Blog 18 - smarter go-to-market strategy.
The blog this week is from Jeremy
Go-to-Market Strategy: A Practical Guide for B2B Business Growth
In the world of B2B growth, entering new markets isn’t just about hiring someone with connections or launching a few marketing campaigns. It requires a structured, strategic approach that aligns with your business goals, capabilities, and client needs. At Growth Ignition, we’ve developed and refined a proven go-to-market (GTM) framework that helps businesses confidently and successfully expand into new sectors, geographies, or service lines.
Whether you're a consultancy looking to break into defence, a tech firm targeting the public sector, or a scale-up exploring new verticals, this guide will walk you through the essential phases of a robust GTM strategy.
Where GTM Fits in Your Growth Funnel
Our growth funnel includes key stages: business planning, marketing, capture, bidding, and client experience. GTM strategy sits between business planning and marketing—it’s the bridge between identifying opportunity and activating it.
Too often, businesses skip this step or misunderstand its purpose. For example, construction firms entering defence might hire an ex-military contact without a clear plan. That person may be valuable—but only once the groundwork is done.
Our Three-Phase GTM Framework
We use a structured 90-day approach, broken into three 30-day phases:
Phase 1: Market Validation
Before diving in, validate the opportunity:
- Business Case: Why this market? What’s the strategic fit?
- Market Research: Size, growth potential, client objectives, and pipeline visibility.
- Client Personas: Who are the buyers? What are their hot buttons, pain points, and procurement behaviours?
- Requirements Analysis: Review past procurements, talk to clients, and understand what’s needed to win.
Phase 2: Solution Development
Once the market is validated, build your offer:
- Capability Mapping: What do you need to deliver value in this space?
- Competitive Analysis: Who else is playing here? What are their strengths and gaps?
- Winning Solutions: Define your unique value propositions tailored to this market.
- Strategic Options: Consider partnerships, strategic hires, or acquisitions to accelerate entry.
Phase 3: Market Activation
Now it’s time to press “go”:
- Messaging & Positioning: Develop a message house that aligns with your value proposition and resonates with your target personas.
- Marketing Plan: Go beyond social media—think thought leadership, events, and targeted campaigns.
- Capture Planning: Identify top 3 pursuits in the market that are 12+ months from tender. Build stakeholder maps, influence strategies, and pursuit-specific messaging.
Real-World Application
We’ve deployed this framework with clients like Serco, helping them enter new markets during the pandemic with measurable success. It’s also embedded in our training programmes and leadership development offerings.
Ready to Enter a New Market?
Whether you're a C-suite leader or a business development professional, entering a new market is a high-stakes move. With the right strategy, it can be transformative.
If you're considering a new sector, subsector, geography, or service line - let’s talk. Book a call, connect on LinkedIn, or drop me a DM. We’ll help you build a GTM strategy and/or an approach to GTM that delivers real results.
Book a call here
Other Resources
We’re on a mission to help companies like yours win more work.
Here are some other free resources that should help you too. Feel also free to share them with friends and colleagues:
Bid Writing Training Interactive Webinar Boot Camp - A condensed one day bid writing training webinar that aims to help attendees improve their ability to write winning tenders and proposals. Book your place here.
Bid Writing Training - Learn to write winning tenders here.
Writing Crown Commercial Services Bids - Learn to tackle the challenges of writing CCS tenders here.
Our free work winning Podcast, the Red Review, can be found here.
You can also follow Jeremy on LinkedIn for hints, tips and insights here.
100% Typo Guarantee—Our blog posts are free-range. It was hand-crafted with love and sent out unfiltered. There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-post revisions. Therefore, I can pretty much guarantee that there is some sort of typo or grammatical error or literary snafu. Got a business to run and a four year old to Dad. Sorry.