gtm-plan

GTM Plan

Build the strategy that turns a launch narrative into demand, conversion, proof, and learning. Use it after the launch brief and positioning are sound and before channel plans harden. Make the output read like a decision that execution teams can use, not a calendar with a thesis added on top.

Treat GTM as the point where Marketing and Growth meet. Marketing creates belief and memory. Growth converts demand through the offer, first value, onboarding, lifecycle, and measurement. For events and editorial franchises, add participant contribution only when the brief or customer evidence shows that contribution is part of the product.

Required inputs

Do not invent missing truths. Collect or mark OPEN:

Launch object, confirmed date, scope, capacity or supply, pricing status, and business model
Primary customer, economic buyer, champion, user or participant, and explicit non-target
Customer evidence in their language: demand, workaround, desired progress, barriers, and recurring work or behavior worth changing
Positioning: market frame, primary promise, functional proposition, emotional value, reasons to believe, and competitive distinction
One verified proof point and an evidence bank for external claims
Business, conversion, learning, proof, and brand goals with owners
For application-based experiences: selection logic, acceptance capacity, comp allocation, accessibility standard, privacy owner, support path, and attendee-data boundary

Truth hierarchy and product mode

Lock the value hierarchy before inventing a campaign, activation, or journey. Use this order:

Confirmed facts and customer evidence
Customer job and reason to buy
Offer and core delivery mechanism
Positioning and strategic platform
Campaign idea
Supporting editorial, community, experiential, or product activations

A downstream layer cannot redefine an upstream one. Repeating a speculative idea across the offer, application, onboarding, PR brief, and scorecard does not turn it into a fact.

Classify the launch before drafting:

Consumption-led: value comes mainly from watching, reading, listening, using, learning, or meeting. Audience action may improve the experience but is not required.
Participation-enhanced: a lightweight action improves the customer outcome, while the core offer remains valuable without it.
Co-created: participant work, contribution, or collaboration is necessary to produce the promised value.

Choose the mode from explicit evidence. An application, curated audience, participatory name, strong brand metaphor, editorial prompt, or agentic interface is not evidence that the offer is co-created.

Write a five-line value lock before the GTM:

Reason to buy: the customer's primary desired progress
Core value: what they receive
Delivery: how the offer produces that value
Supporting layers: proof, editorial, community, or experience that helps sell or deepen it
Non-requirements: attractive ideas the customer does not need to do

Run the concept-inflation test: if a supporting activation vanished, would the customer still buy for the same reason? If yes, keep it subordinate. If no, require direct customer or brief evidence before making it part of the offer. Mark unsupported central premises as HYPOTHESIS and do not propagate them through the document.

Strategy standard

A complete GTM plan answers seven questions in order:

What is the governing decision? State how the launch will win and what the team will refuse to become distracted by.
What must the market believe? Name the customer or category shift in one sentence.
Who must believe it first? Choose one primary customer and name the buyer, champion, user or participant, and non-target.
What are we asking them to buy, attend, or use? Define the offer and first value before adding a customer action or channel plan.
What creates and proves demand? Define the campaign hierarchy and the receipts that lower uncertainty.
How does interest become value? Map the conversion and lifecycle path, including decisions, handoffs, service levels, failure states, and follow-up.
What will we learn and measure? Set dated business, conversion, proof, and brand outcomes. Name the decisions those measures will inform.

The first six answers should fit on one page. If they cannot, the strategy is not ready.

Campaign idea discipline

A brand line is a payoff, not automatically a campaign idea. A product instruction is a first behavior, not automatically a campaign idea. A public prompt is an activation, not automatically a customer obligation. Build the hierarchy:

Platform: the identity, belief, or behavior the audience is invited to adopt
Enemy: the costly default the audience recognizes
Proposition: the reason to choose this offer now
Campaign demand: an action or standard the campaign asks the market to adopt, only when behavior change is central to the strategy
Conversion action: the literal next step, such as apply, buy, install, subscribe, or attend
Payoff: the compact expression the brand can own over time

The idea must contain a human or organizational insight, generate many executions, and make real customer behavior or outcomes feel like proof. Do not invent a campaign demand merely to make the launch feel more participatory. When used, the demand may be rhetorical or public-facing; it does not need to become an admissions criterion, onboarding task, or product requirement. Reject feature summaries and asset bundles. Keep the proposition, campaign demand, and conversion action distinct even when they share language.

