Research methods
Go-to-market strategy: how to build one, with a research checklist
How to build a go-to-market strategy: choose a first buyer, message, purchase path, channel and price, and check each choice with buyer research first.
A go-to-market strategy is your plan for how a specific group of buyers will hear about your product, decide to buy it and start using it. It comes down to five choices: who you sell to first, what problem you promise to solve for them, how a purchase actually happens, how they will hear about you, and what you charge. Each choice rests on assumptions about buyers, and most of those assumptions can be checked with research before you spend money on a launch.
This page walks through the choices in order and ends with a research checklist. If you want a fill-in outline, use the go-to-market strategy template. For software sold to businesses, the SaaS go-to-market strategy guide covers sales motions in more detail.
A worked example: maintenance software for property managers
Suppose you have built a tool that lets tenants report maintenance problems with photos and routes each request to the right vendor. You think property management companies will pay for it. You have a working product and three friendly users, and you need to decide where to spend the next six months. This example is hypothetical and used throughout the page.
1. Choose the first buyer
"Property managers" is too broad to act on. A firm managing 50 single-family homes and one managing 5,000 apartments have different problems, buyers and budgets. Pick one group narrow enough that you could list real companies in it, and whose members would recognize each other as peers.
Paul Graham's essay Do Things that Don't Scale describes starting with a deliberately narrow market, the way Facebook began only at Harvard, so that the people in it feel the product was made for them. A narrow first segment also makes your message sharper and your early references more convincing to the next buyer.
Research to do: interview people in two or three candidate segments. Compare how often the problem happens, what it costs them today and who decides. How to choose your first customer segment covers the comparison.
2. Describe the problem in the buyer's words
Your message should name a problem the buyer already recognizes, in the words they use. You might call it "maintenance workflow automation." A property manager is more likely to say "tenants text me photos at 11 p.m. and I lose track of which plumber I called."
Research to do: in each interview, ask about the last time the problem happened and write down the exact phrases. Keep the ones that come up in several conversations. Customer interview questions has wording that gets people describing real events instead of opinions.
3. Map how a purchase happens
The SBA's business plan guidance asks for a marketing and sales section that describes how you will attract and keep customers and how a sale will actually happen. The second half is where many plans go vague. Write down each step for your segment: who notices the problem, who looks for a fix, who tries the product, who approves the spend and who signs.
In the example, a regional property manager might find and try the tool, while the owner of the management company approves anything with a monthly fee. That tells you who needs to hear your pitch and which objections you will have to answer.
Research to do: ask buyers who recently bought any software for their business to walk through that purchase step by step. How to interview B2B buyers, users and champions explains how to separate those roles.
4. Pick the channels your buyer already uses
A channel is how buyers hear about you: direct outreach, search, referrals, partners, events, marketplaces or online communities. Choose one or two that match how your segment already finds suppliers, and ask buyers rather than guessing. Property managers might hear about vendors from a local association, from the software they already use, or from peers at other firms.
Early on, the main channel is usually a founder. Graham writes that the most common unscalable thing founders do at the start is recruit users manually, and that at least one founder has to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. A channel you can automate comes later, once you know which message works.
5. Set a price you have tested
Price belongs in the go-to-market plan because it decides who can approve the purchase and how much selling you can afford. A price a regional manager can approve alone needs a different sales process from one that needs the owner's signature.
Research to do: ask what the current fix costs, including staff time, and test a specific price with a commitment such as a paid pilot. How to research willingness to pay covers question wording and what counts as evidence.
6. Check the market size and the competition
Before committing, confirm that the segment is big enough and see what buyers use instead. Market size research shows how to count buyers from the bottom up with public data, and competitor analysis covers why buyers choose the alternatives, including spreadsheets and group texts.
Go-to-market research checklist
| Choice | What you need to know | Where to get it |
|---|---|---|
| First buyer | Which segment has the problem most often and most expensively | Interviews across two or three segments |
| Problem | The words buyers use for it | Interview and sales call notes |
| Purchase path | Who finds, tries, approves and signs, and what slows it down | Buyers who recently bought something similar |
| Channels | Where this segment already finds suppliers | Interviews, industry associations and publications |
| Price | What the current fix costs and what buyers will commit to | Interviews, paid pilots |
| Market size | How many buyers exist in the segment | Public data, counted bottom-up |
| Competition | What buyers use instead, and why | Buyer interviews, competitors' public material |
Write your answer to each row on one page. Mark each answer "heard from buyers," "from data" or "our guess." The guesses are your next research tasks.
Your next step
Pick the segment you think is strongest and book five conversations with people in it. Use them to fill in the purchase-path row first, since it is the one most plans leave blank.
If you need people outside your network, Instant Expert can find people who match a description you write, such as "owners of property management firms with 200 to 1,000 units." You review who it finds, it sends your invitations, and you pay only for calls that get booked. The directory pages for sales professionals in property management and procurement professionals in property management are one place to start.