Why you need to set your marketing foundation (go-to-market strategy) before driving growth

If you don’t take the time to set up a strong Go-to-Market strategy and marketing foundation, you’ll never hit your growth goals.

As the leader of a B2B SaaS company, the pressure to grow quickly can be overwhelming. Many founders, CEOs, and revenue leaders are eager to get traction with marketing, looking to launch demand generation campaigns fast and apply an agile methodology that’s popular in software production, to generate quick wins, increase revenue, and grow their business. 

But without a solid marketing foundation, this rush to market can lead to unfocused, ineffective marketing initiatives, paired with a lack of reporting & attribution that can feel like you’re just throwing money into a pit with no idea what results it will generate. 

The key to scalable, sustainable growth lies in laying the groundwork first—crafting a robust go-to-market (GTM) strategy that is specific to your company, competition, industry, Ideal Customer Profile, and target personas and guides every subsequent go-to-market action for your company. 

In this article, I’ll explore why setting a strong marketing foundation is crucial and how the upfront sacrifice will unlock strong and smooth growth for your company.

The Rush to Market: A Common Mistake

The Temptation to Go Fast

The clock is always ticking for results. 

When the need for growth becomes more urgent and previous attempts haven’t been fruitful, it's easy to see why many CEOs push their teams to start demand-generation campaigns immediately. 

Influenced by the principles of agile development, there's often a belief that the faster you move and test, the quicker you'll see results. However, this mindset can backfire if it’s applied incorrectly to marketing. 

Marketing is a long-term muscle that requires careful planning and strategic thinking before execution. It also requires that you consistently run initiatives without expecting an impact on your bottom line for months or even quarters. 

Without this strategy and perspective, you risk running campaigns that are poorly targeted, misaligned with your brand, ultimately ineffective and are a waste of time and resources. 

I’ve seen this occur many times in B2B SaaS companies. 

Founders and executives can easily find themselves stuck in a downward spiral that looks something like this:

1. A few marketing initiatives are started to “test the market” without the proper research or GTM strategy. 
   
   
2. The initiatives struggle to get results (poor volume, conversion rate, ROI, etc.).
   
   
3. To improve results, the executive team micromanages the initiative, pushing for more frequent tests, more reporting, and more short-term focused campaigns.
   --OR the executive team doesn’t have enough visibility into the initiative and its impact and “set it and forget it”, allowing the initiative to run in perpetuity, without optimizing it for results.
   
   
4. Results and momentum stagnate because of 
   --Randomization due to micromanagement.
   --Passive campaigns that aren’t optimized.
5. The longer results don’t come, the more pressure increases on executives.
   
   
6. The executives fire their marketing resources, scrap the initiative, and/or reduce their team size because they weren’t able to hit their growth targets.
   
   
7. They search for a marketing resource that can promise them quick wins.
   
   
8. The cycle repeats itself, with 6 months to a year of runway down the drain after every cycle.

Marketing Foundation: Why Strategy Must Come First

Building Your Go-To-Market Strategy

At the heart of every successful marketing effort is a strong GTM strategy. 

A GTM strategy is like a trail map for selling your product in the market. Without one, it’s very easy to spend far too much time wandering around, ultimately getting lost, and the potential to get eaten by a bear or cougar is pretty high. 

But, if you have the right GTM strategy, the path to your destination becomes smoother, faster, and avoids many of the pitfalls and predators out there in the market.

This isn't just about tactics, though; it's about making fundamental decisions that will shape your company's approach to marketing & selling in the market. Successful GTM strategies balance what we at Kalungi call “Big M marketing strategy” with “Little m marketing tactics & execution”. 

Big M marketing strategy focuses on answering big picture questions like: 

• What is our target market?
• What do people within that market care about?
• Why should prospects change?
• Why should they choose us?
• Why now?
• How do we position ourselves against the competition?
• How should we package and price our products?
• What should our brand’s personality be?
• What are our growth goals and when do we need to achieve them?
• How much are we willing to spend to achieve them?

