The importance of a go-to-market plan
If you’re a sales leader in a growth stage SaaS company, you need to understand a fundamental truth: Your ability to plan, to communicate the plan, and to proactively adjust the plan will largely determine the success of your tenure.
Sure, being a great closer, building and developing a team, inspiring the team to do more than they thought possible are all important. But the fundamentals of planning, communicating, and adjusting are more important to your success, and the success of the company, than almost anything else.
Too many sales leaders overlook the importance of these planning- related disciplines to the detriment of themselves, their teams, and ultimately, their companies. It’s time for that to change.
What’s in a GTM plan?
If you’re a sales leader, you may respond to the above by saying “I don’t need to plan. The CEO/CFO/BoDs give me the plan and it’s my job to execute.” Based on my own experience in GTM planning, I can empathize with that response. But the reality is that any plan that’s coming to you is almost certainly a financial plan - not a GTM plan. Financial plans provide necessary and detailed guidance on the different revenue milestones throughout the year - whether it be new sales, retained revenue, or expanded revenue. These are the numbers you’re expected to hit.
The GTM plan is certainly tied to the financial plan but the intention is to show the path towards those financial goals. To put a finer point on the distinction, the GTM plan paints the picture of how to best allocate resources throughout the year to hit or exceed financial targets.
Here at Revcast we get to see and advise on a lot of GTM plans and perhaps surprisingly, many fall short of this goal. Many of the plans we see are missing key components, don’t highlight gaps between top-down targets and bottom-up realities, and generally leave the GTM organization (and sales leader) on an island. If you want to avoid this reality, consider the GTM planning checklist below.
A practical checklist
The beginning of any GTM plan is the top-level targets. Here are the key ones for most companies...
- New Bookings: The new ARR (new logos and expansions) you plan to add throughout the year
- Retained Revenue: The existing ARR you plan to renew throughout the year
- Pipeline Coverage: The amount of pipeline you need to generate to support the New Bookings target
- Cost: The cost constraints - namely headcount & marketing costs - for the GTM team
Top-level targets are great guide posts, but frankly useless unless you have a strong bottom-up plan to hit those targets you don’t have a plan. Here’s what you need to consider to build a strong foundation to your plan:
- Headcount Plan: The hiring and attrition plans for each team in your GTM organization, broken down by month.
- Quota Plan: The quota assignments by team in your GTM organization.
- Attainment Assumptions: The amount of quota attainment you expect each team to hit.
- Ramp Schedules: The amount of time it takes for quota carriers on each team to onboard.
- Personnel Movement: The anticipated plan for leaves, promotions, and team changes throughout the year.
Stitching it all together
The most important thing for a sales leader is to be able to paint a path to the top-level targets, and this means showing how the bottom-up plan does or does not connect to those top-level targets. More than often, the bottom-up doesn’t initially connect to the top-level target. It’s important to clearly communicate the gap and to show different paths to close the gap. These discussions are crucial to gaining alignment between the sales leader, CEO, CFO, and BoDs.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this is what we focus on at Revcast. We empower sales leaders to build the bottom-up plan, connect it to the top-level targets, and clearly communicate the path. In addition, we know how important it is to be able to adjust on the fly, so we automate real time reporting against the plan. This puts sales leaders in the position of proactively adjusting the GTM organization and keeping the company on track to hit and exceed goals. Great for the company - great for the sales leader!
We'd love to show you a demo of using Revcast for your GTM plan-building and its ongoing, continuous oversight and optimization to adapt in real time. Book a time with us here.
