Is your product team using waterfall or agile?
“Well that’s a dumb question, Toni. Of course we use agile.”
So why is your GTM team stuck doing waterfall?
It is by now proven that agile is by far the superior methodology to deal with uncertainty in the future.
So how do you execute your GTM “agile”?
Well, first, make sure you sign up for our first-ever GTM Live next week, where I’ll be covering the modern GTM framework.
But I actually think there’s some military theory that might be the answer.
I’ve recently stumbled upon the OODA loop.
If you haven’t heard about it, it's a decision loop created by a US Air Force Colonel, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.
It's used in situations where quick reactions are essential to making decisions.
The idea is that when faced with a problem, you need to observe the issue, orient and find context to understand the problem, make sensible suggestions to decide what to do about it, and finally act on the decision. And then repeat.
In our RevOps world, I've changed OODA to stand for Signal, Root Cause, Corrective Action and Sync.
Signal: proactively get alerted when something is off
Root Cause: figure out immediately why it is off
Corrective Action: decide on what to do about it
Sync: align the change with the overall plan
If you don’t get the “syncing” part right, your GTM will descend into chaos within weeks.
One loop could be:
Signal: Opps are low (signal)
Root Cause: 20% fewer calls on SDR team
Corrective action: Spiff & performance management, but also 1 additional SDR hire
Sync: Adapt plan to account for the additional hire.
Another could be:
Signal: Churn in mid-market segment 10% higher than planned
Root Cause: Low CSM coverage due to late hire
Corrective action: Well, speed up the CSM hire, but also take unused budget and deploy to sales or marketing to increase NewBiz
Sync: Account for it back to the plan
And the list goes on.
Companies that can execute these loops immediately and quickly, while not descending into absolute GTM chaos, will hit higher revenue targets.
And I see modern companies adjusting their GTM framework to cater for this.