Understand and simplify your GTM process to accelerate growth
September 2024, Post 7/10, 4 min read
Process noun
1. A series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.
Every B2B sale you have ever made has followed a process, whether tracked and measured, or not. Early on, recording and analysing each sale may seem less important than closing the deal itself, but now you are in a position where diligence is required, measurements are necessary, efficiency is everything, and improvements are the difference.
For leaders in growing companies, the sales process can often feel like a black box. Teams are busy and deals are happening, but what is driving the success – or failure – is murky at best. In this edition of our ten-part series, we’ll dive into the importance of optimising your processes, leveraging automation, and using data to drive continuous improvements.
Efficient revenue processes are the backbone of any successful GTM strategy. They keep your teams aligned, ensure resources are utilised effectively, and create smooth and consistent customer interactions.
To streamline your revenue process, you must start with the fundamentals of any change/improvement journey.
Define. Every. Step: map out each step of your sales process, from lead generation to closing the deal. Clearly define the actions, responsibilities, and handoffs at each stage.
Align your process to your system: map your documented process into your CRM or collaboration tool
Standardise best practices: identify best practices that have proven successful and standardise them.
Measure: continuously and consistently measure the effectiveness of your sales processes using data.
Once this is implemented, we recommend you track and measure performance for a reasonable length of time (3-6 months minimum), so you can determine trends, and be confident the data is meaningful.
When you are in this position, regardless of how you are performing, now is the time to:
Improve efficiency: streamlined processes reduce errors and eliminate bottlenecks, allowing your team to focus on high-value activities.
Be consistent: standardised processes ensure a consistent approach to customer interactions, leading to a better customer experience.
Scale: well-defined processes are easier to scale as your business grows, ensuring you can handle increased volume without compromising quality.
Leveraging Automation
Automation is a game-changer when it comes to revenue processes. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, you can free up your team to focus on the customer. Start by identifying automation opportunities and using the right tools (existing CRM systems or integrated platforms) build simple automated workflows that benefits your sales team.
A great example can be a lead follow-up automation:
Trigger: New lead is created
Workflow: Task is created for the assigned sales lead to contact new lead
Email alert: An email is sent to sales lead to make them aware
Templated email send: An templated email is automatically sent once the sales lead moves the lead from “New” to “Contacted”
Reminder set: if the client doesn’t respond to the email in 3 days from being sent, the sales lead has a reminder to contact.
Applying a simple workflow as above will save significant time, free the sales lead to focus on more value-adding opportunities and reduce missed opportunities. It also provides great data that can be tracked and used to improve.
Data-Driven Continuous Improvement
Data is at the heart of continuous improvement. By leveraging data analytics, you can gain insights into the effectiveness of your processes and identify areas for enhancement.
By tracking key metrics, analysing and interpreting the data, you can begin to identify patterns and trends that could be indicating an improvement area. Based on your analysis you can implement changes and use A-B testing to determine the best solution. A great methodology we use is Sales-as-a-Science (bought to life in Jacco van der Kooij and Fernando Pizarro’s book, The SaaS Sales Method).
Aligning processes to Sales-as-a-Science
Sales-as-a-Science is a methodology that applies scientific principles to sales processes, ensuring they are data-driven, measurable, and repeatable.
Your CRM is a gold mine of data points, from lead sources to win rates, harnessing your RevOps team to optimise your processes, manage your reporting and drive your improvements can be game changing.
By building a structured, predictable sales engine based on sales-as-a-science, it transforms guesswork into precision, turns every interaction into an improvement opportunity and maximises the ability to scale.
Conclusion
Streamlining your revenue processes is essential for driving efficiency, scalability, and growth. By leveraging automation, using data for continuous improvement, and aligning your processes to the Sales-as-a-Science methodology, you can transform your GTM strategy into a powerful engine for success.
Helpful resources:
· The SaaS Sales Method by Jacco van der Kooij and Fernando Pizarro
Stay tuned for the next instalment of our series, where we’ll explore more tactics and detailed steps to enhance your GTM Strategy! And if you missed our previous articles, be sure to catch up on our insights on keeping and growing your existing customers, aligning your teams, and more.