GTM Strategies

Summary: Autify had multiple go to market strategies that I either led or helped marketing perform.

Why did we undertake this initiative?

Autify had multiple times that we needed to change our marketing strategies. We released 3 new products during my time there that all required unique approaches. Armed with our market and user research, we laid out plans of how we would reach customers. Without them, we would not have been able to sell our products.

*** To see samples of the webinars, sales materials, blogs and more, please see the sales enablement materials section ***

What did I do to complete this initiative?

Here's what an overview of the GTM strategies we formulated and implemented -

1) With our market research, we found different buyer personas to target for each of our products. One buyer persona included small companies who were just trying to get some automation started. They typically had 1 or 2 manual testers. Perfect fit for our v1 and v2 versions of our NoCode product. Our 2nd big buyer persona was companies that had their developer's doing testing. They typically had a lot of automation testing already in place and wanted to go increase testing speeds with AI and shift left in their testing. The last persona was enterprise level customers with large QA teams. They required all of the bells and whistle's in a testing tool and required us to develop a different strategy for them. Typically a lot longer time to close a deal.
2) We started out with a direct sales approach. We changed our approach after a while to a bunch of different marketing channels and tested what worked. Paid search, SEO optimization, partnering with testing influencers, webinars, community forum outreach, educational materials, Linkedin Ads, Google Ads, blog posts, and a few others.
3) We tested these channels out with a beta period that we invited customers to join for discounts and feedback. Upon testing out channels, we increased our spending on the channels that were working and lowered spending on the ones that didn't.
4) Even after release, we still continued to A/B test to optimize and decrease our lead costs.

Results of the initiative?

These were the results and findings of our go to market strategies

1) We found that direct Sales approaches did not work. Engineers and tech people generally do their own research when selecting tools and do not want cold outreach attempts. Our CPL (cost per leads) for direct sales were terrible. We quickly pivoted.

2) The channels that worked the best were webinars, paid search and educational blogs that people searched for. We saw the lowest CPL there. It made sense to us, engineers wanted education and to research on their own. Our webinars regularly had 300+ signups and had a 20-25% showing. Paid search also did well, as when clients were looking for testing tools, they generally gathered 10 or 15 companies and did demos with all of them.

3) Once we established what worked, we saved a lot of operational costs to acquire leads and our inbound pipeline grew substantially.