Go-to-market readiness: a checklist before you launch

Launch planning often begins with a list of things to produce: a page, a deck, an email sequence, a webinar. The harder work is deciding what those assets are supposed to say, to whom, and what happens when someone responds. When those decisions are made first, the asset list becomes short and obvious; when they are not, assets get produced, revised, and produced again while the underlying question stays open.

• One buyer role, named. Not an industry, a job title with a problem attached. Where two roles are named, expect two messages and two sales conversations.
• The problem in the buyer's words. The phrasing should be recognisable to someone who has the problem, not only to someone who built the offer.
• The claim, and what supports it. Whatever the offer promises should be traceable to something demonstrable: a specification, a defined process, a documented capability. Claims with nothing behind them are discovered during the sales conversation.
• The alternative. What the buyer does today instead. A launch competes with that behaviour as much as with another vendor.

1. How many new engagements can delivery absorb per month without degrading existing work?
2. Who handles the first conversation, and who covers when they are unavailable?
3. What has to be true of a deal for delivery to accept it, and who may decline one?
4. Are pricing, terms, and approval limits agreed, including who may discount and by how much?
5. Is the handoff from sale to delivery defined well enough that the first engagement does not become the test of it?

Where that last question is unresolved, the notes on operational handoffs describe what a boundary needs before work changes hands.

Choose two or three figures before launch and write down what each would have to show for the launch to be judged a success, a partial success, or a stop. Doing this in advance is what distinguishes a launch from a campaign whose results are interpreted afterwards.

• Qualified conversations created, with "qualified" defined in writing.
• Conversion from conversation to proposal, and proposal to decision.
• Time from first conversation to first delivery, which usually reveals capacity problems first.

Agreeing the definitions is where most of the value sits; two people using different definitions of a qualified conversation will disagree about the launch regardless of its result.

• One buyer role and one problem, written in a single sentence.
• A claim that sales and marketing would both make word for word.
• Evidence behind the claim that a buyer can check.
• Price, packaging, and approval limits settled.
• Delivery capacity estimated, with a defined limit on intake.
• Handoff and acceptance criteria agreed with delivery.
• Two or three measures and their definitions agreed.
• A review date, with a named person to run the review.
• A stop rule: what result would mean pausing rather than continuing.

The example below is hypothetical and describes a pattern rather than a client engagement.

• Readiness can become delay. The checklist is a gate, not a research programme. If a decision cannot be settled with available evidence, state the assumption and test it.
• Early data is thin. Two or three figures over a month will be noisy. The purpose is to catch a clear problem early, not to prove a forecast.
• Positioning is provisional. Buyers often describe the problem differently from how it was written internally. Collecting their phrasing is part of the first month's work.
• Capacity estimates are usually optimistic. Teams tend to assume new work fits around existing commitments. A conservative intake limit protects the customers already served.

Go-to-market readiness sits inside the Growth & Revenue capability, where the commercial decisions around an offer, its price, and its route to market are made together. Pricing questions that surface during the checklist are covered in the notes on pricing and margin review.