Startup Pitch Deck: the Go-To-Market Slide [+ Examples]

Are you building a pitch deck for your startup? Make sure to include in your pitch deck a go-to-market strategy slide to explain how you intend to acquire your customers.

In this series of articles we show you how to create a stunning pitch deck for your startup.

The Go-To-Market slide explained

The go-to-market slide follows the revenue model slide. Indeed, after having explained how your business makes money, we now look at how you will actually acquire customers.

Before we dive in the different elements you should include in this important slide, let’s first have a look at the different strategies that businesses use to acquire their customers.

What acquisition strategy are you using?

Businesses acquire their customers either from online or offline acquisition (or both):

  • Online acquisition: pay-per-click campaigns (e.g. Google Ads), content & SEO, social media, etc.
  • Offline acquisition: print ads, events & fairs, mail, etc.

Arguably, most tech startups mostly use an online acquisition. Online acquisition is sub-divided into 2 main categories itself:

  • Inbound acquisition: customers convert from leads, at the top of funnel, who visit your landing page or website. These visitors (also referred to as “traffic”) either come from paid ads or organic sources (SEO, content)
  • Outbound acquisition: customers are acquired via a sales team who actively reach out to potential customers. Because leads do not come by themselves but you reach out to them, this is an “outbound” strategy instead. Outbound is, for example, used by many B2B businesses (Enterprise SaaS for instance)

Note: to forecast customer acquisition, have a read at our article here (+ free template)

What should you include in your Go-to-market slide?

As we have seen above, make it clear what is your acquisition strategy (inbound, outbound or offline). Include details such as the tools you are using (e.g. Apple Search Ads for paid search, social media and content for organic growth).

Include acquisition metrics to stand out

Yet, because most businesses of your industry use the same acquisition strategies, to stand out from the crowd you should include numbers and metrics as well.

These acquisition metrics show how efficient your acquisition strategy is. Common metrics include (but not limited to):

A Few Examples of our Pitch Deck Go-To-Market Slides

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