Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy

Go-to-market strategy consulting decides how an offer reaches its market: which customer group goes first, through which channel, at what price, in what order, and what has to be true before the next gate opens. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, including the direct-to-consumer launch of McGraw-Hill’s Sharpen platform, the demand-first route to market behind the US neobank Current, and the channel, content and measurement plan that carried Renault back into the UK market.

One boundary first, because it decides whether this page is the right one. Go-to-market work assumes the offer is worth buying and treats the path to the customer as the open question. Where the proposition itself is not earning preference, a better launch plan gets you to the same outcome faster, and the work belongs further upstream in brand acceleration or in brand strategy consulting. We will tell you which of the two you are in before the engagement is scoped, not in month four.

• Since 1999brand and go-to-market strategy
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

Almost nobody calls asking for go-to-market strategy consulting by name. They arrive with one of these five situations, usually from a CMO, a chief commercial officer or the general manager who owns the launch number.

• The product is built and the route to the customer is still undecided. Engineering has a date. Commercial has a spreadsheet. Nobody has chosen the first customer group or the channel that reaches it.
• A new geography or a new segment is next, and the existing playbook does not transfer. The motion that works at home assumes a channel, a price point and a buying process that the new market does not have.
• Selling direct to end customers for the first time. The organization knows how to sell through an intermediary and has never owned the customer relationship, the pricing or the service burden that comes with it. This was McGraw-Hill’s situation with Sharpen, a student-facing product inside a company that had spent its history selling to institutions.
• It has launched, the pipeline is thin, and nobody agrees on the cause. One side says price, one says channel, one says the sales team. Without evidence the argument repeats every month.
• A repositioned brand needs a commercial model to match. The position changed, the channel mix, the price architecture and the sales motion did not, and the market is reading the old signal.

Why launch plans miss their business case

A launch plan is a calendar. It inherits a set of decisions that were usually made implicitly, and when the quarter disappoints, the calendar is what gets reviewed. Four patterns account for most of it.

• The channel is treated as a distribution pipe rather than a business. A partner has its own margin targets and a finite shelf, physical or attentional. If the new offer earns the partner less per unit of effort than what it displaces, the partner will keep selling the old thing and the forecast will be missed quietly, over a year, with nobody lying to anyone.
• The first customer group is chosen for size. The largest addressable segment is the one that teaches you the least and costs the most to serve badly. The useful criterion is which group, once won, makes the second group cheaper to win.
• Price is set from cost or from a competitor benchmark. Price is the loudest statement an offer makes about which category it belongs to and who it is for. Setting it last, from a margin target, hands that statement to a spreadsheet.
• There is no failure condition. A plan with no metric that would stop it is a commitment, not a plan. Launches without a kill criterion spend their full budget regardless of what the first eight weeks showed.

What our go-to-market strategy consulting services include

Five decisions, in this order, because each one constrains the next. Most engagements run all five. Where a company has already settled two of them with evidence, we say so and scope around them.

1. Target customer and first-group selection

Which demand situation the offer serves, described as what customers are trying to get done rather than by category or demographic, and the incumbent behavior it displaces, named specifically. Then the first customer group, chosen because winning it makes the second group easier. For Current this started with a segmentation approach that broke open a cohort the banking market had been treating as homogeneous, which is what made a broader addressable market visible in the first place.

2. Positioning and pricing for the launch

What the offer is in the customer’s words, the comparison it invites, and the proof a buyer needs before committing, placed where in the process they need it. Pricing is decided here rather than at the end: the price level, the architecture around it, and what both signal about the category the offer is asking to be judged in.

3. Channel and commercial model

The route the target buyer already uses, as opposed to the route the company already owns. We model channel economics from the partner’s side, including what they stop selling in order to sell this, and we test whether the sales motion the offer requires is one the current commercial organization can actually run. If it is not, that is a staffing and capability decision with a cost, and it belongs in the plan rather than in a footnote. Where the route depends on a partner, the mechanics of that partnership are part of the strategy rather than a contract drafted afterwards: for Sharpen, the structure of the direct-to-consumer model and the mechanics of an AWS cloud partnership that provided the infrastructure for scale were designed alongside the positioning.

4. Launch sequencing and gates

Geography and segment order, with a written condition for each gate: what has to be true before the next market opens. Sequencing is where most of the risk is removed, and it is the part of the plan that gets compressed first when the date slips.

5. Measurement and the kill criteria

The two or three measures that show inside a quarter whether the plan is working, separated from the ones that only report activity. Awareness and reach rise on any sufficiently funded launch, which is what makes them the least useful early signal. Conversion within the target group and cost per acquired customer against plan are the ones worth reading early, and each gets a threshold that triggers a decision rather than a discussion.

How a go-to-market engagement works

1. Diagnose. Customer research, channel interviews and a review of the business case behind the launch. The output is the list of decisions the plan has assumed rather than made, and which of them the available evidence can already settle.
2. Decide. Target demand situation, first customer group, positioning, price position and channel, with the trade-offs written down. This is where a launch stops being a schedule.
3. Build. The sequenced plan, the gate conditions, the commercial model and the measurement chain, plus whatever the sales motion needs that the organization does not have today.
4. Embed. The method stays with your commercial team, so the second launch does not cost what the first one did. With Renault UK this took the form of a playbook shared with every stakeholder, which we then activated against for over 18 months.

