Modern market conditions are constantly changing. A shift in KPI focus is placing added pressure on RevOps teams to increase conversion rates, customers want a more personalized experience right now, and, well, AI is everywhere.
To stay in the game, your GTM processes should adapt as well. Traditional Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies often fall short in providing the flexibility and responsiveness that fast-growing companies require. Automation in GTM planning and execution offers a powerful solution, enabling businesses to swiftly adjust their strategies, optimize resources, and maintain a competitive edge.
If you’re looking for ways to update your GTM processes, we’ll give you 10. In our popular ebook 10 Steps to Sales GTM Planning, we give insight from pioneering RevOps experts on modern ways to launch Go-to-Market strategies that deliver your product faster and to the right audience. In this article, check out the top five ways companies like yours optimize their RevOps teams with smart, seamless, agile Go-to-Market strategies.
1. Define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Think about your customer first. As your offerings evolve and market trends develop, your ideal customer profile (ICP) will also change. Take the time necessary to reevaluate customer profiles each year with a critical perspective. Begin by reviewing the segmentation model from the current year and assess how effectively you targeted it. This reflection may reveal, for instance, greater success with a specific industry or company size, guiding you to prioritize that segment in your ICP for the upcoming year.
2. Size the Market
Data is crucial in this process. While you will likely begin with your CRM data, it’s important not to stop there. Your CRM data is often outdated and may not cover potential accounts outside your current database.
Enriching your CRM data with third-party sources is essential. The key is to select sources that align with your segmentation. This might involve using specialized regional or industry data in addition to more general corporate data like D&B. With a comprehensive view of the market data, you can perform TAM/SAM/SOM calculations and analyze competitive market penetration.
3. Confirm Targets
Sales teams usually get a top-down target set by finance or revenue leadership. Once you have this goal, validate it through a comprehensive bottom-up feedback process. While this can be time-consuming depending on your tools, it provides transparency regarding targets and ensures they are perceived as achievable. This process builds trust with the field team and offers leadership valuable insights that would otherwise be inaccessible.
4. Determine Capacity Needs
Recent research found that only 40 percent of organizations have adequate skills database capability to do accurate resource planning, even though 92 percent of them claim they use some sort of technology to store skills-related data.
Meeting your targets requires the right team. Understanding your capacity needs involves more than just dividing your revenue target by the average attainment per rep and using that number to determine how many reps to hire. Instead, scenario planning helps you identify optimal capacity: when, where, and what roles to hire.
During scenario planning, incorporating both top-down and bottom-up feedback can validate ramp profiles, ensuring you hire the right number of people at the right times.
Additionally, it’s essential to plan for attrition. This involves identifying roles to be replaced, new hires, or current team members for promotion. Develop an ROI model to track headcount investments, which will help you justify your plan if any conflicts arise.
5. Define Roles
As your sales team expands, roles will shift and specialize to better support the business. Defining those roles becomes particularly important. A recent survey found that 58 percent of organizations did not have skills defined for sales roles.
When defining roles for the new year, review your existing roles, identify any that need to be added or removed, and look for opportunities to enhance support and overlay resources. For instance, if you’re in a growth phase, it might be beneficial to introduce a pre-sales engineer role. You’ll need to establish this role, define its responsibilities, and ensure that your enablement team is prepared to support it. Additionally, consider workforce design, determining the optimal pairing of roles and how and when each should be involved in the sales process.
Because market conditions always change, the move to automated GTM planning and execution is necessary—particularly for fast-growing companies that need to stay agile.
To learn more about strategic methods for segmentation, assigning resources, run-time policies, and ways to define a process to seamlessly navigate changes, download your free copy of 10 Steps to Sales GTM Planning here.
