3 Tips When Preparing for GTM Planning

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Hi All! This week’s topic is Marketing Planning & Excellence. GTM planning is a diverse exercise in orchestrating your marketing, sales, customer service and leadership teams into a shared vision for the upcoming year. In today’s newsletter, I discuss 3 Tips When Preparing for GTM Planning efforts.

What are your thoughts on prepping for your GTM strategy sessions? Share your ideas on The Buzz Community.

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3 Tips When Preparing for GTM Planning

Now that we are in the throws of go-to-market planning for 2024, one of the most important elements of planning successfully is analytical preparation. Understanding the customer, revenue, and key accounts in detail is paramount in driving alignment across your go-to-market teams and vision for the upcoming year.

Here are a few tips to prep for this planning in a way that can create alignment across the GTM teams and provide insight to drive business decisions for the upcoming year.

Tip #1 - Customer Research

Hopefully, throughout the year the GTM team has been collecting customer feedback, testimonials, NPS, and product reviews. This data is a great foundation to understand the pulse of your customers and prospects which should inform your overall GTM planning. But taking this information and putting it into a planning context is super important as we prep for planning our go-to-market.

The structure I’ve used historically is fairly straightforward. Start with the macro picture from both revenue and brand perspectives. That is, take a top-down revenue analysis by market share, product, persona (or ICP), and geography. Second, add a layer of NPS and CSAT analysis to understand where your brand is and where it needs to be. Then, build the same analysis for each ICP / persona to further identify key accounts. Additionally, create a story for the customer-facing trends you see through the data. Lastly, I find it extremely helpful to share an edited customer interview that demonstrates the to-be vision of the revenue and brand experience, usually in video format. This will create a holistic view of how the customer market sees your solution(s) and provide a great internal “sales” tool to get organizational buy-in.

Tip #2 - Pipeline Analysis

Another area that needs detailed analysis is pipeline, pipeline timing, and indicators of acceleration. This is done in partnership with the sales or sales ops team. We need to understand what are the triggers, intent indicators, sentiment, etc. that galvanize prospects to buy and customers to upgrade. Again, this analysis needs to be done by product, persona (or ICP), and geography. The goal of this work is to identify early in the GTM flywheel what are leading indicators of revenue growth drivers.

Tactically, this can identify elements in your go-to-market activities that are driving faster, smarter, and better revenue. Sometimes, it’s something as simple as an industry event, but often it’s a multitude of marketing, sales development, and sales activities collaborating that creates this acceleration of growth. Be mindful, however, that there is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to marketing investment / activity volume over time. This is true for any GTM activity. The goal of this analysis is two-fold. Identify the activities that are driving results and the volume that is the sweet spot to drive outcomes. This will help you strategically plan your budget for the next year.

Tip #3 - Key Account Analysis

One area that is often overlooked in GTM planning is the account-based analysis. As marketing, sales, and customer service plan out their respective year there should be a key account list for the entire company that all groups contribute towards. This list becomes the foundation of your targets for your ABM / ABX strategy.

The tactical way to achieve this is to do account-level planning as a group. All too often, I see B2B brands have the sales organization do all the account planning. However, the challenge with this approach is that this focuses only on revenue as the driver for key account focus. Sometimes, a smaller account revenue-wise can be your best promoter. Moreover, this account becomes a key ally in growing your business and should be “labeled” a key account for just that reason. Planning key accounts as an entire GTM team allows for these outliers to be a big part of your key account focus and GTM motions.

What are your thoughts on prepping for your GTM strategy sessions? Share your feedback on The Buzz Community.

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