A go-to-market strategy checklist. Five sections, done in order.

What the checklist covers. Five decisions, not fifty tasks.

A go to market checklist gets treated, too often, as a project plan: a long list of tasks with owners and dates. That's launch planning, and it matters, but it's a different document from this one. A go-to-market strategy checklist exists to confirm that five specific decisions were actually made, deliberately, before any of those tasks start, because a beautifully executed launch built on the wrong decision still fails.

The order matters more than the content of any single row. Pricing decided before positioning tends to anchor on cost or competitor rates rather than the value the customer actually gets, and channel decided before the ICP is specific enough almost always defaults to whatever channel the founder is personally comfortable with, rather than the one the buyer actually uses. Our guide to the components of a go-to-market strategy goes deeper on each of these five pieces individually; this checklist is about sequencing them and confirming each one is genuinely decided, not assumed.

How to use it. One pass, then a second pass before launch.

Run the checklist twice. The first pass happens when the strategy is being set, ideally four to six weeks before launch, and the goal is simply to force every decision into writing: a one-paragraph ICP, a one-sentence positioning statement, a pricing table, a named primary channel, and a list of who owns readiness in sales, support and tracking. Vague answers at this stage ("mid-market companies", "better than the competition") are a sign the decision hasn't actually been made yet, just gestured at.

The second pass happens in the week before launch, and it's a readiness check rather than a strategy check: has sales actually been briefed on the final positioning, not an earlier draft of it; does support have answers to the three objections most likely to come up; is the dashboard that will measure success built and tested with real data, not a mock-up. Teams that only run the checklist once, at the strategy stage, routinely discover on launch day that the thing agreed on paper six weeks earlier never made it into the team actually facing the customer.

Where the checklist should sit alongside a fuller strategy build is our go-to-market strategy work, which covers the decisions behind each checklist item in depth rather than just confirming they've been made.

A worked example. Where the order actually changed the outcome.

A B2B SaaS founder I worked with, illustrative rather than a named client, had already built a pricing page and a launch date before we sat down. The pricing was tiered by number of seats, a structure borrowed from a competitor, and the positioning draft led with "all-in-one platform". Running the checklist in order surfaced the problem immediately: the actual ICP, once we wrote it down specifically rather than gesturing at "small businesses", was operations teams at companies with 20 to 80 staff who were buying to replace three disconnected spreadsheets, not to add a platform. Seat-based pricing punished exactly the behaviour we wanted to encourage, getting every operations person using the tool, and "all-in-one platform" meant nothing to a buyer whose actual problem was three specific spreadsheets.

The fix wasn't a bigger launch budget or a longer runway; it was redoing two rows of the checklist, pricing and positioning, before touching the channel plan that was already built. The positioning became a direct claim about replacing those three spreadsheets, and pricing moved to a flat team price that encouraged full adoption rather than per-seat gatekeeping. The channel plan, built for the wrong positioning, barely needed to change once the two decisions underneath it were corrected. The decision rule that follows from it: if a launch isn't landing, check the ICP and positioning rows before touching the channel or the budget, because a channel problem is usually a positioning problem wearing a different costume.

Common mistakes with a go-to-market checklist. Treating it as a formality.

• Writing the ICP from who you'd like to sell to, not who already buys. A checklist ICP row filled in with aspiration rather than evidence from actual early customers sends the rest of the plan chasing the wrong buyer.
• Setting pricing before positioning is settled. Pricing anchored to a competitor's rate card rather than to the value your positioning actually claims almost always undersells or oversells the offer.
• Picking a channel because it's familiar, not because the ICP is there. A founder comfortable with content and SEO will default to it even for a buyer who makes decisions through referral or outbound, because the channel row gets filled in from the founder's comfort rather than the buyer's behaviour.
• Treating the readiness row as administrative. Sales enablement and support readiness get scheduled last and compressed first when the launch date slips, which is exactly backwards: readiness is what the customer actually experiences.

None of these five sections needs to be complicated to be right. What they need is to be decided in order, written down specifically enough that a stranger could act on them, and checked a second time the week before anyone outside the team sees the launch. That discipline, more than any single tactic on the list, is what separates a go-to-market plan that was genuinely built from one that was assembled from habit. Where the checklist keeps surfacing the same stuck row launch after launch, that's usually less a go-to-market problem than a growth consulting conversation about the business underneath it.