The GTM Process Index

Read time: 12 minutes

Written by:

Eddie Reynolds
Founder & CEO

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This Index expands on the processes required to record accurate metrics, as outlined in our GTM Metrics and Insights Framework. Visit the Framework to get our in-depth guide on turning data into impactful insights your GTM Team can execute on.

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Marketing/Inbound Processes

These processes will affect the accuracy and consistency of your Pipeline Generation Metrics, most Pipeline Management Metrics, CAC, LTV:CAC, GTM Efficiency Ratio, GTM Efficiency Margin, Bookings, Growth Rate, and Magic Number.

ICP & Buyer Persona Definitions

Although this isn’t technically a process, having your criteria for what makes your ICP and BP “ideal” clearly defined is crucial for every metric that you’ll be analyzing. Miss this one (or get it wrong), and you’ll see a domino effect of inaccurate metrics and inconsistent forecasting that flows through your entire revenue factory.

It starts with marketing: if your marketers are being told to generate as many leads as possible, without clear guidance on who counts as a lead, your sales team is going to be inundated with unworkable pipeline bloat while marketing celebrates hitting target.

In the end, you’ve wasted time and budget on leads that at best will never convert, and at worst will go on to plague your sales and/or CS reps before dropping off or churning.

Qualification Definitions

Here’s how we define MQL, SAL, SQL, SQO, etc. You’ll need to be more specific as to what qualifies a lead into each of these categories for your business.

MQL: A lead that is worthy of sending to sales. Conversion to revenue from MQL, or at least SQL, should be as high as outbound. If it’s not, we’re wasting money paying reps to chase these leads.

SAL: A lead that the sales team has initially reviewed and agreed is worth a closer look.

SQL: A lead that the sales team has thoroughly vetted and determined is ready for a direct sales conversation.

SQO: A lead that has shown clear buying signals and has moved into the qualified sales pipeline.

You might choose to use only one or more of these depending on your inbound/sales process, but it’s important to have clear qualification criteria for whichever ones you choose.

In the case of marketing and MQLs, we look at it as, “when does it make sense to have a sales rep follow up on this lead?” If a lead doesn’t match the criteria we’ve defined, it gets sent back to marketing to nurture.

Lead Scoring & Routing

Lead scoring is taking our qualification definitions above and attaching a point system to each criteria, to help sales and marketing focus on the most promising leads.

Here’s how a lead scoring and routing process helps businesses collect accurate metrics:

Tracks measurable criteria for lead quality over time
Aligns sales and marketing teams with common benchmarks
Provides data for conversion rates, ROI, and lead quality tracking
Identifies bottlenecks in the funnel, optimizing resource allocation
Identifies areas for improvement in marketing and sales strategies
Offers insight into the sales funnel, showing which leads are most likely to convert

Lead Management

When a lead is qualified, scored, and routed to sales, who does it get routed to? Does it go “round robin”, each rep getting the next lead in succession, does it depend on each reps’ territory, or something else? What is then the process for handling the lead once it’s been routed?

Lead Response Time: Having a process for handling hand-raiser leads vs all other leads is crucial for optimizing lead response time. Studies have shown that a lead response time of under 5 minutes for hand raisers can mean the difference between winning the deal and not even being in the evaluation. For leads who only downloaded a whitepaper, this matters much less.

Follow-Up Cadences: How many times do we follow up on a lead? Are we going to call them 3 times? 5 times? Do we email them or send them a LinkedIn DM? What is our step-by-step process/cadence for following up – and when do we give up?

Lead Management Tracking: How do we track these activities? A lot of people book a meeting and then no-show – so do we want to track meetings actually held instead of meetings set? How are we tracking pipeline generation, qualification, and revenue from these leads? This can help create a feedback loop for marketing to get a better understanding of the leads that actually convert.

Funnel Segmentation

A “blended funnel” happens when multiple lead types and marketing metrics are combined into one overall picture. While it shows the full customer journey, mixing data from different channels, lead types, regions, and teams can hide the specific performance differences that tell you what’s really working (or not).

