GTM Strategy, chapter 5: how you feed the revenue cycle
In our last 4 GTM articles, we covered how to build the foundations of your strategy - identifying your ICP, positioning, pricing, channels, and communications. In this post we discuss how to get everything in motion.
It’s time to pull your GTM pieces together
You’ve defined the pillars of your GTM strategy, now it is time to activate it. Your target audience needs to know you exist, what you do, why you are different, why they should care and why they should buy now.
Now you must answer the following questions: How much effort do you want to put behind brand awareness, where do you advertise and how much, how do you equip your team to go hunt (outbound) and what you do to get people to come to you (inbound).
A plan you can’t execute is not a plan
You have 2 key inputs here: data from previous efforts and experiments, and the novel strategies and actions you have developed a thesis on. These are equally valid to inform a set of strategies to land new logos and to expand your footprint with existing ones. With them will come required resources, expected outcomes and levels of effort.
Time for an important caveat - it’s highly probable results will diverge from your plans. This is ok. What you are doing here is putting a stick in the ground, and what you will do after this point is steer in the overall direction and take a lot of turns. What is essential is to be very outspoken about what it will take to deliver you strategies. You will need the resources to hit the level of quality that is likely to yield the results. What we see more often than not is an unrealistic expectation of what activation takes. Be crystal clear about this with all stakeholders upfront, this is not a conversation you want to have in flight.
The result of this phase is a comprehensive plan with a set of activities, associated timeline, results and resources.
Nota bene - one common mistake is to consider this part as your marketing-only plan. It is a GTM plan where marketing and sales and customer success play a role. This plan should be collectively owned by these functions because they are collectively responsible for revenue. It is going to require inputs from the whole organization beyond GTM. Laying out those interlocks is one of the top priority outputs of this plan. Don’t look them over.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure
A comprehensive GTM strategy consists of many moving parts working in concert with one another. Absent a comprehensive system of measurement, you will be hard pressed to answer critical questions like what is working and why, where you are gaining traction and where you are stuck, where to invest additional capital and efforts, and what efforts to deprioritize. You’ll also be missing critical tools to drive accountability and to communicate progress and priorities with internal and external stakeholders. Finally, you’ll be attempting to navigate a challenging, dynamic course with little to no understanding of where and when to turn. Remember - many things will probably not go to plan, you need clear measurements to understand how, why, and how to effectively redirect efforts.
There is one universal truth in this game: no matter how detailed and thought through your GTM strategy is, it will not predict the future. Market conditions will change, competition has its own strategy, there will be mishaps and good surprises - some things will work extremely well and ‘sure things’ will fall flat. Your GTM strategy is something you need to be refining continuously and that is more of a process than a deliverable. The only way to do that effectively and proactively is being rooted in a basis of sound measurement. You and your board set goals for the next year and you need to know if you are on track to hit them. So you need sensors to give you that feedback.
The metrics you use will vary based on your strategy but they fall into 3 core buckets: are we gaining traction on our target markets (does the pipeline makeup reflect our ICPs), are we executing efficiently (how long does it take to win a deal, what is the loss/win split, what is the ACV - both for new logos and expansion), are we making money (are our GTM costs under control vs the rew revenue we bring in). This dashboard is the nervous system of your GTM strategy. Your GTM functions should obsess over it and your leadership team review it frequently. It needs to be backed up by operational metrics each group owns but this is creeping into OKR territory and is a separate, but equally important conversation (one that Facta would be happy to have with you).
Next up: Your top 5 takeaways. Leave your email below to get this and future posts from Facta.
Ari & Frederic
Why Choose Facta Partners?
The Facta team has been servicing growth for over two decades. We will help you define what growth means to you, set the strategic direction to approach it, allocate resources to support it, design processes to deliver it and make sure your team and board are excited about it. We don’t stop at crafting the plan, we also help you to deliver, in the trenches.
Why Facta? Because we have done it, from Series A startups to Fortune 100 enterprises across industries. We have been operators, with people to lead, departments to align and boards to please. We know what works, what doesn't, why and have distilled those lessons into a methodology with a clear point of view.
We are your clarity compass.
