“The only constant is change.” Said every leader in the history of business.
But really – in the fast-paced markets of today, the ability to adapt and pivot mid-year is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. Smart scenario modeling can help uncover changes that will keep your revenue goals insight and prevent plan drift. However, implementing and executing these changes can be challenging, especially when dealing with multiple systems and tools for various aspects of your go-to-market (GTM) execution.
In this blog post, we will explore the best practices to ensure successful mid-year GTM changes.
1. Assess the Need for Change:
Before diving into making mid-year changes, it’s essential to assess the need for change. In our eBook, Building a Stronger RevOps Foundation, we outline the most common reasons for change, such as:
- Market trends or shifts that necessitate a strategic realignment
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Emergence of new competition
- New whitespace
- Reorganization of your resources
Evaluate your current GTM plan and identify the areas that require adjustments. There is certainly a risk in making a huge change mid-year, though it can certainly lead to benefits. We’ve heard many success stories where teams identified new opportunities to pivot mid-year, such as through moving into a new market. But this decision requires careful planning and analysis.
You may find yourself in a situation where the strategy leaders have already determined the need for a mid-year change in your GTM plan. In such cases, your role shifts to understanding the purpose and scope of the change. Dive deep into the strategic objectives driving the decision and gain clarity on the specific areas that require adjustments. By fully understanding the intended outcomes, you can effectively assess the impact on your revenue operations and determine the best course of action.
2. Establish a Cross-Functional Task Force:
Making mid-year changes to your GTM plan requires collaboration and input from various teams across your organization. While it should go without saying, ensuring that key leaders in your organization are represented is essential to success. Establish a cross-functional task force that includes representatives from sales, marketing, product, customer success, and revenue operations. This task force will serve as a driving force for executing changes, aligning teams, and ensuring seamless implementation.
3. Leverage Data and Analytics:
Data-driven decision-making is the cornerstone of successful mid-year GTM changes. Utilize your CRM, marketing automation tools, and other data sources to gather insights about customer behavior, pipeline performance, and market trends. Leverage analytics to identify patterns, opportunities, and areas of improvement. One of the biggest challenges here can be ensuring that your team is working with up-to-date data. If, for example, your analysts download data on a Monday morning and conduct their analysis over a week, by the time they present findings their insights may be very inaccurate. By using an intelligent GTM planning and operations solution that has a real-time connection with your CRM, you can ensure your analysis is credible.
4. Simplify and Consolidate Systems:
One of the biggest challenges in implementing mid-year GTM changes is the complexity of managing multiple systems. If it takes three months or more to implement a GTM change, you are moving too slow to stay with the market. Consolidate your GTM execution tools and systems into a unified platform that streamlines processes and enhances collaboration. Purpose-built GTM platforms provide end-to-end go-to-market planning and execution capabilities, enabling you to enforce and automate your GTM plan. By reducing the friction caused by disparate systems, you can increase agility and accelerate the implementation of changes.
5. Prioritize Quick Wins:
Mid-year GTM changes require a careful balance between immediate impact and long-term strategy. We often hear from RevOps leaders that one of the biggest decisions in making mid-year changes revolves around deciding whether to cast the change as a small “tweak” or a complete re-plan. Obviously there’s a time for both, however identifying low-hanging fruit that can be addressed swiftly, can be an effective strategy. These quick wins not only build momentum for larger changes but also provide tangible evidence of the effectiveness of your mid-year adjustments. Celebrate these victories and use them to rally your teams around the shared goal of adapting and optimizing your GTM plan.
6. Communicate and Educate:
Clear communication is essential when implementing mid-year GTM changes. Keep your teams informed about the reasons behind the changes, the expected outcomes, and their roles in the execution process. Having a clear communication plan and schedule makes the difference between successful implementation and failed efforts. Our GTM Plan Rollout Handbook provides tips and templates to make this process easier. For strategy and operations leaders who have never carried a quota, it can be easy to forget just how sensitive changes are for reps. As per territory management best practices, be sure to put communication about territory and quota front and center so that no one is left wondering how the changes will affect them, which is a common cause of rep attrition.
7. Monitor and Iterate:
Implementing mid-year changes is not a one-time event; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor the performance of your new strategies and tactics, and be prepared to iterate and adjust as needed. Regularly review and analyze the data to assess the impact of your changes and make data-driven refinements. Remember that pipeline review is just one piece of the puzzle. It is critical that you connect all of your performance metrics to the big picture revenue targets and GTM plan so that your organization can achieve its goals.
With the right approach and a commitment to agility, you can successfully navigate the constant market changes and re-calibrate your go-to-market plan accordingly. Although it requires a paradigm shift from a traditional approach, it enables greater effectiveness and revenue growth.
The gold standard in agile RevOps is to work toward automation. As an organization progresses through the stages of GTM automation, making changes becomes increasingly easy. The most sophisticated GTM teams are able to modify their GTM execution in minutes, allowing them to focus their efforts on improving strategy.
