Driving successful go-to-market initiatives is no easy feat—and once launched, understanding how they’re performing can often feel like a guessing game.
In fact, 90% of organizations fail to implement their strategies successfully, which often comes down to a lack of consistent execution. This execution gap is a major barrier to growth, largely driven by disconnected teams working in silos. Without alignment across systems, tools, and data, your teams can’t execute your go-to-market strategies effectively and achieve desired business results.
To eliminate silos and rally your teams behind the high-impact activities that drive business outcomes, you need shared visibility into what works and what doesn’t. With a unified view of go-to-market analytics, you can optimize your strategy in real time and empower your teams to bring your key initiatives to life.
So, how can you ensure your go-to-market initiatives are clearly defined, consistently executed, and continuously optimized to influence your business’s bottom line? Here are tips to help you break down silos, improve operational efficiency, and deliver tangible outcomes against your key business priorities.
Define Your Initiatives to Foster Alignment
Most initiatives fail due to a lack of visibility, alignment, and measurement, as 36% of organizations struggle with go-to-market alignment on their key initiatives. Before you can drive consistent execution, you need to create clarity of and visibility into the goals, key activities, and expectations of your initiatives. That’s where enablement comes in to help: with its unique ability to break down silos and streamline efficiency within the go-to-market organization, enablement can help you align on and define your initiatives.
To start, bring together stakeholders across marketing, sales, enablement, and operations to establish a clear set of goals for your initiative. Then, prepare your bill of materials for that initiative by assessing all of the key activities that will be needed to achieve the goals you’ve set. Once you’ve defined what you want to achieve and how you plan to do so, make it visible and easy for your stakeholders to track progress so you can maintain alignment.
TIP: Define and centralize the plan for your go-to-market initiatives with Highspot Initiatives. Lean on enablement to spearhead this process, as they can successfully break down cross-functional silos and enhance productivity, allowing you to unlock the impact of your strategic initiatives and drive more predictable growth. When enablement underpins go-to-market initiatives, 71% of teams improved time to ramp and 46% of teams improved their win rate.
Execute More Efficiently Through a Seamless Experience
Along with defining your initiative, it’s crucial to ensure that go-to-market teams are prepared to execute the strategy. However, it’s difficult to convince sellers to rally behind a strategy—even when it’s designed to help them reach their goals. This is a common challenge in many organizations, as 71% of organizations struggle to hold reps accountable for taking the right actions. When leveraging one tool for your content management, another for your learning programs, and yet a third disparate tool to coach reps, it becomes difficult to streamline execution across go-to-market teams.
Having separate tools also results in disconnected analytics which feeds silos, causing misalignment and frustration across teams to persist. A unified approach to go-to-market execution is key to eliminating these issues inhibiting growth. With a unified system to connect teams, drive your initiatives, and track progress, organizations can more effectively drive consistent execution of their strategic priorities.
TIP: Bring together your content, systems, and data across go-to-market teams and facilitate consistent execution through a unified platform. When customers use Highspot to administer their content, training, and coaching programs, they report an average 14% increase in deal size and 19% increase in rep quota attainment.
Leverage Data to Optimize the Impact of Your Initiatives
Overcoming the barriers to effective execution depends on robust data that consolidates insights from your go-to-market programs, enabling you to evaluate your efforts and optimize them accordingly. However, many organizations lack a consolidated system with go-to-market insights—61% of companies struggle with siloed analytics held in separate tools. With a single system to consolidate your data across teams, you can gain insights into what works, take action to close performance gaps, and drive more predictable revenue growth.
Even when you believe leading indicators suggest an initiative is performing well, it can be difficult to connect action with impact—it’s why so many teams struggle to execute their strategies. However, recent advancements in analytics are now enabling companies to visualize how their go-to-market initiatives impact business outcomes. With the new Initiative Scorecard, you’ll gain a data-driven dashboard that connects your leading indicators of success—metrics that revolve around your enablement programs and rep activities—to lagging indicators that influence business outcomes.
TIP: To optimize the execution of your go-to-market initiatives, align your efforts and programs with key business results. For instance, organizations focusing on product launch as a key initiative often leverage win rate (used by 57% of Highspot customers), cross-sell/renewal revenue (used by 71% of customers), and adoption rate (used by 71% of customers) as their lagging indicators of success.
Overcome the Execution Gap and Drive Business Impact
Go-to-market strategies have little value without consistent—and effective—execution. And executing successful go-to-market initiatives shouldn’t feel impossible. By driving your initiatives in Highspot, you gain a holistic view of every team’s impact on business outcomes and unlock new visibility into go-to-market productivity.
Let data guide your go-to-market strategy. By doing so, your strategy can take shape, fueled by execution that enables you to realize even the most ambitious outcomes.
To learn how to use the Initiative Scorecard to drive common go-to-market initiatives—like product launch, new messaging, cross-sell, or pipeline generation—download our E-book.
This blog post is part of Highspot’s research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
