Why do B2B SaaS companies need GTM (Go-To-Market) Operations?

Over the last 15 years, it has been interesting to see the evolution of operations supporting the Go-To-Market (GTM) team (marketing, sales, customer success).

As technology advanced and the need for setting up automation to support the buyer journey and the sales process increased, operators became an integral part of the GTM team’s success.

However, the operations teams were siloed and, due to a lack of resources and broad expertise, were very tactical.

The answer to that was to create a “Revenue Operations” team to combine them all together to create alignment and cohesion.

But there is still one problem: Focus.

Often we see the revenue operations teams not aligned with goals of marketing. This is due to the fact that RevOps teams are mainly comprised of sales operations folks who report into the CRO, leaving them in a place where they focus on pipeline and closed-won revenue first.

This makes it very difficult for companies to operationalize their GTM strategy and unable to report on it in a unified way that the whole business can use for planning, budget allocation, and goal setting.

It’s simple: You cannot execute a great GTM strategy without great GTM operations.

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So what is GTM Operations?

First, it is not a “team.” I mean it could be at an organization, but it’s not just a categorization of people doing the work. GTM Operations is a focus area.

At CS2, GTM Operations is purely how GTM teams execute and report on their GTM strategy. And we have designed our own framework of the interconnected components that fast-growing B2B SaaS companies need to operationalize their strategy, create an optimal buyer experience, and enable their teams.

And GTM strategy is not just a marketing strategy. It is a strategy that affects almost the whole company - marketing, sales, customer success, finance, and even product at times.

GTM operations is crucial to the success of a business and should not just be a marketing priority but a company-level priority. 

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CS2’s GTM Operations Framework

Over the last 9 years, we have been focused on all of the components you will see pictured below. But it wasn’t until we worked with over 100 clients and saw what GTM teams really needed did it became clear.

With this clarity, we developed the GTM Operations Framework (pictured below) as the blueprint for what we deliver for clients and center our roadmaps around. 

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GTM Operations focuses on the following:

• GTM Motions: Most B2B SaaS businesses do not rely on just one GTM motion. They have a mix of 6 motions — Demand Gen, Account-Based, Outbound, Partner, Customer Expansion, and Product-Led.

• GTM Execution: How you set up your tech, people, and process to execute each GTM motion, run your marketing/sales activities, and collect buyer data for processing. Most of this is in the domain of Campaign Ops.

• GTM Foundation: The sequential process that converts buyers into revenue. Operationalizing the buyer journey from ICP identification, signal prioritization, to sales handoff. Including order of ops, the sales process, and the integration of the tech stack.

• Unified GTM Data: A custom object data model that unifies GTM/funnel/pipeline/campaign/source/revenue data into one object for easy reporting.

• Signals: Any observable activity associated with a buyer or company that suggests potential buying interest (e.g. buyer filling out demo form, person engagement with content, company job postings, company acquisitions, etc). See more on signals vs. touchpoints vs. intent here.

• GTM Analytics Framework: Enabling the GTM team with an analytics framework that they can use to plan and get actionable insights into improvements across the sales process and GTM motions.

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What are the results of using the framework?

In addition to just supporting GTM teams to execute and report on their GTM strategy effectively, when clients are delivered our GTM Operations framework they see:

• An increase in marketing and sales efficiency
• An easier system for teams to operate in and aligns the revenue teams
• A decrease in friction in their buyer’s journey
• Improved conversion from sales-ready lead to opportunity
• Improved velocity from meeting booked to closed-won revenue
• A unified data model that increased visibility for better decision-making
• Easier and quicker report pulling in real-time
• Improved planning and budget allocation to reduce GTM bloat

Interested in learning more about the GTM Operations framework? Feel free to contact us to have a conversation.