A Sales Leader's Guide to a New GTM Motion: The Case for Change

By Trevor Jett (Childers) VP and Global Head of Sales, Vivun

This is the first article in a three-part series exploring how revenue leaders can improve cross-functional alignment for a more efficient GTM motion, more accurate product-market fit, and more seamless customer experience.

The focus of Sales Leaders today and the technology that supports them is usually directed toward two areas: 1) Opening opportunities and 2) The navigation of approval/influence needed to execute contracts.  Sales methodologies such as MEDIC/MEDDPICC do a fine job shining a light on recognizing value, understanding influence and processing paperwork.  Likewise, strategies such as Account Based Marketing (ABM) keep sales and marketing motions focused on finding and opening opportunities within a company's Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).  However, more often than not these processes are unidirectional without adequate feedback loops into critical parts of the business such as forecasting, product roadmap and sales execution. Importantly, they also miss one of the most important parts of the sales cycle: The Technical Win. 

In this series of articles, we will discuss moving from the status quo into a modern GTM motion that connects Sales, PreSales, Product and Post Sales/Customer Success into automated, repeatable and data-driven collaboration. 

Battling Incomplete Information

The interface between Sales and Product/Engineering (Product-Field Alignment) - getting feedback from the GTM functions into the hands of product managers and engineering to inform the product roadmap - is a critical function in a modern organization. Deciding on the features, functions and capabilities that have the highest impact on revenue can make or break the growth of a company.  

Most often, this feedback loop is manual, anecdotal, not data-driven and not repeatable.  Monthly meetings between sales teams and product managers often devolve into an exchange of gripes, unsupported by data. Sentiment software may gather a wish-list from account executives or even customers, but do those wishes represent the features or product gaps that win or lose, or do they just represent challenges that will eventually be overcome? Most importantly, the nuances of winning or losing during the technical sale are often beyond the understanding of the account executive, buried in the RFP requirements or feedback during proof-of-concept presentations. 

Worse yet, many CROs will only seek this information from either the sales engineering team or the customer success team; not both. To be clear, these are two sides of the same coin.  Sales Engineering understands the feature gaps that prevent sales while Customer Success understands the feature gaps that prevent renewals. While there may be some overlap, the issues are largely distinct and equally critical to understanding.  

The modern sales leader is often tasked with attributing pipeline dollars to features, to prioritize the roadmap or commit a revenue target to some new development or module. It is this conversation where the problems often manifest. The product team thinks the GTM team doesn’t understand how to position the product or is just blowing things out of proportion, and the GTM team feels they are not being listened to.  

Today, any revenue values associated with product gaps, be they for deals lost, deals delayed or for which the outcome has not yet been determined are either point-in-time exercises or clumsy reporting based on incomplete CRM drop-down fields rife with errors and assumptions. With a dearth of helpful data about the technical sales cycle where the product is evaluated technically and the reliance on data generated by non-technical sellers - Sales Leaders have a difficult time having a data-driven conversation about product gaps, features and roadmap prioritization. 

Can you answer the following questions:

• Can you have a data-driven conversation about the product roadmap, including specific features, at any point in time?
• Do you know why you are winning deals? Why are you losing deals?
• Can you understand the impact of: lost deals, delayed deals, deals where we're not invited?

Understanding Forecast Blind Spots

Unfortunately, one of the most important functions of the sales leader also suffers the same inadequacies: The Forecast.  If we examine the quintessential weekly forecast call, we reveal another blind spot of the modern sales leader: the source of information.  While the full team may be in attendance on these calls, it's most common that information on an opportunity is delivered by the Account Executive and often by the Account Executive alone.  Any technical members of the team present may be inclined to demur when presented with the opportunity to highlight challenges in the sales cycle. 

These mores fall in line with the management practices we commonly see in sales teams.  Account Executives are not in the business of delivering bad news and are systematically discouraged from doing so.  Such revelations will typically invite more inspection, more pressure and more involvement from management - none of which the Account Executive wants.  Most sales methodologies are actually based on inspection techniques to reveal these issues in the sale cycle, even if against the will of the Account Executive.  Retrospectives on lost opportunities often show that the deal was actually lost weeks prior during the technical evaluation, but those challenges went unreported.  They are unreported during the forecast process and often don't make their way into the product roadmap feedback loop either.  So, why do we rely so exclusively on the account of one person on the team, or force others to give testimony to issues publicly? 

Seasoned Sales Leaders know that if they want to know what's really going on with an opportunity and progress on the technical win, they go directly to the sales engineers / solutions architects.  A modern GTM motion needs to gather data from multiple sources and ensure it gets to the correct feedback loops.  Feedback on opportunities and product-market fit from presales, professional services and customer success should all be part of the process, in a mechanized and repeatable way. 

The next article in this series will explore how to create these cross-functional feedback loops that capture a complete 360 degree view of the voice of the customer and market.