Little m marketing strategy is much more focused on the “how” of day-to-day execution:

• How are we capturing the demand that exists right now?
• How are we generating demand that doesn’t currently exist?
• What channels do our prospects make decisions with?
• How do we test our value propositions with the market?
• How do we develop content that adds value to the prospect in every stage of the funnel?
• How can we increase conversion rates?
• What is our Customer Acquisition Cost? How does it compare to our Customer Lifetime Value?
• How do I increase the quality of leads marketing is delivering to sales?
• How can I enable the sales process as much as possible to increase bottom-of-funnel conversions?
• How can I enable the customer experience as much as possible to increase customer retention?
• What upsell campaigns can I run to increase my Average Revenue per Unit?

As important as little m marketing is (and it’s extremely important), it’s nothing without big M marketing strategy. 

Big M marketing strategy focuses the efforts of little m marketing execution to ensure that the impact is driven in the right direction, focused on the right prospects, and with the right differentiation to make sure that all of the channel tactics are as successful as possible.

Many marketing hires and agencies are very well versed in “small m” marketing. They’re great at the tactics of Google Ads, running demand generation campaigns, writing blogs, etc. 

However, without the overarching guidance of big M marketing, more often than not these campaigns lack a cohesive direction, only address one portion of the funnel, and lead to ineffective demand generation and capture, which hurt your business’s bottom line and growth. 

Here are the key elements of your Go-to-Market strategy you must put in place before launching your demand generation campaigns:

• Growth plan: How does your company plan on growing over the next year, 3 years, 5 years, etc? Will you be growing by penetrating your current market? Entering a new market? investing in your product? Use a framework like Ansoff’s Matrix to organize your team’s thoughts on this.
  
  
• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): You must have a segment of the market that is big enough to support your business needs, but small enough for you to stand out from the noise. After all, if you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one. Pick a niche in the market where you stand out and become its champion. Here’s a template you can use to get going.
  
  
• Target Personas: What actual people within your ICP are you targeting? The main difference between B2B and B2C marketing is that with B2B marketing you need to convince someone to spend someone else’s money, so who is your user? Who is your buyer? Know them and document them as much as possible and develop all of your GTM materials with them in mind.
  
  
• Competitive research: Who are you going up against when a prospect considers solutions to their problems? Where do you beat them? Where do they beat you? What features/benefits are table stakes for the market? Have a crystal clear understanding of the competition and how your product stands out for your ICP/personas. Hint: even if you think you don’t have competition, you’re competing against the status quo. 
  
  
• Messaging and positioning: Document your positioning, value propositions, and reasons to believe, as well as why prospects should change, why with you, and why now. This will be the standard for your messaging across all of marketing and sales so spend the time to make sure it aligns with your overarching strategy, product roadmap, etc., and that it has enough detail & standardization that you could give it to a new hire or agency and they could easily create a website that fits your brand.
  
  
• Brand voice: If your brand were a person, what would they sound like? How would they talk? Your brand voice must be consistent across marketing, sales, and customer success materials so that the right prospects are attracted to your brand and there is a smooth path for them to go from marketing to sales, to CS.
  
  
• Marketing budget: Before you spend any resources, time, or money on marketing campaigns, you need to know how much money you have to spend on marketing. How many marketers can you hire? Which ones will best support your goals? How much discretionary budget do you need? Are you attending events? What tech stack do you need? Iron this out early so you can maximize your budget (and marketing’s impact).
  
  
• Marketing projections: Even if you don’t have any underlying data, you need to start your marketing efforts with an idea of what success looks like. What is your company’s revenue target for the year and how much of that revenue is marketing supposed to contribute? How many Marketing Qualified Leads need to be generated to hit that number? This will initially be based on some assumptions but it will give you a clear direction on how hard you need to push and how much you need to spend to hit your targets.
  
  
• Channel research: Before spending any time or money on campaigns, make sure you know the channels you’ll be utilizing and have a decent idea of if your ICP uses them as watering holes, or makes decisions based on the information that lives on those channels. Know how competitive these channels are, how much they’ll cost, and have an idea of the leads you’re expecting to generate and what the unit economics of the channel will be.
  