Proof is the campaign engine

Build the launch around evidence rather than posting volume.

Start with one verified receipt and several real workflows, customers, contributors, or use cases.
Show the request or need, context, action, finished result, and consequence. A demo without an outcome is not a receipt.
Seed respected members of the target market before launch. Help them complete the intended behavior and reach a real result; do not script their conclusion.
Continue seeding after launch. New use cases, credible advocates, participant contributions, and customer evidence sustain demand.
Set a publishable-evidence target. Ten credible receipts usually beat 100 generic mentions.

For experiences, show the program and room forming before asking someone to trust their quality. Confirmed speakers, sharp questions, moderators, formats, participants, venue, original research, and past authority are stronger proof than adjectives. Use founding contributors as proof only when contribution is part of the confirmed product mode.

Conversion and lifecycle

Map the entire path from first interest to realized value. Use the stages that fit the launch and omit the rest:

discover → qualify or apply → decide → purchase → onboard → first value → use, attend, repeat, or participate → retain or return

For every stage, name the customer action, response time, owner, data collected, recovery path, and measure. Do not hide operational gaps behind “seamless onboarding.”

For gated or application-based events:

Treat audience composition as part of the product and define the desired mix.
Publish who should apply, how decisions are made, when applicants will hear, how long an offer is valid, and how the waitlist works.
Keep qualification data separate from private logistics. Collect dietary, disability access, medical, and travel information after acceptance, never as selection inputs.
Ask for accommodations rather than diagnoses. Provide a direct human contact and a manual path through any agentic flow.
Separate consent for public profiles, directories, introductions, photography, and model use.
Ask only for preparation that improves the confirmed attendee promise. For consumption-led events, logistics, interests, and optional introduction preferences may be enough. Require a profile, question, artifact, proposition, or public contribution only when the brief makes participation part of the offer.

Load references/curated-event-gtm.md for the full attendee flow, application questions, and benchmark method.

Editorial's role

Assign editorial one or more explicit jobs: establish authority, create demand, explain the category, extend the experience, or supply the product itself. Do not blur these jobs.

Use editorial to teach the market how the category or behavior works. The definitive piece should be useful without the product or event, establish the brand’s method, and make the offer a strong place to experience or apply it.

An editorial franchise becomes part of the product only when the customer buys access to it, receives it as a promised benefit, or must contribute to create the value. A campaign prompt or companion series can remain a supporting activation. If contributors create the product or proof, define commissioning, editing, publication, consent, and how the work continues after launch.

Choosing first value or behavior

For products and services, choose a job or action that is important enough to matter, easy to evaluate, safe to complete, and capable of producing a visible result. It should lead naturally to repeated use or a reusable outcome.

For consumption-led events and media, define first value without inventing homework. Before purchase, first value may be confidence in the program, speakers, argument, or audience. During the experience, it may be clarity, useful disagreement, entertainment, or a relevant connection. Passive attention can be the intended behavior when the product is a talk, panel, performance, film, or article.

Avoid novelty demos, vague “help me run the company” prompts, forced performance disguised as participation, and behaviors whose value cannot be observed inside the measurement window.

Benchmark discipline

When the launch needs market examples, research first-edition or comparable launches rather than relying on famous mature brands.

Separate the biggest outlier from the most transferable analog.
Use dated, cited results: attendance, sales, conversion, press, audience composition, or a verified downstream outcome.
Identify the distribution engine, offer, proof, timing, partners, and first value or behavior behind each result.
Extract a mechanism, not an aesthetic. “Use a famous speaker” is weak; “borrow distinct forms of authority and distribution from partners with explicit jobs” is useful.
Name what the current launch should reject as clearly as what it should borrow.

PR as a separate brief

For launches that need earned media, create a short PR brief beside the GTM rather than burying press in a channel list. It should contain the news, market story, objective, press audiences, lead and supporting angles, timing, spokespeople, assets, claims to clear, hard questions, and definition of success.

