4 Simple ways to enhance your go-to-market execution
AUTHOR
If you have experience in sales, marketing, or customer success roles, you understand the immense pressure that comes with executive leaders setting revenue targets. You meticulously design a go-to-market (GTM) plan to achieve your goals, but unforeseen challenges often hinder the execution of your strategy. Enhancing the effectiveness of your plans is always possible. But when you don’t have a clear understanding of the factors influencing performance, spotting opportunities for optimization can be tricky.
That desire for greater insight and agility is driving digital transformation efforts all over the world. While transformation has delivered positive outcomes for some businesses, a McKinsey study shows that 45% of digital transformation projects don't pay off. And only 1 in 10 exceed expectations. If your transformational journey isn’t yet paying off, or if the performance of your GTM teams isn’t meeting your expectations, you might be exploring ways to improve your results.
While every business is different, their GTM challenges are often very similar. Based on our experience with customers who have developed effective GTM plans, here are four simple ways you can optimize the execution of your GTM strategy:
1. Design multiple GTM plans to amplify your revenue objectives
Cost-cutting has become a top priority for businesses. And for some companies, that means overhauling the entire budgeting process and resource allocation strategy for sales, marketing, and customer success teams. The traditional annual planning approach, where budgets are allocated and GTM teams create spending plans for the year, is nearly dead. CFOs, CSOs, and CMOs are putting an end to blind or haphazard spending and adopting a quarterly planning method instead.
With limited resources and budget availability, you need to invest in areas that will generate the greatest impact. Creating multiple plans that align with your revenue objectives can help optimize your goal attainment in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Begin by identifying high-yield segments of customers and prospects that offer high potential for profitability and growth. Gain insights into conversion rates, pipeline metrics, deal velocity, and win rates to prioritize your target audience based on their likelihood to make a purchase. Task your GTM teams with building plans that focus on your core segments. And synchronize their efforts by establishing a timeline for engagement and employing effective tactics. This approach ensures that your investments are directed toward areas that will yield the best performance and ROI.
2. Develop back-up plans for unachieved metrics and milestones
It’s crucial to identify early metrics that can serve as indicators of the effectiveness of your GTM plan and whether you’re on track to achieve your revenue goals. To avoid the fire drills that come with teams missing their targets, it’s best to prepare for any deviations from the intended trajectory and make strategic decisions in advance to determine when and how to pivot your strategy.
Creating contingency plans for your GTM teams is a great insurance policy against the risks associated with program failure. Without a backup plan, teams are forced to scramble to recover from setbacks. Scenario modeling capabilities provide a structured framework to anticipate and prepare for various potential scenarios. It allows GTM teams to simulate different situations, assess their potential impact on revenue goals, and evaluate alternative strategies and courses of action. Exploring different “what-if” scenarios can help evaluate alternative approaches, such as adjusting pricing, modifying sales targets, reallocating resources, or targeting different customer segments. This proactive approach helps minimize disruptions and enables GTM teams to respond swiftly and effectively to changing circumstances.
3. Build a trustworthy metrics system for informed decision-making
Within your GTM organization, various teams have distinct objectives and are evaluated based on different criteria. There’s an expectation that sales, marketing, and customer success teams will collaborate cohesively and effectively toward a shared objective. However, when it comes to planning, it’s not unusual for individual managers to gather reports and analytics from various sources, such as CRM systems and other sales and marketing tools.
Unfortunately, this practice often leads to fragmented information and isolated data. When that happens, you lose context or understanding of past performance drivers, and you may make inaccurate decisions about what is and isn't effective.
If you hope to create an aligned approach to achieving business goals, create a set of trustworthy metrics to share and utilize across all your GTM functions. Sharing metrics across functions fosters transparency and accountability, allowing all teams to work toward a shared set of objectives. This approach can improve communication and collaboration across teams, which can lead to more effective decision-making and better overall results.
4. Streamline planning with dedicated teams and defined timelines
In today's competitive and disruptive markets, the ability to pivot and adapt swiftly can make a significant difference in staying ahead. However, poor planning often results in missed deadlines and execution delays, causing a ripple effect throughout the organization. This ripple effect includes increased costs due to unforeseen expenses, insufficient time for task completion, and rushed execution leading to errors. According to a Sales Management Association report on sales planning practice, half of the surveyed companies experience delays in delivering their sales plans. And only 40% believe their plans are truly effective.
Business planning and operations teams define growth strategies at a larger scale. To improve outcomes, revenue-generating teams like sales, marketing, and customer success need a deep understanding of performance drivers and the ability to leverage specific actions. To streamline decision-making, it’s crucial to establish dedicated teams responsible for optimizing channels, armed with performance metrics and specialized expertise. Those teams should collaborate closely with stakeholders to justify investments and drive both short-term and long-term growth. Creating tiger teams to support functional leads across the GTM organization can facilitate faster and more effective execution, ultimately improving return on investment (ROI).
Achieve faster outcomes with connected planning
The Anaplan Connected Planning Platform has transformed planning and improved outcomes for more than 2,000 customers. Our platform gives you complete visibility and control over your business processes, increases productivity, and drives profitable growth. With a more comprehensive view of your operations, you’ll make better-informed decisions faster. You’ll gain confidence to accelerate the execution of your go-to-market strategy and act decisively with support from real-time scenario modeling and analysis. With the ability to execute with speed and intelligence, you can stay ahead of the competition and drive your business forward.
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