Go To Market Strategy

I've been appointed by the general manager to co-create a go-to-market strategy with the regional sales manager and marketing communication plan for a new product line - bar code reading solutions for logistic and distribution centres. 

This product line was completely new to the market and there were almost no customers in the CRM system to offer the product to. There was a need to identify the ideal customer and the first countries for the product to roll out. 

In order to identify the best countries for a product start, I created a survey to send to the sales colleagues in 10 European countries. The survey revealed that most of the distribution and logistic centres are in central Europe and ideal customers are logistics/ warehouse/ distribution centres managers and professionals. Surprisingly the survey revealed that IT managers are also important contacts in the purchase journey as bar code reading software has to be linked with the warehouse software. 

The target for this GTM strategy was simple: Achieve the sales target and grow the database with new contacts in logistics, warehouse and distribution centres. 

To achieve these two targets I developed and implemented these marketing actions:

1. SEM campaign where together with sales I identified important keywords and created landing pages with promotional content about the devices which was translated into the local languages.

2. Email marketing campaign running for 6 months dedicated to different customer groups to promote a new product.

3. Direct Mail campaign "Refer A Colleague And Get a Gift" focused on contact functions who might work with logistics or warehouse to refer their colleagues and both of them will receive a giveaway.

4. Telemarketing campaign to promote the new product, find users and ask for referrals.

5. PR article in a logistics magazine highlighting the added value of the product and use case.

6. Adding a promotional email to the newsletter of the 2 industry web magazines.

7. Attendance at 1 logistic trade fair and 2 conferences.

8. 1x LinkedIn InMail campaign focused on warehouse, logistic and distribution centre managers.

These actions have been done in the time frame of 6 months. 

The results were amazing, despite challenging targets, I was able to overachieve the sales target by 48% and the customer database growth also exceeded expectations. 

After this successful rollout, the product was introduced to the rest of the region and I continued supporting it.