Understanding The Why: The Rise of Go-To-Market Process Intelligence
UNDERSTANDING THE WHY: THE RISE OF GO-TO-MARKET PROCESS INTELLIGENCE
One could argue that understanding why a GTM organization is succeeding or not is perhaps even more important than whether it is. For instance, if a department is performing well but its leaders misdiagnose the reasons for its strong results, there is a high likelihood that management doubles down on a non-optimal marketing message or sales strategy and as a result the department’s performance deteriorates over time. As such, it is essential that teams articulate the why.
In order to address this problem, there is an entire matrix of questions GTM leaders must consider:
- What is the messaging which resonates the greatest with prospects and thus most positively contributes to pipeline development? Is the company’s marketing actually consistent with this message?
- Why do some sellers consistently perform well while others do not? Are sellers who focus on quantity or quality of outreach making greater contributions to the pipeline? What are the tactics which high-performing SDRs utilize in prospect interactions, and can they be universalized to all reps?
- When competing for an account, why did the prospect’s procurement decisionmaker decide to select your solution or that of an alternative vendor? Was the decision made based on functionality, price, ease-of-use, etc.? Was the decision made entirely along one of these dimensions or were multiple factors weighed?
Vendors attempting to resolve these questions fall under an umbrella we call Go-to-Market Process Intelligence. In essence, process intelligence vendors provide organizations greater visibility into the answers to these structural questions, and in doing so, make it more likely that the organization is able to build a durable rinse-and-repeat selling motion.
Despite being in the early innings of the category, multiple players are gaining strong traction and verifying market demand. For instance, companies like Gong and Jiminny are providing sales teams with call recording and analytics functionality that enables them to better understand the best practices SDRs utilize when conversing with prospects.
Utilizing a different approach, Clozd – which brands itself as a “Win-Loss Analysis” service – is combining customized buyer surveys and interviews with its proprietary software to help customers pinpoint the reasons why they are winning or losing in competitive bake-off processes.
In our opinion, the value proposition which process intelligence offers is so compelling because it has the potential to function at the micro level of improving individual sellers’ effectiveness but also at the macro level of helping companies refine their broader strategies across multiple organizational departments. Here is an illustrative example.
Through either analyzing call transcripts collected by a company like Gong or inspecting the analysis provided by Clozd, company X discovers that the primary reason it is losing against its competitors is because the market is placing a strong preference on a set of functionalities which company X had previously believed were inconsequential. In turn, company X is now in the position to not only pivot its marketing message and alter the instructions it gives to SDRs but also adjust the priorities of its engineering team and invest in developing the proper set of features.
In this way, process intelligence distinctly separates itself from the other subsectors of GTM technology whose benefits are only experienced by sales and marketing teams. As a result, we fully expect the category to continue to grow as the market further internalizes the profound ROI which process intelligence can provide.