Innovation in Professional Services Demands Creative Go-to-Market Strategies

Digital transformation is driving rapid change and innovation in the design and delivery of professional services. It’s also changing the preferences, expectations, and behaviours of B2B buyers.

To keep pace and identify market opportunities, and connect with customers effectively, you need a thoughtful, customer centric, tech-enabled go to market strategy. 

Yes, B2B buyers are now more willing than ever to search out and educate themselves on products or services before initiating contact with sales teams. However, without a plan for understanding their needs your organisation is in danger of investing resources to launch where there is no business need. And without a strategy for engaging, persuading and converting their interest, you’ll lose sales through lack of connection. 

This is especially the case for organisations where digital transformation is revolutionising the business model and redefining whole industries.

In this article, you’ll learn why it’s not enough to design a product or service and then find a market for it. Instead, you’ll see why working through your go to market strategy helps you to engage with your customers, convince them to buy, and gain a competitive advantage.

What is a go-to-market strategy?

A go to market strategy is created by the marketing department specifically to launch, or relaunch, a specific aspect of a business. You might design a GTM plan to:

• Introduce a new product or service to an existing audience.

• Introduce an existing product or service into a new geographical area.

• Introduce a new service or product into a new area.

Your market plan would be tailored around your service and aimed to reach the specific target audience that would want or need your service.

If you look at the parts that make up a GTM strategy, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’re looking at a general marketing strategy for your business. It includes examining your buyer personas, looking at USPs, setting up your marketing funnel, and creating content to fill it at every stage. However, where the two differ is that your marketing strategy is about your business as a whole. It’s designed to address every aspect of your marketing, and not just one specific product or service.

Why create a go-to-market strategy?

With a clear GTM plan in place, you’ll have a roadmap to follow when launching your product or service. Instead of launching to practically no fanfare and likely no audience, a well-thought-out plan can increase the chance of you launching your service successfully. It’s not a quick fix and it does take time and effort, but it also offers your best chance of success, and it can reduce your time to market.

Your plan can give you a competitive advantage in your target markets, with a clear sales process and a plan for how you’re going to grow. Everyone involved will understand exactly what is happening and what they need to do. Your messaging and content will be coherent and on target, and you can reduce the chances of any mistakes.

Your plan should be flexible so that you can adapt to changing circumstances but still achieve success over the short term and long term.

This isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have if you want to launch successfully.

What Uber and Law Firms Have in Common

Take Uber, for example. Their innovative technological solution to hiring a mini-cab disrupted all other businesses in the space. However, it wasn't enough just to offer a different or better option. To drive the fast, mass adoption and achieve the scale their business needed, they opted for heavy price promotion and discounting, practically to the point of subsidy. 

It might be hard to see the parallels, but the same market forces and considerations are at play in B2B organisations.

McKinsey states that “…those companies that move quickly and decisively to transform their go-to-market channels, models, and culture through technology should be able to unlock substantial value: top quartile B2B players generate 3.5 percent more revenue and are 15 percent more profitable than the rest of the B2B field.”

They also note that: “As the customer landscape shifts toward digital channels, and as e-commerce matures, companies need to develop consumer-centric strategies that will drive traffic to their web pages and improve lead generation. Doing so significantly increases performance, as McKinsey analysis shows that companies with strong presales capabilities consistently achieve win rates of 40 to 50 percent in new business and 80 to 90 percent in renewal business, well above the average.”

If you’re running a law firm, there are a lot of other law firms out there to compete against. The digital transformation of some aspects of your business has the potential to offer you a clear USP and point of differentiation.

For example, many legal firms now provide an automated, digital service for basic services where they can be templated, such as will writing, service contracts, and NDAs. Not only is this easier for law firms, but it can also be easier and cheaper for the consumer too.

But it’s not just the simple stuff that’s being automated. Large and complex legal matters depend more and more on Lawtech. Look at some of the innovations coming from Allen & Overy. 

Their AI-supported tools allow the mass analysis of thousands or even millions of complex contracts in rapid time. They can then update them to match regulatory requirements or bring potentially problematic issues to the attention of human lawyers. A regulatory change in financial markets or insurance might impact a huge number of contracts. It’s not humanly possible to analyse or triage them all, so LawTech helps.

This change in the nature of the client relationship demands a radical re-think of go-to-market strategy. It’s no longer lawyers and clients meeting in offices across a desk. 

Self-service websites open up services for the low end of the market without jeopardising revenues from the core business. Advanced software guidance and technical support at the Allen & Overy end of the scale affects the types of services delivered in person and the degree of productisation over advisory services. 

When you’re selling a different kind of service and different kinds of relationships, you need to create a different kind of experience. Suddenly you’re in the Technology products and SaaS space, as well as in the law sector. 

