Creating a Go-To-Market Strategy

About the Guest

Bas is a new dad who is enthusiastic about watersports, mountain sports, and travel. He has visited 50 countries and thinks that the most beautiful places are Greenland and Tibet. Professionally, he is passionate about integrated Go-To-Market challenges, simplifying and improving the customer experiences, driving scale by thinking programmatically, and using partners and partnerships to scale by balancing enablement, contracting, and incentives.

Connect with Bas Paumen 

Key Takeaways

• Bas discusses the way to create a Go-To-Market strategy and tap into new markets by understanding the market potential.
• When going into the market, the key is to consider the setup in the long haul by establishing support systems and the right relationships.
• Bas shares the nightmare of working with a problematic business having tax issues resulting in a stock freeze despite due diligence.
• The contingency plan is to go with two partners. This way, the customers won’t be left in the dark.
• Engineering teams in AWS are so closely involved with the customers that are using the product. This allows them to accurately define the customer experience.

Quote

“When you want to go into the market, then you really have to think about the long term of being in that market, being able to support it, and having the right relationships in place.“- Bas Paumen

Highlights from the Episode

What does it take to create a ‘Go-To-Market Strategy’ to tap into new markets?

It depends on what you need to market. Understand that variance in implementation. Hardware, for example, has a lot of different kinds of ways of how they need to be certified and so for this, various cases go into calculating the market potential. The key is to make it accessible. You still have to organize all the ways that people can pay and can transact your product.

How do we tackle the challenges with new market expansion?

A lot of considerations go into this. You have to go forceful about it and realize that you, as a company, are actually liable in many cases for after-sales support and warranties that are cannot be fulfilled, because you’re officially not in that market. Think about the long term of being able to support it and sustaining valuable relationships along the way. Practicing due diligence is always a must but know that certain situations are uncontrollable and cannot be helped. Prepare contingency plans to combat risks.

With hundreds of solutions to offer, how does your team approach potential customers?

By always keeping the customer in mind, we continuously develop and innovate new products based on the requirements of our existing customers, but also, customers that we see that will benefit from new cloud solutions. Although the products that we offer are also not immediately a solution, they are building blocks to support that and can be combined into solutions that are relevant for a certain industry. By working closely with the customer, it is easier to define the customer experience.

How do company values affect their Go-To-Market strategy?

Customer obsession is number one – it drives everything. It affects the way we develop new ideas and new Go-To-Market strategies. We work back from what is needed to get done, what kind of product is needed, how to bring it to market, and identifying what the customer experience is needed to make it successful.

Is there any book, podcast, video, or other resources that you’d like to recommend?

• Endurance by Alfred Lansing

Shout-outs

• Jay McBain – Chief Analyst at Canalys