Once we have validated that our product has good retention, it's time to turn up the customer acquisition pipeline and launch our product in a bigger market.
Your go-to-market strategy (or go-to-market) isn't something you just think about once upon launching your first product. But rather, like many other aspects of our business, it's an iterative process focused on continuously improving marketing and sales. Therefore, rather than a single big effort to launch, you should instead think of it as a continuous launch.
Remember, even the best marketing and sales team in the world cannot sell a bad product sustainably. So if you've found yourself asking, "When should I focus on marketing and sales?" The answer is once you've found product/market fit. Product/market fit means that your product meets a real customer need and creates significant customer value.
A product that has found product/market fit will experience a pull from the market, meaning people will use the product, understand its value, and will share the positive experience with others. A sound go-to-market strategy will help strengthen that pull.
In the beginning, you're likely trying anything and everything to attract customers, but you might not be very strategic about it. But it's important to recognize that you have two types of tools at your disposal: sales and marketing. We use both terms frequently, but what's the difference, and how should you use them as a startup?
Sales is about building and managing the one-on-one relationships with potential customers that eventually lead to the sale of the product/service. It is high-touch and expensive, but extremely effective as you have probably discovered by now through your product tests. Given the proactive nature of sales, it's considered a push strategy.
Marketing is the process of getting people interested in the solution being sold and is a one-to-many relationship. While marketing is higher leverage and might seem like a better choice, some solutions just need more individual attention in order to be sold. Marketing generates demand and is therefore considered to be a pull strategy.
Which one should I be doing?
While many companies use both tools as part of their customer acquisition strategy, it's important to understand how you should balance them depending on your customer and solution. By using the rubric created by Mark Leslie, you can look across seven dimensions to determine how much Marketing versus Sales you should do: