go-to-market strategy

Definition

Your master plan for how you'll actually convince humans to exchange money for your product, typically involving buzzwords like 'omnichannel' and 'vertical integration.' It's the section of your pitch deck you update most frequently as each approach fails.

Example Usage

Our go-to-market strategy is enterprise sales with a bottoms-up approach, which means we have no idea who will buy this but we're hoping someone in IT will click our LinkedIn ad.

Origin

Traditional business strategy terminology, adopted heavily by startups in the 2000s

Fun Fact

Most successful startups' actual go-to-market strategy was 'founder desperately emails everyone they know,' not the elaborate framework in their Series A deck.

Source: Business strategy and product marketing terminology

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