Go-to-Market Insights from Innovate Calgary’s Founder’s Lunch
We had a great turn out and high audience engagement yesterday at Innovate Calgary's Founder's Lunch talking about GTM. Key takeaways:
- Know your customer. If you don't understand the problem you solve, for whom, and why they should care, you need to take a step back and evaluate. Create your ICP, test and validate it, and revisit it quarterly. Your ICP will shift as your business grows and you need to adjust, even if the changes are subtle.
- Make it human. No one likes to be "talked at". But most people love a good story. Don't lead with features and benefits - no one cares, especially when they've never heard of you or your product before. Show that you understand the pain points your customers are going through, and tell a story about why you are solving the pain and how it is going to help your customers in their business.
- Every product has competition. If there is a pain that a customer is trying to solve, they might be using cobbled together ways of solving it rather than a slick, built-for-purpose solution. That is still competition. Be sure to do regular competitive scans in order to understand who your competitors are and, just as importantly, who they're not. Uncover how you differentiate and play to your strengths.
- Don't jump to tactics. If you don't understand the impact of the problem you are solving, who your customers are, and how to reach them, you might as well light the money you are spending on tactics on fire. Tactics are a good way to test your hypothesis once you've done the hard yards of building your ICP, messaging and positioning, and discovering where your customers go to consume information and learn about new ideas.
Huge thank you to the audience for your engagement and questions - there were some tough ones to answer, and to my fantastic panel members Arleigh Vasconcellos, Clark Lai, and David Cree for bringing your perspectives. I learned a lot from you in our short time together.
Big shout out to Marian Danko for moderating and running an excellent event. If you haven't attended a Founder's Lunch before, check it out. They will run the last Thursday of the month going forward.
