Go-to-market strategy for a B2B startup: plan, channels, 90 days

In 2025, 53.1% of large Italian companies used artificial intelligence. Among SMEs, ISTAT found 15.7%. Count every firm with ten or more employees and you get 16.4%, double the year before. If you sell AI software to Italian businesses, that gap between big and small already hints at who buys first.

Picking that first buyer, and working out how to reach them, is the job of a go-to-market strategy. We’ll build one here. First the six parts of the plan and an ideal customer profile for a made-up Italian SaaS; then three ways to sell, channels that work in Italy, your first 90 days and the numbers to watch. Jargon new to you? Start from the beginner’s map, from zero to a first round.

What is a go-to-market strategy, and when do you need one?

Ask Salesforce and you’ll get the broad version, a step-by-step plan for bringing a new product to buyers. We keep a go-to-market plan smaller. One page, four questions. Who buys first? Why would they switch? Where do they hear about you? And what turns a first chat into a signed order? Everything else about the company belongs in the business plan. This page is only the road to revenue.

When should you write it? After you’ve talked to buyers, before you hire anyone to sell. Marc Andreessen’s 2007 definition of product/market fit is short: a good market, and a product that can satisfy it. Don’t sit on the plan until you’re sure you’ve got product-market fit. Testing the plan is how you find out. No customer interviews yet? Validate the idea in seven days first.

Everything here assumes B2B selling, to companies rather than consumers. The buyer is usually a team, and the sale ends with a contract.

The six parts of a GTM plan (a one-page template)

Six blocks, in this order. Each depends on the one before, so don’t start from channels.

1. Ideal customer profile. Which companies buy fastest and stay longest? Describe them so tightly you could list them by name. Then a TAM, SAM and SOM estimate shows whether the segment is big enough to carry a business.
2. The problem and the promise. One sentence on the pain, in the buyer’s words, and one on the result, with a number if you have it.
3. Channels. Where those buyers already look for answers. Two tested properly beat six tried for a week each.
4. Sales motion. Who actually gets the signature? It might be a salesperson, the product itself or a partner.
5. Pricing. The model and the entry price. A €300-a-year tool can’t pay for sales visits. Our SaaS pricing strategy guide compares the models.
6. Metrics. Three to five numbers, reviewed every week, each with a target for day 90.

How to write an ideal customer profile (ICP)

Salesforce describes an ICP as ‘a detailed description of a buyer who’s a perfect fit for your products or services’. The ICP defines the type of company; the buyer persona is a semi-fictional person inside it. In B2B you need both, ICP first.

Narrow beats broad. In 2022 ISTAT found 4.47 million active enterprises in Italy, and almost all of them, 94.9%, had under ten people. Between 50 and 249 people there were just 24,796. With 250 or more, 4,343. So ‘Italian SMEs’ is a census, not a customer profile.

Here’s the worksheet for an invented startup. Manutek, in Bologna, sells software that plans maintenance on industrial machines.

Field	Manutek’s answer
Industry	Makers of packaging and food-processing machines
Size	50 to 249 employees, €15 million to €60 million of revenue
Location	Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy first, so a visit costs a day, not a flight
Trigger	A new after-sales service contract, or a customer complaining about downtime
Pain	Technicians sent out without the right spare part; service contracts that lose money
Buyer and users	Buyer: head of after-sales service. Users: field technicians. Sign-off: the CFO
Tech stack	An ERP already in place; machines that send data, or could
Disqualifiers	No after-sales department; fewer than 50 machines installed at customers

Two rows matter most. The trigger tells you when to call. The disqualifiers stop you spending months on companies that love the demo and never buy. And remember the ISTAT figures: large firms adopted AI more than three times as often as SMEs in 2025, so an AI-heavy product may need an ICP further up the size scale than you’d hoped.

Sales-led, product-led or partner-led growth?

Three ways to carry a deal over the line. You’ll probably end up mixing two, like most B2B startups.

Motion	Definition	The first deal usually comes from	Suits
Sales-led	‘If the only way you can sell a product is if someone talks to you, you’re using a sales-led strategy’ (Wes Bush)	A meeting, a demo, a proposal and a contract	Higher prices, several people who must approve, integration work
Product-led	‘A business strategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers’ (Wes Bush)	A free trial or a free plan that converts	A low entry price, quick set-up, a user who can start alone
Partner-led	Partner sales, ‘also called channel sales’: a way to reach the market quickly without adding headcount (Salesforce)	A partner who already has the customer’s trust	Buyers who already buy through an integrator, a distributor or a consultant

Bush’s shorthand is easy to remember. Product-led means people use it first and pay later. Sales-led is the other way round. In Italian B2B the price often settles the question. A €40-a-month tool for micro-businesses can’t carry a salesperson’s car, lunch and three meetings. A €30,000 contract with a manufacturer won’t be signed after a free trial.