The GTM decides the role of PR. The PR brief determines how earned media performs that role.

Video system

Separate the brand film from the proof library. The brand film makes the campaign idea memorable; the proof library makes the offer credible and useful. Define only the formats the strategy needs: a branded film, a concise overview, real interactions or participant stories, full workflows or outcomes, customer receipts, onboarding, and channel-native cutdowns.

Every clip should prove one claim. Do not turn the campaign into a feature tour.

Measurement

Lock four classes of measures with dates and owners:

Business: qualified demand, paid conversion, revenue, capacity, retention, and referrals
Conversion: time to decision or first value, completion rate, activation, repeat behavior, attendance, or participation
Proof: publishable receipts, named advocates, program proof, outcomes, and case-study candidates; contributor artifacts only when the product mode calls for them
Brand: awareness, branded search, direct and organic traffic, earned coverage, distinctive associations, and reuse of campaign language

Label each measure as offer, campaign, activation, or operations. Activation completion cannot stand in for offer success unless the value lock makes that activation part of the product. Measure the promised customer outcome as directly as the launch allows.

Use a funnel model before launch when capacity, revenue, or sales targets matter. Show the assumptions and track quality or composition beside volume. A full event with the wrong room or a large waitlist of poor-fit applicants is not success.

Required output

Produce two layers.

Decision core

Use seven sections and keep them brief:

The decision — how the launch wins, the market shift, product mode, value hierarchy, and strategic refusal
The customer — primary customer, buyer, user or participant, non-target, and evidence
The offer — what they buy or do, pricing or capacity, first value, and key open truths
The campaign — platform, enemy, proposition, optional campaign demand, conversion action, payoff, articulation, and proof system
The journey — conversion and lifecycle path, including decision points and recovery
The route to market — three to six phases, each with one job and only its required proof or action
The scorecard and gates — funnel assumptions, a small set of outcomes, launch gates, and owners for open decisions

Chosen appendices

Add only the modules the launch needs:

Proof and seeding plan
Customer, attendee, or participant flow with exact questions
Editorial system
PR brief
Competitive or first-edition audit
Video system
Milestones and operating owners
Claims and evidence bank

Dream tweets and headlines are optional stress tests for positioning. Use them only when they reveal whether the intended market belief would produce meaningful coverage or word of mouth. Never require them to fill a template.

Reference routing

Task	Load
Planning a curated or application-based event	`references/curated-event-gtm.md`
Building the upstream message hierarchy	`strategy/messaging-architecture`
Producing the launch narrative	`launches/new-product-launch/references/launch-narrative.md`

Historical worked examples live under docs/cases/. They are optional study material, not dependencies or current project guidance.

Dependencies

foundation/marketing-os
launches/canonical-process.md
launches/launch-brief (approved input)
launches/new-product-launch/references/launch-narrative.md (for net-new products)
strategy/messaging-architecture
marketing-science/research · marketing-science/brand-equity
positioning/{relevant product} · brand-voice/{relevant product}
launches/claims-clearance

Quick checklist

The governing decision and first six strategic answers fit on one page
The product is classified as consumption-led, participation-enhanced, or co-created from explicit evidence
The reason to buy, core value, delivery mechanism, supporting layers, and non-requirements are locked before campaign mechanics
One primary customer is chosen; buyer, user or participant, and non-target are explicit
The offer, price or capacity, and first value are concrete; any required customer action is justified
Campaign platform, enemy, proposition, optional demand, conversion action, and payoff each have a clear job
No optional activation has silently become an admissions rule, onboarding task, PR premise, or success metric
Offer, campaign, activation, and operations measures remain separate
Proof exists before channel volume begins
The journey names decisions, handoffs, service levels, failure states, and follow-up
Application data and private logistics are separated for gated experiences
The route to market gives each phase one job
The funnel and scorecard measure quality or composition beside volume
Research distinguishes a scale outlier from a transferable analog
Appendices are selected because the launch needs them, not because the template lists them
Every external claim routes through claims clearance