Large GTM Planning and Playbook Adoption

Many OceanFrogs customers share that they are using OceanFrogs data to do their GTM planning. Hence, I am digging deeper and sharing how they are doing. At the same time, your inputs and feedback would be of use.

This article is based on my discussions with many leaders (CEOs, CROs, CMOs) or based on discussions with enterprise companies, mid-market, and startups. Scope of the use cases in this article is limited to enterprises and mid-market and not startup/SMB. I define startup/SMB as a company with revenue less than $20 million USD in this case.

GTM Planning is a planning of sales, marketing, customer success/professional services, and manpower planning. There might be more teams such as finance involved in it.

GTM Planning is conducted annual and quarterly but it is also conducted in these scenarios.

1. Launch a new product

2. Launch to a new Geo

3. Launch to a new Segment

4. Explore a new partnership

5. Explore GTM on a new ecosystem (SalesForce, SAP, or ServiceNow etc)

Is GTM Planning more than sales planning ? Yes. Though sales planning overshadows other planning such as marketing planning, financial planning, and manpower planning. These are the key things to remember:

1. It is the superset of Sales Planning.

2. It is NOT execution but planning.

3. It is NOT limited to fixing data.

Current World of GTM Planning

Well, this beast has not moved an inch compared to sales intelligence, sales engagement, competitive intelligence, and marketing automation. There are reasons for the slow growth.

Inefficient Ingestion

1. Takes forever to pull data pulled from multiple sources and map it. Market research teams are super busy. As a result, focus is on data collection and fixing the data, putting it together. I discuss the data sources used in ingestion.

2. CRMs do have the number but these numbers are not standardized, templatized. Manually calculate win/loss ratio, SQL/MQL ratio and other GTM numbers manually.

Ineffective Analysis

Forget it. There is no science/organized way to run scenario, compare results. It is not rocket science and hence scientists have not paid much attention to it. Lack of analysis is due to the time it takes to put together the data. Effective analysis techniques will become available quickly when the problem of inefficient ingestion is taken care of.

Directionless

GTM Planning takes a top-to-bottom approach on some days and a bottom-to-top approach on other days. Right now, it is an exercise driven by intuition, opinions. There is no mechanism to put those opinions into a system/tool/methodology to run some tests.

No Insights from third-party Data

Tedious. Right now, it is an overkill to bring insights from third party data sources such as intent, hiring trends, industry growth or investor’s feedback/data.

New World of Large GTM Planning

Oh ! come on. What in the world would we have progressed if we had not done AI based GTM planning? Generally, planning based tools are quite prevalent in cost optimization scenarios. Let’s see what the new world is requesting to do in large GTM planning.

Large and Efficient Ingestion

It takes a month or more to put together data, fix data mapping issues. The data is still not complete after a month. The market research team has to give up and meet the deadline. This is the need of the hour.

1. Seamless way to pull internal data from CRM, Customer Success/Account Management

2. Integration with Sales Intelligence tools such as ZoomInfo, HGInsights, Clearbit or OceanFrogs.

Large and Rigourous What-If Analysis

Data Analysts and Market Researchers are two different jobs. It takes data analysis skills to run scenarios on spreadsheets. There is a tool needed to change variables and see the impact on revenue achievable. More discussion on these variables is provided below.

Collaboration

GTM planning is about collaboration between sales, marketing, finance, and the CEO’s office. A method/tool is required where these stakeholders can run scenarios, decide on the best plan possible.

Ask From the Reader!

Would you care to give us 15-20 minutes and share “How you do GTM Planning?” Many industry leaders from Postman, Persistent, and Hitachi have given us their methods and approaches.

Is Large GTM Planning For You ?

When should one look at making GTM planning more efficient:

1. GTM planning is taking more than 2 months.

2. There are endless iterations between sales, marketing, and the CEO’s office.

3. There are multiple products/Geos/Acquisitions Channels and Deal size > 10K USD.

4. It is tough to decide between Geos/sales channels/marketing channels and budget is a concern.

Benefits of Large GTM Planning

There are benefits that are subjective and objective both.