Go-to-market strategy results

McGraw-Hill: a company that sold to institutions, launching to students

McGraw-Hill had built the Sharpen learning platform to serve students directly, a move beyond the institutional sales model the company had been built around. A student-facing digital product needed its own go-to-market strategy, a consumer-oriented positioning and a partnership model that could deliver reach at scale, none of which the existing commercial motion supplied. Vivaldi developed the go-to-market strategy and the brand positioning for the launch, including the structure of the direct-to-consumer model and the mechanics of an AWS cloud partnership that provided the infrastructure for scale. The positioning was designed for student audiences rather than institutional buyers, which is the harder half of the problem for an organization whose every existing proof point was addressed to the latter. Sharpen launched with strong initial reception, described by early evaluators as a “cool new student app”. The AWS partnership enabled rapid deployment, and the direct-to-consumer model established McGraw-Hill’s first direct relationship with student end-users at scale. No public outcome figures were released for this engagement. Read the McGraw-Hill Sharpen case study.

Current: a route to new segments, not a bigger push to the same one

Current was a digital challenger bank used mostly by lower income adults, growing, and stuck with a perception that limited where it could go next. Vivaldi used a segmentation approach to understand the cohort in detail, which surfaced a much larger addressable market than the category assumed, then built a purpose, a position and a new consumer language, and a demand-first go-to-market strategy that could reach new segments while continuing to serve the existing ones. That strategy carried a product innovation roadmap aligned to the new position. Alongside it, because the market could not wait for the repositioning to finish, we developed campaigns including an out-of-home summer takeover of New York, which resulted in a 23%+ increase in brand awareness. Read the Current case study.

Renault UK: choosing the channels, then staying in them

Renault had been an icon of UK automotive marketing and had spent more than a decade with consideration well below its previous levels. Vivaldi defined and activated the digital, social and content marketing strategy, using a six-pillar planning framework to settle the audiences, the tone of voice, the channel priorities, the content themes, the distribution approach and the measurement framework, all captured in a playbook shared with every stakeholder. The channel and distribution decisions are the go-to-market half of that work: which routes to the customer were worth funding, and in what order. We have been activating the playbook for over 18 months. Reach, awareness and engagement are at an all-time high for the brand, and over 1,100 cars sold were attributed to a single campaign. Read the Renault UK case study.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for go-to-market strategy

• We will tell you if the launch is not the problem. A firm that only optimizes the route to market will run a competent plan for an offer the market did not want. We would rather lose the scope in week two than bill for it in month six.
• Channel economics are modeled from the partner’s side. What your partner stops selling to sell this, and what that costs them, decides more launches than product quality does.
• Price is a positioning decision here, not a margin calculation. It is set alongside the proposition, because it is the fastest thing the market reads.
• We own nothing we would recommend you buy. No media, no channel, no software. Advice on how much of any of it you need is not an advertisement for ourselves.
• The method stays with your team. A playbook and a planning framework, so the second launch is run by you. Independently recognized: WirtschaftsWoche has named Vivaldi a top consultancy for Strategy and Innovation in its Best of Consulting awards five times.

How to evaluate a go-to-market consultant

Worth asking of every firm on your shortlist, including us.

• What will you do if the proposition is the problem? Ask whether they would say so, and when. A firm with no answer will deliver a well-run launch for something nobody wanted.
• How do you choose the first customer group? If the answer is the largest addressable segment, there is no learning built into the plan.
• What do you know about my channel’s economics? A plan that treats the channel as a pipe will underdeliver quietly for a year and be hard to diagnose afterwards.
• Which metric would you kill the plan on, and when would you read it? A threshold and a date, or it is not a failure condition.
• Who runs the second launch? If the method leaves with the consultancy, you bought a launch rather than a go-to-market capability.

Go-to-market consultancy, product marketing agency or sales consultancy?

All three get shortlisted for the same brief and decide different things. The useful question is which decision is actually open.

Related work

Which page you want depends on which decision is actually unresolved. If the argument is still about who the offer is for, start with segmentation and targeting consulting. If the demand spaces themselves are the question, see demand landscape mapping. Once the route is settled and the constraint is what each customer costs to win, the work moves to customer acquisition consulting, and the idea that carries the launch into market is built in campaign development or put to work through brand activation. Where the revenue model rather than the route is the problem, it belongs with commercial strategy.

This capability sits in our brand acceleration group, inside the Marketing Strategy & Acceleration practice at Vivaldi.

Go-to-market strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

Vivaldi is headquartered in New York and has a second US office in Los Angeles. Outside the US, our teams work from London, Zürich, München, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Lima, which matters on this service more than most, because a launch sequence across geographies is only as good as the people who know how each of those markets actually buys. We work with US companies nationwide from our two US offices; for city-specific information, see our pages for Chicago, Dallas and Houston. Read who Vivaldi Group is and how we work.