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One of my favorite GTM problems, the top-down annual plan from finance! 👀
🌶️ Take: Finance and product teams should be just as accountable as GTM teams for hitting the plan. Revenue targets are not just a GTM responsibility; they require cross-functional collaboration and accountability.
It is a team sport and everyone should be accountable!
Finance teams often fall into the trap of creating top-down annual plans without correlating these plans to the actual inputs and outputs across marketing, sales, customer success, and product development.
Pretty much every CEO/CFO that I have worked with create ambitious revenue targets based on market potential, board pressure and/or “expected” growth rates.
However, these plans often fall short because they are just numbers on a spreadsheet and do not account for the granular inputs and investments needed at each stage of the buyer and customer journey.
One of the first things my team or I always did was model out the specific inputs and outputs across marketing, sales, and customer success to understand where we are today what was possible.
Once you have this modeled and understand the intricacies behind it you have to align product development to meet customer needs for your plan.
They are part of the GTM team and the planning process.
🤘tip: Review inputs and outputs on a weekly basis with the entire go-to-market team. Having been doing this for years in the e for of a WBR (weekly business review)
✨ tip: Use ChatGPT and its advanced data analysis capabilities to help you build the plan, optimize it, get key insights and recommendations. This will save you hours.
Every company should have 4 plans:
1️⃣ Financial Plan
2️⃣ People Plan
3️⃣ Product Plan
4️⃣ GTM Plan
They should all be interconnected to each out and synced.