Houston expert: How B2B industries can leverage go-to-market strategies for maximum impact

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By pinpointing and customizing efforts to meet the specific needs of the most lucrative customers, businesses can maximize ROI and achieve revenue objectives. Photo via Getty Images

Crafting a successful go-to-market strategy is a must for driving revenue and profit growth, especially for investor-backed, high-growth businesses. But there is no one size fits all approach. Companies need nuanced GTM strategies tailored to their unique products or services.

There are six key sales and marketing motions:

  • Inbound Marketing: Attract customers through valuable content like white papers, how-to guides, and market overviews and then deploy this content across blogs, social media, emails, and publications for broad engagement. Think about a client's needs, and then deliver them content that directly helps them.
  • Outbound Outreach: Employ targeted strategies for account engagement, reaching specific prospects through personalized emails, calls, and digital outreach. This pushes out that valuable content to the identified target accounts and markets.
  • Product-Led Marketing: Engage customers directly through the product with free trials or freemium models. This approach integrates marketing, sales, and the product itself. Encouraging hands-on interaction with the product or service is a great way to convert potential leads into buyers.
  • Channel Partner Marketing: Collaborate with distributors, resellers, or affiliates to advocate for products. Referrals, commissions, and "nearbound relationships" amplify market presence, turning partners into an extension of the sales team.
  • Event Marketing: Enhance visibility and connection through things like trade shows, webinars, and demo days. It’s an opportunity to reach a broad audience but also to get that one-on-one interaction.
  • Community Marketing: Foster advocacy through authentic engagement, leveraging social media influencers, user-generated content, and online forums. This is more common in B2C but can also be helpful with B2B.

Each company, characterized by unique products, budgets, and requirements, will employ these strategies in varying combinations. Using examples of three different types of companies — B2B services targeting the healthcare industry, an industrial services company, and SaaS (software as a service) — let’s see examples of how they can best leverage different tactics for maximum impact.

Strategic GTM Tactics for B2B Healthcare

We’ll start with a company that offers business services to healthcare organizations. Inbound marketing for this company means content that showcases specialized solutions, addressing unique pain points of the decision makers. Through blogs, social media posts, and targeted emails, the company demonstrates its expertise, attracting organizations seeking solutions.

To push this message out, the company identifies targeted healthcare institutions matching their ideal customer profile and begins more personalized outreach, like highly tailored emails or phone calls. A next step might be a complimentary trial of the company’s service, if that is possible within the business model. Are there any channel partners that could talk about the company’s product, or maybe even help sell it?

Healthcare industry trade shows provide a platform to showcase exactly how the service can benefit clients. To broaden the audience reach, webinars provide a digital platform for showcasing the service.If there are online communities for this target market, can your satisfied customers be there too? They can provide authentic advocacy for the service.

Strategic GTM Tactics for Industrial Services

This hypothetical company specializes in precision machining and fabrication services, serving clients from industries like automotive, aerospace, and general manufacturing. Inbound marketing includes case studies and industry-specific guides, showcasing how the company stacks up favorably to the competition.

Targeted follow up with key manufacturing and industrial companies emphasizes custom services based on in-depth industry research and analysis to determine target rich markets. Tell potential customers specifically how your company best meets their needs. Are you a better value? Best rated? How exactly are you different, or better?

Channel Partner Marketing looks for collaborations with distributors or resellers in industrial equipment. Leveraging existing distribution networks is another way to enhance market presence and accessibility. What unexplored avenues exist to broaden the company's reach?

Trade shows are an optimal way for this company to demonstrate its services. Preparation is the key to seek out targets in advance and set up one on one meetings.

Strategic GTM Tactics for SaaS

Lastly, consider a cloud-based project management software company that improves collaboration and boosts efficiency for businesses. The informative content potential buyers want to see includes software guides and case studies, highlighting the software's competitive edge and successful integration by other companies.

Look at how the company can further refine its outbound marketing strategy to effectively reach and engage its target audience. You want to forge one-on-one interactions with those prospects most likely to buy.

For SaaS, the free trial is a powerful strategy, while the freemium model, providing basic features for free and charging for premium options, boosts functionality and fosters adoption. Channel Partner Marketing can be a good strategy too, where consultants, resellers, or integrators endorse the SaaS product, and earn commissions for referrals.

Through webinars, the company directly demonstrates the capabilities of its solution to businesses who need more efficient software tools. Active involvement in virtual or industry-specific events can keep leads interested. In this case, this company has its own online forum where users share experiences and tips related to the SaaS software.

Conclusion

Once a company determines the ideal mix of marketing and sales tactics for optimal outcomes, it becomes necessary to prioritize them. This step in strategy is crucial for efficiency and profitability. There are always limits to budget and manpower. Companies can boost efficiency by prioritizing technology over manual processes in outreach strategies.

Strategic growth in revenue and margins, especially in challenging markets, entails concentrating on acquiring customers aligned with the company's ideal customer profile. By pinpointing and customizing efforts to meet the specific needs of the most lucrative customers, businesses can maximize ROI and achieve revenue objectives.

To achieve optimal results, Craig Group can help companies determine who these potential customers are and the best way to reach them, using a data-driven approach.

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Libby Covington is a partner with Craig Group, a technology-enabled sales and marketing advisory firm specializing in revenue growth for middle-market, private-equity-backed portfolio companies.

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Is your New Year's resolution to start contributing? Email natalie@innovationmap.com to learn more.

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This month, the internet has been discussing "quiet quitting," the practice of employees setting hard boundaries about when they work and to what extent they are willing to go beyond the outlined expectations of their jobs.

