The Value of a well designed and executed GTM Strategic Planning & Performance Lifecycle

Building a GTM Strategic plan is the first step most SaaS companies complete as part of their annual planning cycle. But then what happens to that plan?

How do you track your progress to your GTM plan? Do you track how each of your GTM plays are performing and where to focus your additional time, money and resources based on what is driving results?

There are many elements to a GTM Planning and Performance Lifecycle. As these elements are defined and deployed, the ability to drive results depends on the ability of the SaaS company to track and monitor progress while being able to manage changes quickly and easily as to not interrupt the GTM lifecycle.

Here is the model that shows the typical GTM Planning and Performance Lifecycle:

Each stage of the GTM Strategic Plan requires an operational execution plan and tactics to drive consistent delivery of results.

GTM Data Management

It starts with using high quality standardized data. If the data from your CRM system is not accurate or has inconsistent and missing data, then it will be challenging to put your plan in place and be able to accurately track and report on the progress to your plan.

Once you define your GTM Strategy and each of the GTM plays that you will be focusing your company on for the year, the next step is to align every operational process in your Customer Lifecycle Management model from Lead generation through to an expanding customer.

As you begin to configure your technology stacks to track the results of each tactical GTM play and report on the progress of your GTM strategy, you may find various holes in your data which will either eliminate or affect your ability to understand what’s working and not working from week to week throughout the quarter.

I suggest you take the time to get your data right. Audit the key fields that are required to track all the various elements. Think about the data required to have the insights into the progress of your GTM Strategic plan and create a plan to correct all the data. Once the data is correct, you will need the technology to maintain these data standards and prevent future data degradation.

For Example, If your GTM Strategic Plan has a play defined as follows:

• Target Market = Enterprise

• Industry = Technology

• Company size = >1000 employees

• Revenue size = >75m

• Target Personas: CRO, COO, CFO, VP Business Operations or Revenue Operations

• Solution = GTM Modeling and Execution

• Territories = NA and EMEA (All countries, states, etc are defined)

Then the data standards for all leads, opportunities, and customer roadmap and performance tracking will require the above fields to be complete, accurate and maintained for each prospect to customer.

As you define your data workflows and alignments, the required fields must have standards, policies, procedures and processes established to ensure consistent, quality and timely data standards are maintained.

GTM Planning

With accurate, standardized data, you can begin your planning process to put your strategic plan into execution mode.

This begins with modeling each of your GTM plays within your MarTech and CRM tech stacks. You may have various models and scenarios you want to play with for each market segmentation including balancing your territory plans with a capacity planning model to help you determine the following:

• Do you have the right people in the right roles?

• Does your team have the capacity to deliver on the targets?

• What is the alignment between Marketing, Sales and CS for each planned territory assignment?

• Are the assignments balanced and equitable?

• Which model provides the highest probability of success in delivering on the targets?

Once you have a plan, the next most important element to focus on is creating high quality content to support each GTM play that will resonate and motivate the ICP and personas you have defined to buy. This is the content you will use in your Sales Enablement tactics and training to equip each Account Executive with what they need to work every lead to close with the highest repeatability.

To create high quality content, it is wise to utilize the resources throughout your company. For example, the Customer Success and Professional Services teams have the knowledge and experience on what customers are using the solution for and how it has had an impact on their business. These are rich stories to use as part of the Sales Enablement content. Another example could be the Product Management team who may be working with customers on the design of the future roadmap. They could provide insightful content on how they compare to their competitors solutions as well as what is coming in the future to lead the way in the market. You could also have folks in the company with industry expertise and/or connections to key personas in your ICP that you can interview and ask them questions like:

• How do you buy this type of software?

• What business impact would you expect to be delivered to make a long term investment?

• What price point would make it a no brainer to buy the solution? (should be based on the value and ROI the solution can deliver)

• How do we compare to the other competitors in this space?

• What are the most important buy decision criteria?