In Italy, partner-led selling may deserve more room than the American playbooks give it. Do your buyers already get their software through the integrator who runs their ERP, or the consultant who handles their certifications? Then that partner can open doors no cold email will. You borrow their trust and give away margin, so agree in writing who owns the customer.

Which B2B channels work in Italy?

LinkedIn and founder-led outreach

LinkedIn had 25.0 million members in Italy in late 2025, by DataReportal’s count: registered members, not daily users, so treat it as a ceiling. It’s still where you’ll find the head of after-sales service at a Modena machine builder, by name. A short, specific message from a founder usually teaches you more than an ad budget.

Trade fairs

Two days at a fair can save you months on the road. If you sell software to businesses, SMAU Milano is on 3 and 4 November 2026. For manufacturing there’s MECSPE, at BolognaFiere from 3 to 5 March 2027. In your first year, don’t pay for a stand. Set up ten meetings before you go, then count how many have become real opportunities 30 days later.

Integrators and distributors

Sign two partners, not ten. Each one needs its own territory and a demo account, plus a price list where their margin is plain to see and a call with you every month. No opportunity in 90 days? Then it’s a logo on your website.

Public tenders on MePA

Do schools, hospitals or town halls buy what you sell? Look at MePA, the public administration’s electronic marketplace, run by Consip. In 2025 it handled more than €11 billion of purchases in over 810,000 transactions; over 290,000 suppliers were enabled, more than 95% of them SMEs, and software solutions came to €639 million. You must be enabled in the right category, declaring your overall turnover and your turnover from similar contracts.

Planning a second country? The channels change at the border. Our guides to entering the German market and expanding to Spain from Italy redo this work country by country, and six questions for a market entry strategy help you choose the order. When you get there, our cross-border expansion service can plan that entry with you.

Your first 90 days, step by step

Paul Graham’s advice to Y Combinator founders holds in B2B: ‘The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.’ That means you, not a new hire.

1. Days 1 to 10. Write the ICP and the promise. List 100 matching companies, with the person to contact at each.
2. Days 11 to 30. Sit down with 25 to 30 of them, on a call if you must, and don’t sell a thing. Ask how they handle the problem now. What’s it costing them? Who has the final say?
3. From day 31 to day 45 you rewrite the promise, borrowing their words. Then put a price on it and try both on the next ten calls.
4. Days 46 to 60: one real sale, start to finish. That’s the demo, a proposal and the ask for a paid three-month pilot, with its success measure agreed in writing. Give two channels a weekly target in meetings booked.
5. Days 61 to 90 are for the first two or three paying customers. Note why each one bought, and why the others didn’t.
6. Day 90. Review the numbers below, then keep, narrow or change the ICP.

B2B sales metrics: win rate, sales cycle and pipeline coverage

Three numbers, defined the way Salesforce defines them:

• Win rate. Of all the qualified opportunities in a given period, it’s the percentage your team closed and won.
• Sales cycle length. Add up the days each closed sale took and divide by the number of deals.
• Pipeline coverage tells you how much potential revenue has to be sitting in the pipeline if you’re going to hit a target. It depends on the other two.

A worked example, with invented numbers. Manutek wants €120,000 of new annual recurring revenue in six months, at about €12,000 per customer: ten deals. At a 20% win rate it needs 50 qualified opportunities, roughly €600,000, through the funnel in that time. That’s 5x coverage, not the 3x many founders assume. Salesforce’s Jason Jordan explains the trap: the 3x rule ‘works only when your win rate is exactly 33% and your sales cycle is exactly one year’.

Cycle length moves the calendar. If deals take four months, this half-year’s opportunities must exist by the end of month two. Then weigh what each customer costs to win against what it brings in, with our guide to CAC, LTV and payback.

Common go-to-market mistakes

• An ICP you can’t turn into a list of 100 names.
• Hiring a salesperson before the founders have closed the first deals. Nobody can teach a process that doesn’t exist yet.
• Running a product-led playbook on a product that needs an integration project first.
• Partners counted instead of the opportunities they bring.
• Reporting emails sent and posts published, but not signed contracts.

Checklist: your GTM plan on one page

1. Write the ICP with a trigger and three disqualifiers.
2. Problem and promise: a sentence each, in your customers’ words rather than yours.
3. Pick a sales motion and write down why, in two lines. Can’t? Then it’s probably the wrong one.
4. Choose a pricing model, and put a number on the entry price.
5. Two channels. Not five. Each with a weekly target.
6. Decide where the numbers live (win rate, cycle length, coverage) so nobody’s hunting for them on Monday morning.
7. Book the day-90 review now, while it’s on your mind.