In a world of fast-moving and unpredictable markets, sales plans are not enough. What businesses need is a resilient go-to-market (GTM) approach for ongoing and sustainable growth. Predictable revenue requires the right combination of flexibility and control. Companies need three foundational building blocks to evolve their GTM engine: adaptable incentive models, process-oriented and data-driven market alignment, and dynamic cross-functional collaboration.
Flexible Incentive Models: Static sales compensation plan reward structures cannot quickly adapt to shifting supply and demand. Incentive programmes that incorporate flexibility can mirror market dynamics, keeping organisations better aligned for tides of change. For instance, a telecommunications company experiencing an unexpected spike in demand for digital services could incorporate short-term windfalls into its sales incentives to ensure that the organisation is rewarding route-to-market for new products. This type of dynamic incentive structure helps to keep a sales team motivated to maintain both tactical and strategic movements in revenue streams.
Datadriven Market Alignment: For organisations that use historical quota and sales targets from several years ago to pay sales teams, the priorities, demands and requirements shift faster than you can set the targets and boundaries. Predictable revenue is the ability to align your sales effort to real-time market insights. With predictive analytics, a medical device organisation can respond to regional demand patterns and healthcare sector trends to adjust quotas effectively. A device that was top six to eight months ago, but has been replaced by another as a medical provider’s preferred model, can be foreseen. Quotas can be set with integrity to meet expectations of a territory based on current and future trends, and revenue targets modified to ensure the organisation’s expectations are realistic and achievable, thereby creating consistency in the cadence of performance. Variance in revenue outcomes decreases because data and science drive decisions rather than ‘gut feel.
Collaboration Across Functions: A robust GTM strategy depends critically on sales, marketing and finance teams working together in a coordinated fashion. For example, a retail company can time its sales promotions with marketing activities and finance forecasts to better ensure that sales drive incremental, aligned revenue growth. Incentives can be aligned with specific marketing programmes (eg, bonus payouts that driven product sales used in promotions).
With a flexible and dynamic approach using incentives, data, and alignment, you can unify GTM activities into an agile, mass response model that drives repeatable revenue streams.
