Mastering Your Go-to-Market Strategy: Why Value Creation is the Ultimate Growth Lever

Jordan Wolf
3 days ago
2 min read

*Find the original slide deck for this live in-person conversation here.

If you aren't obsessed with value, you aren't ready to go to market. Here is how to segment your audience, identify what they truly care about, and position your solution as an absolute necessity.

The 4 Buckets of B2B Value Creation

Before you can sell, you must understand what "value" actually means to a business. In the B2B sector, almost every successful product or service creates value through one of these four buckets:

Revenue Generation: Does your solution help the client make more money?.
Effectiveness and Efficiency: Can you help them manage resources better or improve employee performance?.
Cost and Time Containment: Are you helping them decrease expenses or save precious hours?.
Compliance: Do you help them fulfill regulations or maintain industry standards?.

Pro Tip: For a deeper dive into these drivers, Wolf recommends the classic Selling to VITO to help you think like a "Very Important Top Officer".

Market Segmentation: Finding Your "Who"

You cannot be everything to everyone. To succeed, you must slice the market into segments that value different attributes.

B2B Segmentation Considerations

When looking at businesses, consider these factors to find your niche:

Industry and Market.
Company Size and Life Cycle.
Function and Geography.
Usage Occasions and End Users.

B2C Segmentation Considerations

For consumer markets, the focus shifts toward:

Demographics and Psychographics.
Settings and Environments.
Specific Use Cases (e.g., a phone case for a hiker vs. a fashionista).

Identifying Valued Attributes

Once you have your segments, you must identify which attributes they value most. Is it customization? Speed? Durability? Or perhaps trendiness?.

By comparing your strengths against the competition in these specific areas, you can find where you are uniquely positioned to win.

Urgency: The Secret Ingredient of a Sales Cycle

You may have a great product, but if the customer can "put it off," your sales cycle will stall. To drive action, you must answer three critical questions:

Can they extract this value without you?.
What is the cost of delay? (What do they lose by waiting six months?).
Are you mission-critical?.

Final Tips for GTM Success

Customer Selection Impacts Everything: Your choice of target market dictates your product scope, marketing effectiveness, and even customer service efficiency.
Be a Specialist, Not a Generalist: It is hard for people to remember you if you aren't known for something specific. Specialists almost always win over generalists in the early stages.
Talk to People: The best knowledge isn't on the internet; it’s in people. Have open-ended conversations to find emerging problems you can solve.

The Founder’s Reading List

To further refine your GTM thinking, Jordan Wolf recommends these essential titles:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.
Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross.
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.