This past week, I had the opportunity to attend a remarkable event in Austin – Pavilion’s GTM2024 – surrounded by some of the sharpest minds in revenue leadership, including CEOs, CMOs, and founders. A recurring theme echoed throughout the sessions: the importance of efficient go-to-market strategies.
In a world where growth at all costs is no longer sustainable, the conversation has shifted towards maximizing outcomes with the resources available. Yet, as promising as many of the ideas were, I left with one lingering thought: GTM execution is still stuck in an outdated model.
The Rallying Cry for Efficiency
The discussions at the Pavilion GTM event highlighted a new focus on operational rigor. Thought leaders like Winning by Design shared insights on how their “revenue as a factory” concept can bring discipline to revenue operations. Other speakers emphasized the importance of smarter marketing attribution to track which investments yield the highest returns. All of those approaches are valuable. But something fundamental is still missing.
The shift toward efficient growth requires more than just adopting new frameworks or metrics. It demands a deeper transformation in how we manage and execute go-to-market strategies. What we really need is agility, and right now, that’s exactly what most go-to-market teams lack.
Stuck in a Legacy Cadence
To understand the problem, look no further than the traditional cadences that govern go-to-market operations today. Most organizations operate along rigid schedules:
- Weekly Forecast Meetings: Mostly focused on immediate deals in the pipeline and hitting quarterly targets.
- Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs): A more exhaustive check-in, but only once every three months and focused on retrospective adjustments and the next operating period.
- Annual Planning: A months-long process to map out the following year and beyond.
While structured, those operating cadences are the antithesis of agility. In particular, none of those cadences and their structures allow for ongoing inspection and challenging of the core assumptions in a sales plan. This is a huge miss, because the core assumptions are often the leading indicators that drive revenue outcomes. If companies aren’t steadily staying on top of these assumptions, they are almost certainly leaving money on the table – either in the form of earlier risk mitigation or opportunity cost.
Agility: Replicating Success from Development Teams
If go-to-market teams want to embrace efficient growth, a good lesson is to look at what happened in product development organizations many years ago. I began my career in a development organization during the shift from waterfall to agile methodologies. At first, the idea of frequent, iterative adjustments seemed absurd. The notion that teams could meet daily or weekly to reassess priorities felt impossible. Yet today, nearly every development team operates this way — and both the efficiency and productivity gains are indisputable.
The same transformation is now knocking on the door of revenue organizations.
Winning go-to-market teams…
- Won’t rely on rigid quarterly plans or wait for annual reviews to make changes.
- Won’t wait to react after Board Meetings, but instead come into meetings better prepared and proactively ready to share recommendations backed by insights.
- Will dynamically align resources on the fly to drive better outcomes, making adjustments monthly or even weekly.
- Will know exactly when to pull back on hiring, when to push forward, and how to invest their time and budget to maximize outcomes.
Why This Change is Inevitable
Despite some revenue leaders being very skeptical of my point of view on this, the writing is on the wall. Agile go-to-market strategies are inevitable. Companies that cling to the rigid cadence that currently guides the slow-moving ship that is many GTM organizations will struggle to keep up with market demands. The winners, on the other hand, will thrive by adapting quickly and seizing opportunities as they arise.
Agile go-to-market organizations will course-correct in real time using live data, rather than wait for low-cadence cycles to make decisions or stay fixed on the rigid formulas of forecasting or hiring plans. And while this shift may seem radical today, the same skepticism greeted agile development practices years ago. Now, agile is the norm for nearly every tech team. The same will happen to revenue organizations.
