So we actually teamed up with a couple of students from pharmacy and with a couple of doctors and pharmacists that created like very high quality educational material and we reached 70% of the target group that they had with just like this awareness campaign. And the whole point, I think it was like super nice because if you work in this type of field, you know, you cannot really like do billboards. So if something gets out there, like you need help or something like that, that's not how do you promote this type of product. But it was just like done in a beautiful and socially responsible manner. So that, for example, was a very nice campaign that we did for to create like more awareness and more brand affiliation to a younger demographic group, which is traditionally like not the ones that, you know, goes to the pharmacy and reads flyers. It's just like a little bit of brand rejuvenation for them. So this is a campaign that I personally very much enjoyed because you know how it is. I think that these campaigns are very good for society.
- Speaker #0
For you, what were the key success metrics? How do you explain the success of this campaign?
- Speaker #1
So it was the activation campaign, right? We were building an online community. We had a podcast. We had events. We had just our digital communication. And we measured the engagement. The engagement was defined by the number of... people who like either engage with us on a social media but not like number of likes but something more meaningful attended the events just like ask questions interacted with our experts so it was just like those types of kpas but what was most important there was to measure like a sentiment right because when we started the campaign things were awkward there was a couple of us and our friends interacting with these posts. And it was just like a little bit of a taboo subject when we started out. But later on, I think that just like by being authentic and being super high quality in the way how we communicated, that we created like a lot of trust and a lot of goodwill. that customers just like started to interact with us differently. I have like some super technical campaigns as well. Sometimes we do like very sophisticated cold reach, but if you ask me like the type of campaign that I'm most passionate about, yeah, this is one of my favorite ones.
- Speaker #0
How you feel about the campaign that you do? And I'm working also in the B2C for hiking and of course I am passionate about hiking. So it's easier for ourselves to understand also the needs because we are living it. so much it can also help.
- Speaker #1
This is fantastic and I think it's so important and it makes you like much better in customer empathy, right? Because, for example, if you work with a very, let's say, alien industry, I was working with concrete and with injection molding. I mean, very interesting industries, but before I actually built my house, I literally had like no idea how this decision making and like buyer journey goes. it became important later on in my life but this proximity and just like understanding and living this lifestyle in consumer brands it's so important even when it comes to small things like copywriting because if you say to me right now maya can you please write me a copy about men's belts or something like that i would be a belt christmas present relative, impossible to miss. That would be it. I don't know anything else about this, right?
- Speaker #0
It's always the same about knowing our audience and being able to really use the right words and the words that are meaningful to them. 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 is expensive for the value 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, elftech 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 #1
Yeah, and you can bypass this to some extent. Even if you are not like super passionate about the field that you are working in, you can do like a bunch of customer research. As long as you are talking to customers, you will be fine. And like there is a bunch of online forums that you can analyze. So a friend of mine, he was helping his father doing like a really weird product, which is like bait to attract boars. So wild swines. And the guy is like as old as we are. So he was not really thrilled to promote these baits about hunting and stuff like that. But nevertheless, he spent like two months interacting with those people in the forums and he got scaringly good at this.
- Speaker #0
And do you have on the contrary, like a go-to-market that or an activation that really didn't work? And how do you explain it? Or something that you saw also, it can be anything.
- Speaker #1
So a lot of times when we have more technical products and if go-to-market is done, like literally when things are burning and you cannot change much and you are like literally spending your last money and you are super pressured, there will be some decisions that are... Very hard to correct. And you don't have like a lot of space for research and experimentation. So you are very pressed and you are very like obligated to make the right bets. Sometimes it can work as a wonderful motivator, but I will share an example where it didn't. We were launching and I have to be super careful now, but a running app and the running app was developed like with a vision to help semi marathon runners. So serious runners. But the agencies that they were working with, they launched meta ads. And meta ads were targeted at a very, like, mainstream audience. And this was a pressure cooker. It was, like, super nervous environment. We really had to make it or break it. And we suddenly saw that there were a lot of registrations. Like, yeah, it was celebrating, all good. But then nobody was using this app for running. Why? Because those people didn't even have the running habit. They were just, like, theirs. Lying on the couch, clicking meta ads, Facebook ads, and like thinking that they will lose some weight potentially if they would run. So it was just like a very bad selection of an audience and a channel of communication without like they optimized for the right type of metrics, right? The metrics that they were optimizing for was cost to install. And if you are optimizing for this, of course, you will select like some sort of mainstream audience. But the app like it needed early adoption. It really needed those marathon runners that are serious about the running and need this type of guided running advice. So yeah, that was a miss, unfortunately.
- Speaker #0
And so what will be your recommendation to avoid doing this mistake again?
