GTM

The default path we didn’t take At a retail-tech SaaS I worked at, we rebranded the product — new name, new visual identity, new positioning, new website and social presence built from scratch. Somewhere in that process, the pricing conversation started the way it starts almost everywhere: open three competitor pricing pages, eyeball where they land, pick a number somewhere in the middle, call it “market rate.” We stopped that conversation before it went anywhere. It’s the single decision from the entire rebrand I’d defend most confidently, because it was the one built on the least amount of guessing. Why competitor pricing pages are a trap Competitor pricing tells you what another company believes their buyer will pay, filtered through their own cost structure, their sales motion, their brand equity, and their existing customer base’s switching cost. None of that transfers cleanly to a company mid-rebrand, with a new name buyers don’t recognize yet and none of the trust an established competitor has already banked. We still did deep competitive intelligence — feature matrices, positioning gaps, messaging audits — because understanding what competitors offered and how they talked about it mattered for product and GTM decisions. What we refused to do was let their price tag become our starting point. Anchoring to a competitor’s number answers the wrong question: it tells you what they charge, not what your buyer will actually pay for your specific version of the value proposition. What we did instead We didn’t run a formal, single-instrument willingness-to-pay study. What we ran was messier and, in hindsight, more honest: a continuous willingness-to-pay process built on real conversations rather than a survey instrument. Sales was already running when I joined, and I spent a significant amount of time sitting in on live sales calls — watching how prospects actually reacted to a price in the moment, not what they said they’d pay in the abstract. That unfiltered, in-context reaction turned out to be more reliable than anything a structured questionnaire would have told us, because it was revealed behavior, not a hypothetical answer. Alongside that, we ran direct interviews with existing customers, and we used competitive intelligence — feature matrices, positioning gaps — to shape our initial bundling. None of this happened in a single clean phase before launch. It happened continuously, in parallel with ICP and persona work, as we onboarded new customers and learned more. The output was never a single number handed over by a research report. It was a live feedback loop — sales call data, customer interviews, and real market response, compounding into a clearer picture of what different segments would actually pay. Building the price ladder from segments, not features The common approach to SaaS tiering is to bundle features into “Basic / Pro / Enterprise” buckets and hope the segmentation falls out naturally. We built it the other way around. The willingness-to-pay signal we gathered — through sales conversations and customer interviews, not a formal survey — showed us where the real price ceilings sat for different buyer segments, and the tiers were built to match those segments, not to create artificial scarcity that pushes people toward an upsell. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Feature-bundled tiering optimizes for extracting more from each customer. Segment-based tiering, built from real buyer signal, optimizes for actually landing the price a given buyer is willing to pay in the first place — which matters enormously more when you’re a newly rebranded product still building trust. Ability-to-pay mattered as much as willingness-to-pay Our buyer base skewed heavily SMB, running on a freemium model. For that segment, budget reality was often the harder constraint — not whether they were willing to pay, but whether they structurally could. That distinction shaped the final tiers as much as any single conversation did. It’s a detail formal WTP frameworks sometimes miss: a segment can want your product and still have no room in their budget for it, and no amount of clever pricing psychology changes that math. Pricing below the incumbent, on purpose The signal pointed to a clear answer: price around 20% below the established mid-market players, and roughly 50% below the category leader. That wasn’t a discount strategy or a “let’s undercut everyone” reflex. It was where real buyer behavior told us our ceiling sat once we accounted for the trust deficit of a smaller, newly rebranded product asking someone to switch from something they already knew. Pricing lower than an incumbent without any signal behind it is just guessing downward. Pricing lower than an incumbent because sales conversations, customer interviews, and repeated iteration showed that’s genuinely where the value-to-trust ratio lands for your buyer is a decision you can defend in a board meeting — even if the process that got you there wasn’t a textbook study. Letting the rebrand carry the price The launch didn’t apologize for the number. New name, new identity, new website, new social presence — every touchpoint was built around the same positioning that justified the price, not around explaining why it was lower than the leader’s. Buyers weren’t told “we’re cheaper because we’re new.” They were told why this product, at this price, was built for exactly their use case. Results +28% website traffic, +13% social engagement, +12% MQL growth in the period following the rebrand. The takeaway Pricing research gets treated as something that only counts if it’s a formal study — a survey instrument, a fixed sample, a clean report. Done properly, willingness-to-pay work doesn’t have to look like that. Sometimes the most reliable signal is sitting in your sales calls and your actual market response, if you’re willing to iterate against it instead of guessing once and moving on. We repriced three times before we got it right. That’s not a weaker process than a formal study — it’s a different kind of rigor, built on revealed behavior instead of stated preference.