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Screen-free hiking app developed in Houston earns 'Best of the Best' award

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An AI-powered, screen-free hiking system developed by Varshini Chouthri, a recent industrial design graduate from the University of Houston, has received Red Dot’s “Best of the Best” award, which recognizes the top innovative designs around the world.

Known as NOMAD, the system aims to help users stay in the moment while still utilizing technology. It will go on to compete for the Red Dot Luminary Award, the highest recognition given at the international event.

“NOMAD was truly a passion project, inspired by years of hiking growing up, where the outdoors became a place of peace, challenge, and reflection,” Chouthri said in a news release.

“I wanted to design something supporting those kinds of experiences by helping hikers feel more grounded and confident while staying present in nature. It was a way to give back to the moments that made me fall in love with the outdoors in the first place.”

The app “reimagines” outdoor exploration by removing the dependence on screens by using adaptive AI, contextual sensing, and an optional, wearable companion device. It employs a circular learning model that enables hikers to receive real-time guidance, safety alerts, personalized trip planning, hands-free navigation and more through a natural interface, according to UH.

NOMAD was developed at the Hines College of Architecture and Design’s PXD LAB. In 2023, Lunet, developed by David Edquilang at Hines College, received the “Best of the Best” recognition and went on to win the Red Dot Luminary Award.

The PXD LAB offers a platform to expand concepts into system-level designs that address real-world challenges, according to UH.

“Varshini’s work on NOMAD exemplifies the future-focused, systems-driven thinking we promote in the Advanced UX Design curriculum,” Min Kang, director of PXD LAB, added in the release. “NOMAD goes beyond being just a product; it reimagines how technology can enhance outdoor exploration without disrupting the experience.”

In addition to the Red Dot honors, NOMAD has already earned distinction from the FIT Sport Design Awards and was a finalist for the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) presented by the Industrial Designers Society of America.

NASA signs on latest tenant for new Exploration Park campus, now underway

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Exploration Park, the 240-acre research and commercial institute at NASA's Johnson Space Center, is ready for launch.

Facilities at the property have broken ground, according to a recent episode of NASA's Houston We Have a Podcast, with a completion date targeted for Q4 2026.

The research park has also added Houston-based KBR to its list of tenants. According to a news release from the Greater Houston Partnership, the human spaceflight and aerospace services company will operate a 45,000-square-foot food innovation lab at Exploration Park. KBR will use the facility to focus on customized food systems, packaging and nutrition for the low Earth orbit economy.

“Exploration Park is designed for companies in the space ecosystem, such as KBR, to develop, produce, and deploy innovative new technologies that support space exploration and commerce,” Simon Shewmaker, head of development at ACMI Properties, the developer behind Exploration Park, said in the GHP release. “This project is moving expeditiously, and we’re thrilled to sign such an innovative partner in KBR, reflecting our shared commitment to building the essential infrastructure of tomorrow for the next generation of space innovators and explorers.”

NASA introduced the concept of a collaborative hub for academic, commercial and international partners focused on spaceflight in 2023. It signed leases with the American Center for Manufacturing and Innovation and the Texas A&M University System for the previously unused space at JSC last year.

“For more than 60 years, NASA Johnson has been the hub of human space exploration,” Vanessa Wyche, NASA Johnson Space Center Director, said in a statement at the time. “This Space Systems Campus will be a significant component within our objectives for a robust and durable space economy that will benefit not only the nation’s efforts to explore the Moon, Mars and the asteroids, but all of humanity as the benefits of space exploration research roll home to Earth.”

Texas A&M is developing the $200 million Texas A&M Space Institute, funded by the Texas Space Commission, at the center of the park. The facility broke ground last year and will focus on academic, government and commercial collaboration, as well as workforce training programs. ACMI is developing the facilities at Exploration Park.

Once completed, Exploration Park is expected to feature at least 20 build-to-suit facilities over at least 1.5 million square feet. It will offer research and development space, laboratories, clean rooms, office space and light manufacturing capabilities for the aerospace, robotics, life support systems, advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence industries.

According to the GHP, Griffin Partners has also been selected to serve as the co-developer of Exploration Park. Gensler is leading the design and Walter P Moore is overseeing civil engineering.

Houston cleantech co. plans first-of-its-kind sustainable aviation fuel facility

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Houston-based Syzygy Plasmonics announced plans to develop what it calls the world's first electrified facility to convert biogas into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

The facility, known as NovaSAF 1, will be located in Durazno, Uruguay. It is expected to produce over 350,000 gallons of SAF annually, which would be considered “a breakthrough in cost-effective, scalable clean fuel,” according to the company.

"This is more than just a SAF plant; it's a new model for biogas economics," Trevor Best, CEO of Syzygy Plasmonics, said in a news release. "We're unlocking a global asset class of underutilized biogas sites and turning them into high-value clean fuel hubs without pipelines, costly gas separation, or subsidy dependence.”

The project is backed by long-term feedstock and site agreements with one of Uruguay's largest dairy and agri-energy operations, Estancias del Lago, while the permitting and equipment sourcing are ongoing alongside front-end engineering work led by Kent.

Syzygy says the project will result in a 50 percent higher SAF yield than conventional thermal biogas reforming pathways and will utilize both methane and CO2 naturally found in biogas as feedstocks, eliminating the need for expensive CO2 separation technologies and infrastructure. Additionally, the modular facility will be designed for easy replication in biogas-rich regions.

The new facility is expected to begin commercial operations in Q1 2027 and produce SAF with at least an 80 percent reduction in carbon intensity compared to Jet A fuel. The company says that once fully commercialized the facility will produce SAF at Jet-A fuel cost parity.

“We believe NovaSAF represents one of the few viable pathways to producing SAF at jet parity and successfully decarbonizing air travel,” Best added in the release.

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This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

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