You know how it goes: a B2B product manager decides it’s time to ship. They loop in marketing and sales late in the process. Marketing is blindsided, scrambling to throw together a campaign for a product they barely understand. Sales? Oh, they’re frantically trying to figure out how to train their team on a product they just heard about. The result? A launch that’s not gonna be great.
Going to market doesn’t work because it’s reactive and rushed. Teams are playing catch-up instead of driving the conversation. It’s time to flip the script. Stop “going to market” and start building to market—ensuring alignment, clarity, and success from day one.
Why Go-to-Market Strategies Often Fail
When sales and marketing are afterthoughts, you’re setting everyone up to fail. Marketing doesn’t get the time they need to craft a killer campaign. Sales is stuck guessing at how to position the product. And your launch? It lands with a thud instead of a bang. There is also a risk here that the product idea is weak and untested idea.
The real kicker? You’re ignoring the very people who could make your product better. Sales and customer support teams talk to your customers every single day. They know where the pain points are and how customers talk about them. But instead of involving them early, you drop the product in their laps at the end and expect miracles.
It’s not just ineffective—it’s expensive. Misaligned teams waste time and resources trying to fix something that could have been done right the first time.
Why Building to Market Works
So, what’s the alternative? Building to market means involving sales, marketing, and customer success from the very beginning. Instead of rushing to align teams in the final weeks, you’re creating alignment from day one.
Sales and customer success talk with customers every day and they hear a lot about what’s working and not for your customers. They can help make sure you are focusing on the right things. To be fair sales teams have blinders on, they only really know about their portfolio but you can solve for this in your analysis by finding patterns.
We are forcing product managers to tell a story about how we’re delivering value to customers and the business right from the start. This gives product managers and everyone else clarity so they can do their best work and make smart suggestions for tackling problems and tradeoffs.
By the time you’re ready to launch, marketing should already know the story they’re telling—and help shape it. You’ve also got their buy-in what you are delivering
Share updates, provide demos, and make sure everyone knows what’s coming. No more last-minute surprises.
When you build to market, you’re not just shipping a product—you’re delivering a solution that’s already positioned for success.
How to Build to Market Effectively
Here’s how to make building to market work for you:
Regularly engage with Sales and Marketing colleagues through different channels to build a relationship and collect data. A lot of companies have systems for collecting feedback that never get answered, you need to show you are listening.
Start with the story: At Amazon the first thing they do is write the press release imaging how they will deliver value to the customer and the business. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr explained how this worked in the book Working Backwards and their website has a template
Test your messaging: Talk to customers throughout the process. Learn exactly what words they use, understand their pain points, and refine your positioning as you go. Here are some questions I always ask: How would you describe this (product or feature)? Who would you recommend it to? Would this help solve your (their words) problem?
Share early and often: Give your teams access to demos and test environments. Make sure they know what’s coming so they can hit the ground running when it’s time to launch.
By building to market, you’re not just preparing your teams—you’re empowering them to crush it. Your launches will be smoother, your customers happier, and your bottom line stronger.