  
• Website: Your website is your online storefront, so it needs to be built around your ICP & personas to attract them, educate them on their problem, and present a great solution that’s easy to purchase. Kalungi even built a website theme so that it’s easy to build your site from scratch. Your website also needs to be able to convert visitors down the funnel with CTAs & form fills, while also collecting the right information on each lead to ensure the success of marketing and sales efforts.
  
  
• CRM: Your CRM needs to be your “one source of truth” for marketing data. It’s also at the heart of every marketing effort, so you need to make sure that you have the right software, set up the right way so that you can attribute leads by source, automate your marketing efforts, and hand the right leads to sales at the right time.
  
  
• Attribution & reporting: As I said before, marketing is a long-term muscle and won’t necessarily have an immediate impact on your pipeline. So how do you know if you’re going in the right direction? By establishing the right KPIs as leading and lagging indicators for your initiatives, you can see numerical progress toward your goals, before an opportunity is created. You also need to make sure that you can attribute leads, MQLs, Opportunities, and closed deals by source so you can know where and how much to invest your marketing budget in what marketing sources.

Try this: Host a Go-to-Market workshop with your executive team and customer-facing employees to jumpstart your GTM strategy. Discuss your growth goals, ICP, Personas, competition, positioning, points of differentiation, and brand voice. Then document them. Then give your marketing team 1-2 months to set up the marketing foundation the right way, before applying pressure to generate results. While it may be painful to wait initially, it’s more than worth it in the medium-to-long run, as your growth will be easier, faster, and more scalable.

The Role of Testing: When and How to Execute

Balancing Strategy with Execution

Agile methodologies have become popular in many facets of business, including marketing, for good reason. The idea of quickly testing and iterating is very appealing and can allow companies to ship and iterate quickly, resulting in products that can better adapt to changing customer needs. 

However, when this is applied to marketing, we warn against relying too heavily on this approach without a solid foundation to give it direction.

Without a clear strategy, A/B testing and rapid iterations can lead to confusion, inefficiency, and wasted resources.  

For instance, without the right GTM strategy, and marketing foundation, how will you know that the increase in clicks that you saw from a headline variation was from the right audience? Or that they’ll be likely to convert? Or that they aren’t just clicking and then bouncing off of your landing page? 

As you can see, without the right research and strategy, it’s easy to optimize for the wrong factors, which can negatively impact marketing performance and can lead to a marketing team that is overworked but unable to positively impact real results.

Instead, testing should be used to validate and refine your strategy, not replace it. By grounding your tests in a strong strategic framework, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are both effective and aligned with your business objectives. 

This way, you’ll be able to tie headlines to your messaging framework, which draws from customer interviews and is much more likely to resonate with your target audience (to continue the analogy from the above paragraph). 

It’s also critical to have a specific hypothesis and goal in mind for each test that you do. For example: If I include an ROI stat in my website header, I’ll improve my CTA clickthrough rate because prospects will internalize the company’s credibility and the positive impact we can have on their businesses.

As for goals, make sure that you create SMART goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Here are some examples of A/B tests you can use to validate your GTM strategy:

1. Messaging tests on marketing copy across website headlines, email subject lines, ad copy, calls to action, etc. These tests can be used to test the effectiveness of anything in your messaging and positioning guide for each persona in your ICP:

• Pains
• Claims
• Gains
• Positioning statements
• Value propositions
• Reasons to believe
• Brand voice
• Social proof & Voice of the Customer
• Case study stats
• Comparisons against competitors
• Etc.

• Imagery
• Page design
• Graphics to draw the eye to the CTA
• Page structure to prioritize different content
• Brand/color scheme iterations
• Photography vs illustrations, product shots vs people

• ROI calculator
• Case study
• One pager
• Ebook
• Template
• Tutorial
• Podcast recording
• Blog
• Webinar recording
• Etc.

Here are some A/B testing tools you can use, to help you conduct your tests and gain the most insights possible.

• Hubspot Marketing Hub (CRM)
• VWO (website testing)
• Outreach (outbound sales & marketing)

Always use testing as a tool to fine-tune your strategy, not as a substitute for strategic planning. Prioritize strategic patience—taking the time to build a solid foundation—over tactical impatience, and always have a hypothesis and result in mind when launching your tests that will help to move your strategy forward (not just your short-term results). 