The idea is to utilize your internal teams to provide the detailed, relevant content to Marketing for them to create the high quality branded materials. Otherwise, Marketing teams will do their research on the internet and pull together what they believe is the right message. It is better to get the real story from the customers who have lived it; and understand the problems, the pain, the costs, and the time they spend working around these problems to do their jobs. Customers can share a much more passionate story of how your solution has transformed their operations and it is much more impactful.

As you plan your territories, think about your GTM strategy and strategic plays to help you determine the best approach to aligning and balancing your territory plan. Using your capacity planning model will help you to plan out the balanced quota and target assignments as well. The goal is to make sure the plan is realistic and achievable. There are several technologies that can help you create these plans in a short period of time and support maintaining the data standards to ensure accurate reporting of the progress to your GTM plan. I recommend adding one of these solutions to your Salesforce solution as your GTM planning, executing and tracking solution, the same way you use CPQ for your standard quoting solution. One of my favorites is Fullcast.

GTM Revenue Generation

Once you define your GTM Strategy and strategic plays for the current year, then a plan needs to be put in place for tracking performance to the plan and ensuring you have the right standards, policies and processes in place to execute on each play with quality content and excellence in execution.

The best approach for tracking results to your GTM strategy is to use technology to track, monitor and report on how each GTM play is performing. The insights from your technology should be showing you what is working and not working and where you should continue investing to ensure continuous healthy revenue generation.

Tracking all the metrics from the Top of Funnel (TOFU) through the Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) on a weekly basis will provide the insights to track the trends by each GTM play and view what strategic plays are improving the funnel metrics and increasing your win rate while reducing your sales cycle times.

Once you have your plan, standards, processes, policies, procedures and technologies enabled, it is important to have a well defined Sales and CS Playbook that documents these. However, just asking Sales and CS teams to read playbooks will not get the knowledge transfer and behavior changes operationalized. It will require a well planned and executed training program on the new messaging and content to support each GTM play for these teams to begin to drive results in alignment to your GTM plan.

I love the funnel reports to monitor how your GTM plays are doing and driving improvements to the KPIs that are key to generating repeatable results. Many times companies bail on a GTM play that isn’t producing results without evaluating the details of the how the standards, processes, policies and procedures have been setup to ensure the execution of each play is well done by all roles through out the process. This goes back to what makes the data and reporting excellent. It is the standardization of the processes and the configuration of the technology to enable these standards to be executed with consistency, quality and excellence which produces accurate data and reporting.

GTM Performance

In this stage of your GTM Execution, the dashboard is best reported showing the summary level and then the breakdown by each GTM play in order to identify which GTM plays are working better than others. Some plays may need more time than others to begin hitting goals and proving the strategy is working.

A balanced and aligned GTM plan leads to a well thought out approach to how the Sales leader is going to hit the target. It is best to use a capacity plan to help design the right territory plan.

Many SaaS companies have also found great success in growing faster by aligning the Sales and CSM teams. If the territories can be defined as a book of business that the Sales and CSM teams can run together; it has been proven to drive the successful execution of the wall to wall customer roadmap plan and ensure TCV is achieved for all customers at a faster pace.

A few key elements to look at as you review the results of your GTM performance on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis:

• Have you published your GTM Strategy to the company with all GTM plays defined?

• Do you have a territory plan that is well balanced and realistic to hit your target?

• Can you automated all changes quickly to ensure no opportunities become stagnant?

• How are your Sales and CSM teams aligned to drive growth in the customer base?

• Have you defined the workflows and data flows that are aligned to the GTM plays and territory plans throughout your tech stack?

• Have you configured the technology stack to execute on the workflows and territory assignments to ensure TOFU to BOFU flows without fail and no leads or opportunities are stalled?

These are the areas to verify are executing as planned and designed throughout the GTM lifecycle. If any of these areas are not well planned or setup to execute in a standardized manner, then the results of your reporting could be flawed and may not have the quality data you can rely on to make sound business decisions on your GTM strategy.

Any GTM plan is only as good as the ability for a SaaS company to put the detailed processes, standards, policies and procedures in place to support the execution of the plan and then use the technologies wisely to enable the team to their jobs better and the insights to guide the leadership’s decisions on how best to drive to results.

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