Therefore you need go-to-market strategies that adopt the appropriate behaviours for this new context. You suddenly need to provide your customers with a lot of content that explains the offer and guides people on how to use it. Content becomes the product and the service, and not purely through the templates you need to produce. 

And throughout automation is able to track the interactions, providing a 360 degree view of the customer. From first ad click through to them using the platform and support content, you’re gathering data that both enhances your client’s experience and refines the service for the future.

How to create your Go-to-Market strategy

If you’ve ever written a marketing plan, you probably know what’s coming. As with any successful marketing effort, it starts with research. Get your marketing and sales teams involved with creating your strategy for the best chance of success.

Although you may have worked out your target market and target audience for your business as a whole, when you’re launching a new product or service, start again at the beginning. By truly understanding the buyer persona, you can create products and services that truly meet their needs.

Look at your existing customer base and at individual high priority accounts. Dive into your web statistics and social media analytics to understand what people are searching for, what questions they’re asking, and what their pain points are. 

Look at your competitors too. See who they are selling to and what services they already have that are popular. Ask yourself, what is the need that you are serving with your new service?

Clearly defined buyer personas will also throw your positioning into sharp relief. 

• How does your buyer respond to you and your current offerings?

• Are there any behaviours that are relevant to your product’s appeal?

• Will you be aiming for a high-end, exclusive audience that’s happy to pay a high price?

• Are you more likely to aim for low pricing and volume sales?

• How will you communicate what problems and pain points you are solving?

• How will your messaging intersect with your understanding of the customer?

• What will your price strategy be?

As you would with any other part of your marketing plan, map the customer journey to understand the customer experience ecosystem. Take a look at every part of the buyer’s journey from the first touchpoint through to how you might encourage your potential customer to stay loyal to you and even become a brand ambassador. 

Set up your sales pipeline and create the right content to address the needs of customers at every stage. Ensure that your support team is well-trained and knows what to expect so that after-sales service is equally well-prepared for your launch.

The aim is not just to launch to great success but to keep your new service top of mind and plan for long-term success.

Your GTM strategy needs to answer the following questions:

1) What is your sales business model

You may offer a self-service model where everything is set up for the customer to self-educate and persuade themselves to buy, where your focus is on driving traffic rather than building a large sales team.

An inside sales model would have your sales reps nurturing your potential customers to encourage them to buy, without needing face-to-face meetings.

The field service model relies on outreach from dedicated sales teams and is much more suited to products and services that are high-ticket with a long lead time.

Or finally, you may go for the channel model where you partner with someone to sell your service for you.

2) What does effective marketing look like for your service? 

Will you rely on search marketing, your content strategy, social media, or a combination?

How can you optimise the customer experience using data collected throughout the customer journey and improve your conversion rates? How will you test and improve as you go to reduce the length of the sales cycle?

3) What do you need to put in place to allow for scalability? 

How can you help your potential customers do at least some of the work for you, and how can you automate as much as possible to allow your business to scale easily? You can do a lot with a good marketing team, but you can free up their time for greater strategic creativity if you employ automation that empowers clients to help themselves. 

You could include automated workflows to guide your customers through the buyer journey. Self-service content and chatbots could help you persuade without needing a single sales rep. Calculators could let your customers input their own figures to work out how helpful your service will be to them and how it could impact their ROI. 

4) How do you stratify your offer? 

You’ll have decided by this point what sort of offer or offers you want to create. Now you need to create appropriate GTM strategies for different services, depending on whether you offer a high touch, high value, premium offering, or more value end products or services.

Regardless of the answer to your questions, you need to create a digital-first customer experience. As customers increasingly prefer the digital journey to face-to-face meetings, even for B2B, you can’t afford to be left behind.

Dive deeper into our content to find out more about:

• A website as a platform that enables self-service, on-demand conversations, and online delivery. Let your site content guide your buyers through the buyer’s journey and make up their own minds. Read more here.

• An excellent, targeted content strategy that delivers the right content at each stage of your sales funnel. You can then increase lead generation and enable a self-directed customer journey, whether your customers find you on social media, in search, or on your own website. Read more here.

• Marketing automation that allows you to understand your customer’s behaviours and interactions throughout the customer journey, both pre-and post-sale. Knowing how people interact with your company online and use your services guides your marketing, content creation, and product development. Read more here.

• Self-service, digital-first, and automated offerings in professional services require content and templated solutions to be effective. Don’t just save your content creation for your marketing. Read more here.

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Putting together the right go to market strategy for your services or product launches takes work. So does implementing it and keeping it going. But you can help yourself by doing a lot of the work upfront, and by using automation to take up some of the load.

Whatever type of business you have, if you’d like some help with your go-to-marketing strategy or you’d like to see how automation can help you market your business more efficiently, why not get in touch with 1827 Marketing and book a demo of our marketing automation platform?