Finally, once you have a strong enough test result, spread the change to your other marketing materials and watch the results. 

Keep in mind that testing is a game of small, frequent wins. Compounding one percent gains over time are much more impactful than a one-time 20% bump, so constantly test in alignment with your overarching GTM strategy. 

Just watch the incremental improvements transform the results your team delivers.

The Risks of Randomization in Marketing

Avoiding the Trap of Randomization

One of the biggest risks in marketing is the tendency to become randomized. 

Marketing is a function that is capable of supporting almost every department within a B2B SaaS company. As a result, it can be very easy for marketers to get spread too thin across too many priorities and work extremely hard to generate lackluster results. 

Here are a few of the most common ways that marketing teams become ineffective:

• Constant, last-minute requests with a tight deadline from sales, executives, etc.
  
  
• Marketing focusing on tasks and initiatives rather than results
  
  
• Consistent, granular, and manual reporting requirements
  
  
• Frequent company strategy changes (changing ICP, entering new markets, core messaging & positioning adjustments, etc.)
  
  
• Marketers always say “yes” and prioritize projects that don’t impact performance metrics (Share of voice, Leads, MQLs, Opportunities, Weighted pipeline, etc.)

The risk of this pitfall is particularly high when marketing teams lack a clear strategy. Without the focus provided by a strategy and clear goals, it's easy for marketing to become a "black box" where resources are consumed, but results don’t materialize.

A strong GTM strategy, paired with a specific set of Objectives and Key Results (or Rocks for the EOS fans out there) helps prevent this by providing clear direction. After all, a strategy is as much about saying “no” to the wrong things as it is about saying “yes” to the right ones. 

With a strategic foundation, marketing teams can avoid getting sucked into low-priority initiatives and concentrate on the most important ones, ensuring that their efforts are aligned and their impact is maximized.

Try this: To maximize your marketing team’s impact Boil the Go-to-Market strategy that you came up with above into SMART, Quarterly goals for you and your marketing team. Check on your teams’ progress every 2-4 weeks and ensure that you help them stay focused on your strategic objectives and avoid the temptation to chase every new trend or idea. You can use frameworks like Objectives and Key Results or Rocks to help your team stay organized and focused on the right things.

The Payoff: Benefits of a Well-Laid Marketing Foundation

What Success Looks Like

Although it can take time to build, when you’ve completed a solid marketing foundation, the benefits are impressive. 

A well-defined GTM strategy leads to more effective campaigns, clearer ROI, and better alignment between marketing and other departments, like sales. 

Your team will have a clear direction, enabling them to work more efficiently and effectively. 

You'll be better equipped to adapt to changes in the market.

Your campaigns will be more likely to succeed because they're rooted in a deep understanding of your audience and the market.

Moreover, with a strong foundation in place, your marketing efforts will be more efficient, generate higher quality leads that convert better down the funnel, and compound their impact with strong attribution data and coordinated testing. 

You’ll be able to reap the benefits of your improved marketing efforts with the right assets built at the right place in the funnel, for the right target audience, and the right system to attribute, ingest, and hand off the right leads to sales. 

This is the ideal starting point for marketing. It gives marketing the direction it needs and the aircover to get there with a strong GTM strategy and the right leading KPIs. It also puts the right system in place to measure marketing’s success and optimize its efforts, from the top to the bottom of the funnel. 

It also equips marketers and executives with the data they need to make smarter decisions on where to invest vs divest in marketing channels and initiatives. And finally, it optimizes each channel to its fullest potential, resulting in real, repeatable, scalable, and ROI-positive growth for you and your business.

Invest time in building a strong marketing strategy and foundation. Then give marketing the space to execute on that strategy, while holding it accountable to the leading indicators of success. The long-term benefits of having a clear, focused approach far outweigh the short-term gains of rushing to market.

Rushing into marketing without a solid strategy is a recipe for frustration and wasted resources. By taking the time to build a strong GTM strategy, you can guide your marketing efforts, ensuring that they are aligned, efficient, and effective.

Ultimately, this sets up your B2B SaaS company for scalable growth and long-term success.

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