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With 2024 looming, most companies are knee-deep in GTM planning. The question I’m hearing from founders is: What can I do to improve efficiency in my GTM and reduce my CAC payback?

The reality is that many companies will need to raise again next year at a time when efficiency matters just as much as growth. Let’s start with defining what efficiency looks like on your team and then we’ll move to the three Ts for implementing.

Improving GTM efficiency

If you do need to raise next year, I recommend building a finance model that sets you up for success with at least 2x growth and 110%+ NRR with a CAC payback of 12 months or less (up to 18 for Enterprise) and a burn to new revenue ratio of 1:1.

Once you have that, you need to stress test it by building your GTM Bottoms Up Model to make sure you can actually execute on your plan. I share exactly how to do that in a previous blog post, along with a template that you can use to make it painless.

3 Ts for GTM success in 2024

With your GTM Bottoms Up Model in place, you can now look for opportunities to improve efficiency with the 2024 mantra that less is more. Here are the three areas I’m seeing companies focus in on:

• Traction in Outbound — Gone are the days of sending out mass email sequences hoping for responses.  Buyers want to have a conversation with you when they are ready, which means that you need to move to an ABM (account-based marketing) strategy with a defined ideal customer profile (ICP) and Buyer Journey (you can find templates for these in our new Resource Center!) and a target account list. 
  
  
  • We are seeing many companies also prioritize their outreach to prospects that show intent by interacting with your content or meeting at events, as well as leveraging phone and text in conjunction with emails.
    
    
  • Another option here is to test one of the new outreach productivity tools like Persona.ai or Octave which find your target prospects and write personalized messaging and content to help you reach out to them, saving hours of work. One of our portfolio companies is testing this strategy and was able to reduce their BDR team from 4 to 1 with the same output. Other teams are using a tool like this instead of hiring an SDR.

• Team — Thank goodness I haven’t seen a plan yet this year that has someone hiring 10 AEs in Q1 with the good old “let’s just throw bodies at the situation” solution. That doesn’t work. However, there is more talent available now and I am seeing companies opt to hire a more experienced AE instead of AEs with 1-2 years of experience.  We saw more of the latter in 2020/2021 because it was hard to find sales talent, but It may be worth it for you to hire one experienced AE instead of two junior AEs to drive productivity and learning.
  
  
  • In addition, earlier stage companies may want to think about hiring a fractional head of sales as the first sales leader to hire the first few salespeople and build out the playbook. You can get an experienced sales leader that has already done it at your stage for less than a full time hire.

• Tools — Similar to the quantity of salespeople we were hiring the past few years, we’ve also seen the quantity of tools in the GTM tech stack increase. This is a great time to take inventory on what you are using, the value or ROI of each tool and the users that need it. With this data, you can:
  
  
  • Eliminate low value tools:  Prioritize your biggest must haves to see if there are any tools that you don’t need anymore because they don’t provide value and/or your team doesn’t use them.
  • Consolidate: Are there opportunities to implement one tool that replaces 2 or more that you have right now? For example, we have early stage portfolio companies that are seeing success using Apollo vs. purchasing separate database and outbound productivity tools.
  • Test: Do you have a pain point that could be solved by a tool you haven’t tested? If so, I’d recommend testing in a controlled environment so you don’t have to disrupt your team.
  • Keep an eye on AI: These new crop of tools are streamlining and automating workflows to boost productivity. I think we’ll see a few of these breakout in 2024.

What else are you doing to improve your GTM efficiency in 2024? Let us know in the comments!

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