1. Reduce GTM planning time to less than a month. It would help everyone give it a focused effort.

2. Reduce data ingestion to less than 2 weeks. It will help everyone focus on the next step of running scenarios.

3. Sales and marketing both get a say in the decision making because it is data driven, collaborative.

Large GTM Planning Tool

A tool solving GTM planning automatically has following components:

1. Data Ingestion Module

a. Data ingestion will bring data from various sources, map them together. It is not an easy ask. Company level mappings will be at the website url + country level. Tools have different ways of identifying companies and storing data.

b. Planning will require firmographics, technographics data. There can be vertical specific data.

2. CRM Processor Module

There are three important items that your CRM has.

a. History of your sale last year: existing accounts, churned accounts, lost opportunity.

b. Key relationships involved in those wins, churned accounts, lost opportunities.

c. Conversion factors can be automatically calculated from these CRMs. It is a topic of a separate article, though.

3. Run Large Scenario Module

Let me explain it using examples. Here are the scenarios the CEO’s office and CRO/CMO are interested in solving:

a. What revenue targets should I set that can be achieved in the next quarter/year ?

b. What conversion factors should I aim for next year:

i. MQL to SQL conversion

ii. Lead to Deal Conversion

iii. Lead/Deal to Closure conversion

c. How much should I expect from my sales channels:

i. By replacing competition

ii. By partners/resellers

iii. Using Ecosystems such as salesforce

iv. Direct Sales

Large GTM Planning Results

What do you get after going through the entire process:

1. Account Selection to Sales Channel Mapping

a. By replacing competition

b. By partners/resellers

c. Using Ecosystems such as salesforce

d. Direct Sales

2. Sales Planning

One can change the conversion factors and get to know the following:

a. Territory Mapping

b. Monthly Quota to achieve

c. Accounts to go after

3. Marketing Planning

One can change the conversion factors above and get to know the following:

a. Marketing Channels to go for

b. Spend

4. GTM Reports

GTM analysts love to see planning through the following views:

a. Industry View

b. Geo View

c. Enterprise/SaaS/SMB View

d. Territory View

e. Portfolio View

There are other use cases that need to be solved –

What is completely missing from the radar is an organized way to:

1. Track Monthly GTM Health

2. Check GTM Readiness

3. Connect to a CRM and collect conversion ratios.

Conclusion

I believe that the time has come to give the power of this tool to GTM teams. An integrated, collaborative approach with efficient ingestion of data will allow everyone time to run scenarios, compare results. Large GTM planning is just the beginning of GTM planning.

The second phase of this process is to execute the Large GTM playbook. Once goals, territories, sectors, and sales channels are decided, it is time to train sales organization, marketing on those channels. GTM playbook adoption is the perfect way to do so because it is related to GTM numbers.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to all the industry leaders who have shared their wisdom with us.

1. Sanjeev Sisodia, Ex-CRO of Postman, Persistent Systems

2. Nithin Nadagouda, VP, Cap Gemini

3. Vivek Khandelwal, Co-Founder, iZooto

4. Hamid Qayyum, Head of Marketing, ABM Agency

5. Dileep Reddy, Head of Finance, Knolskape

6. Marcello Davis, Sales, MontyCloud

We also observed more than 150 clients that have worked with OceanFrogs over the last 7 years. Some of the marquee names include Salesforce, MoEngage, LambdaTest, Kovai, Hitachi, and HCL.

In case you do wish to know the latest about this, please schedule a meeting at the link below.

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Author Details

Vinay Mehendi

Vinay Mehendi, PhD focuses on customer engagement, alternative data, technographics, and CRM data management. he was listed as Top 20 B2B Marketer by Ruth Stevens in 2020. He is a Clemson graduate.

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