A year ago, AVI Global Plast didn’t have a marketing function. Just a 25-year-old reputation, a ₹300Cr export business spanning 33 countries, and zero structured demand engine. No CRM. No content calendar. No consistent messaging across the website, sales decks, and trade shows. Just a strong product and a market that already trusted the name — but had no systematic way of reaching new buyers, or reminding existing ones why they’d chosen AVI in the first place. Building that function from the ground up — across brand, demand generation, export GTM, and event strategy — taught me more about B2B go-to-market than any campaign I’d run before. Here’s what stuck. 1. Manufacturing buyers don’t respond to “marketing” — they respond to proof In consumer marketing, a clever campaign can shift perception overnight. In B2B manufacturing, it can’t — and trying to force it usually backfires. Procurement leads, NPD engineers, and supply chain directors aren’t evaluating you on creativity. They’re evaluating you on whether your spec sheets are accurate, whether your compliance documentation is complete, and whether your packaging will survive a transit audit three weeks from now in a different climate. The moment we stopped writing copy that sounded like a brochure — “industry-leading,” “world-class,” “trusted by thousands” — and started writing copy that read like an engineer explaining a process, conversations changed. Inquiries got more specific. Sales calls started further down the funnel, because the website had already answered the basic qualifying questions. The lesson: in industrial B2B, proof is the message. Confidence comes from precision, not adjectives. 2. Your biggest GTM lever might be a website nobody’s looked at in years When I started, the website’s bounce rate was sitting at 98%. Visitors were landing and leaving almost instantly. The instinct in most organizations would be a full redesign — new visuals, new branding, a bigger budget. We didn’t have that luxury, and honestly, it wasn’t the actual problem. The real issue was structural: the site wasn’t answering the questions a buyer actually has before they’re willing to fill out a contact form. What certifications do you hold? Can you handle our specific SKU dimensions? Do you export to our region? What does your compliance documentation look like? By restructuring content around those questions — without touching the visual design — bounce rate dropped from 98% to 47%. No redesign. Just better answers, in the right order, at the right depth. The lesson: before reaching for a redesign, ask whether your existing assets are actually solving the buyer’s information problem. Often, they’re not — and that’s a content and structure fix, not a design one. 3. Export GTM is 33 different micro-markets wearing one trench coat “33 countries across 6 continents” looks great on a slide. On the ground, it means 33 different sets of buying triggers, regulatory requirements, seasonal cycles, and competitive landscapes. What works for a North American berry exporter — fast turnaround, cold-chain compatibility, retail-ready packaging — doesn’t translate to an EU avocado packer, who’s thinking about recyclability mandates, different retailer specifications, and a completely different sourcing calendar. Treating “export markets” as one audience is one of the most common GTM mistakes in B2B manufacturing. It leads to generic messaging that resonates with no one, because it’s been averaged across buyers who have almost nothing in common except that they’re “international.” The fix wasn’t to build 33 separate strategies — that’s not feasible for a lean team. It was to group markets by buying behavior and product fit rather than geography, and build messaging variants for those clusters instead of treating “export” as a monolith. 4. Repositioning isn’t a tagline change One of our core shifts was moving from being perceived as a price-led thermoforming supplier to being recognized as a solution-led export partner. That’s an easy sentence to write and a genuinely hard thing to do — because positioning claims that aren’t backed by substance get ignored, or worse, actively damage credibility with sophisticated buyers who can tell the difference. Before we said a word about “solutions,” we had to be able to demonstrate the capability behind the claim: rPET integration, digital traceability, the ability to support custom development at speed. The recognition that followed — including being featured by Starlinger viscotec as a high-performing PCR packaging leader in India — wasn’t the result of better messaging. It was the result of the messaging finally catching up to capabilities that were already real. The lesson: positioning is a promise. Don’t make it until the operational reality can back it up — otherwise you’re just adding to the noise everyone else is already making. 5. A marketing function in manufacturing is built on trust capital, not creative capital Perhaps the biggest mindset shift: in this environment, marketing’s value isn’t measured primarily by creative output. It’s measured by how well marketing’s narrative matches what operations, sales, and leadership already know to be true. Every meaningful external validation we earned — the Plexconcil Top Exporter recognition, the Starlinger feature, the Sahyadri Farms partnership recognition — came from marketing and operations finally speaking the same language. Marketing wasn’t translating operational reality into a story from the outside; it was working with operations to find the story that was already there. That’s a very different posture from consumer marketing, where the brand often leads and operations follows. In industrial B2B, the brand earns the right to speak only once it accurately reflects what the business can actually deliver. The bigger picture Building marketing in export manufacturing isn’t glamorous. There’s no viral campaign moment, no overnight brand transformation. But it’s some of the most honest GTM work I’ve done — because the buyer on the other end isn’t making a snap purchase. They’re making a multi-year supply chain decision, often involving multiple stakeholders, compliance reviews, and sample testing cycles. When marketing respects that — when it prioritizes proof over polish, structure over spectacle, and alignment over creativity for its own sake — it stops being a cost center and starts becoming part of how the business actually grows. If