- Speaker #1
Don't spend any money to acquire your first 100 customers. No, just kidding. It's all about just like acknowledging that there are early adopters and that there is mainstream. And whenever you have a product which is still like a little bit buggy and a little bit like underdevelopment and you need to learn a lot from the users, mainstream users like are usually not the ones that would be, first of all, the most forgiving. And second of all, like you cannot really count of their support if the product is not like top shelf in the moment. So, yeah, it would be like a much better strategy. That case would be to go. and like do some flyers on marathons to go into running groups like on Strava and do the let's say more of a unscalable guerrilla-like tactics before drowning a bunch of money into meta ads to have mayas who cannot run 10 kilometers without stopping. Well potentially I can but I don't want to.
- Speaker #0
Are there common ideas about go to market that you disagree or that you really want to debunk?
- Speaker #1
I mean, on Monday, I do this on a daily basis. So for me, you know, Carlota, you have to understand I'm a very pragmatic person. And I will work with literally anything there is and I will try to grasp the best out of this because this is my nature. You are giving something and you are optimistically and positively trying to make the best out of such a situation. So yes, this is like kind of a default mindset of a golden retriever. but nevertheless whenever it comes to go to market i think that people are like severely overthinking this yes it's important it has a lot of gravitas it can be a reason why a good product can be like sunk but i always like to start with a good product because if the product is good if it really delivers value we can save it we can always develop like good but better go-to-market strategy and as long as we are diligent and agile and observant in what assumptions did not work out and like what else did we learn on this journey, I think that it has a fair fighting chance. What I don't like is to just like make this type of field of work very understandable for people as you would have to be like a rocket scientist to grasp this. Yes, it can be difficult in science environments, this is why you can like do it with your team, you can hire an expert, you can get a consultant. You can read a little bit more about this and do your own research. So it's always fixable. But I always like the idea that people who will live with the consequences of the decisions actually do the work. I don't like this being like completely outsourced. OK, here is my product. Take it to market. Even though I have done all the research and I know my customer inside out. But here you go. You take it to market. My hands are clean. So that's an attitude that I'm not very fond of.
- Speaker #0
And do you have some advice for the PMM community in France to become an excellent go-to-market strategist? Besides reading your book, of course.
- Speaker #1
No, no, I didn't want to go like that way. But I would just like start, and oftentimes with product marketers, and I mean, I'm being completely sincere here. There is like a lot of imposter syndrome and there is a lot of just like, you know, maybe our type of work is not like the most important in the organization. But I think it is. In go-to-market, it's definitely something that makes tremendous difference. Imagine, like you're responsible for sales decks, for messaging, for all the cool like pitch decks that we are doing, for landing pages often. And I just think that you should take a little bit more power. to display your work a little bit more and grasp like more power more control in the organization and i'm not trying to like to do a rebellion here but what i have seen in practice your work really matters so please don't be afraid to talk about this to display it and to proudly share your achievements because otherwise who will you have to do this yeah
- Speaker #0
that's true we often forget that if we don't show the work Nobody will do it for us. So we have to be the first ones to do it.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. And I mean, the spirit in this community is so nice. Like I love to interact with product marketing communities. Like people are curious. They are very friendly in discussions. I like developers. I mean, there is a lot of good stuff going on. So yeah, just embrace it and showcase your work a little bit further.
- Speaker #0
And there is something that you wish. you had known earlier about go-to-market, about all the things that you know now and that you have written on the book?
- Speaker #1
Probably it has to do something with the things that don't scale, right? Coming back to the example that we were discussing with the running app. So everybody is like super wired into thinking that we have to do things that scale, that will super grow our charge or something like that. But in early stages of go-to-market, things are very delicate they are very fragile before you have a product market fit i kind of grew to believe that it doesn't really matter what you do as long as it is done and it is perfectly okay to give up suppliers and to like have a billboard at one event and do like things that are a little bit let's say non-digital and not very scalable per se But whatever gets the job done, whatever will get you those first 100 or 1000 customers, however you define this milestone, then it's really important to start building systems. And I like to think about those go to market motions, so structured and repeatable ways how to get customers. So I defined seven of those. We can talk about this later, but it's super important to have predictable way. how to get new inflow in your business because otherwise you will be stuck forever doing flyers at the event so you have to evolve that's probably the most important one um did i place enough emphasis on this a year ago i don't think so but i literally started to think about this go-to-market journey in milestones such as stairs right so this is the first direction that you need to win then the second one then the second one and then the second one and your go-to-market strategy will evolve, it will change.
- Speaker #0
Okay, so the important thing is to know what are these different steps and where we are and how to go from one to another, right?
- Speaker #1
Literally reverse engineering the objective. I mean, if your objective Carlota would be to get like 10,000 downloads of your apps, you could think about this such as, okay, how do I get the first thousand one? for free preferably in subgroups or with existing customers or something like that okay now i learn and i either refined my messaging i just like do a little bit better creatives or something like that to have even better success in the second batch that i will do right so it's reverse engineering and being very perceptive towards what you learn on a way
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