Introduction

A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive plan to deliver a winning value proposition to customers. Its goal is to achieve a competitive edge in the market to acquire and grow customers to fuel growth. Whether you’re an entrepreneur launching a new startup or a manager introducing a new product, your GTM plan is your roadmap to success and a critical piece of your pitch deck. This course is designed to address the challenges of product and service innovations, customer experience design, marketing, selling, and managing following years of digital transformation and disruption and to help students uncover and explore today’s successful GTM strategies.

In this course, we will dive into the five crucial components of a GTM strategy:

1. Strategic customer selection that attracts the right customers and repels those who may be unprofitable,
2. Product-market fit optimization for early traction generation to quickly obtain initial customers and then, over time, increase their lifetime value,
3. Evolving monetization strategies and pricing plans to align with the firm’s maturation process and to balance customer acquisition and profitability,
4. Innovative channel designs and customer experiences (CX) that increase adoption and promote diffusion, and
5. Efficient and effective marketing communications strategies that combine the best of brand marketing and performance marketing.

Through case discussions and interactions with executives, founders, and case protagonists, students will gain practical insights and processes to help design their own GTM strategies.

This course explores GTM strategies in a variety of industries and product categories (e.g., apparel, beauty, furniture, food and beverage, healthcare, retail, gaming, and technology). While most cases will focus on early-stage firms, firms in various life stages (e.g., startup, early traction, fast growth, maturity) will be covered.

In addition to the case discussions, we will have a hands-on in-class exercise that highlights analytic tools that are helpful in designing GTM strategies. No prior technical experience is required.

Career Focus

The course is particularly appropriate for:

• Entrepreneurs and founders writing pitch decks and designing GTM strategies;
• Product managers and marketing managers;
• Consultants engaged in growth strategy roles; and
• Investors seeking to evaluate the GTM activities of portfolio companies.

Grading:

Grading in the course will be based on class participation (50%), and an Exam or Paper (50%).

Students can choose to take a final exam (alone) or complete a final paper (alone or in pairs), both up to 1,500 words (or 5-6 pitch deck slides). The final paper takes one of the following approaches or addresses a topic approved by the instructor:

• Using course frameworks, build a GTM strategy for a business of your choice.
• Propose a new GTM case: identify a specific company, its main challenges, and interesting dilemmas.

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