For example, when we look at all MQLs together, we don’t see the dramatic differences between Demo Requests and Webinar Leads in conversion rates, Average Sales Price, etc. and the total revenue they produced.

Here’s a visual:

Most companies segment their funnel to some degree, but the more you can break your funnel down the more hidden insights you’ll be able to uncover. Which means better goal-setting, forecasting, and resource allocation.

Sales & Pipeline Management Processes

These processes affect your Pipeline Generation metrics, Pipeline Management Metrics, and most of your Financial and GTM Metrics.

ICP & Buyer Persona Definitions

Having the wrong ICP and Buyer Personas in your pipeline will skew metrics from ASP, to sales cycle length, to close rates. When reps are desperate to hit quota, they’ll try to win bad-fit customers, which means making concessions such as custom packages and discounts. Even if the deal is won, this will end up costing you down the line.

Sales Process & Sales Methodology

Sales Methodologies are things like MEDDICC/MEDDPICC; a structured, repeatable approach that outlines the best practices a sales team should follow to move prospects through the sales funnel and close deals. Sales Methodologies shouldn’t be mistaken for the Sales Process.

The Sales Process translates your methodology into the step-by-step journey your reps take through every sales stage.

Both of these things need to be well defined so that they can be baked into your CRM – effectively creating guardrails for your reps while moving prospects in and out of each stage (Ie, qualification criteria within the pipeline).

This process determines how we measure pipeline generation, close rates, sales cycle, ASP, sales stage age, etc.

Targets & Quotas

These aren’t technically processes, however having them well-defined and thought out is just as critical for accurate metric measurement. The targets and quotas you set are going to have an effect on what your reps spend their time and focus on.

For example, if you give your reps a meeting quota without any kind of qualification, your reps are going to do what they have to do to hit that quota. Then, you might be scratching your head at why your meeting-to-opportunity conversion rate is so low.

Capacity & Territory Planning

This topic has a lot of complexity to it, but the main thing to ask yourself is “How many accounts can each rep cover effectively?”. This should take into account all of the activities a rep needs to complete to work each account, how long that takes, and then what are the best accounts we can give each rep to fill their capacity.

When it comes to Territory Planning, we want our metrics to be able to tell us how well we’re covering any given territory. Even though our reps might be busy and crushing it, are there any Tier 1 accounts in a territory falling through the cracks and not being covered?

If the best rep you have doesn’t have the time to call on every Tier 1 account in their territory, they’re not the best rep for those accounts, and your territories should be re-evaluated.

Outbound Prospecting Process

We’ve written an entire Framework and guide on this process, but here are the essentials for accurate metrics:

What is our prospecting cadence and strategy? Over what channels and how many times do we contact them before we give up?
Creating reports that tell us: How well are we covering each contact/account? How many contacts have been converted into meetings?

Keep in mind this is a huge topic and there are many ways to optimize your Outbound process, but these are the bare essentials for collecting consistent data.

Pipeline Review Process

What is the actual process for Sales Managers? How can they leverage the data in the system to look at the pipeline and determine whether or not reps are following the sales process? How do they then use this information to coach their reps in 1:1 meetings?

If our goal is to not only collect accurate metrics, but to optimize those metrics, then we need a process for management to step in and point out what’s going well and what needs to be improved.

Sales Coaching Cadences

Piggybacking off of the Pipeline Review Process, we need to define how often and in what way we should expect our sales managers to conduct this pipeline analysis and use other metrics for coaching

Customer Success Processes

These processes and definitions are crucial for the accuracy of some obvious metrics, such as Gross Retention, NRR, churn rate, and NPS scores. However, they also affect your GTM Efficiency Ratio, GTM Efficiency Margin, and overall Growth Rate. As a recurring revenue business, a lot rides on the customers you’re able to keep around. Business visibility after the sale is just as important as everything before it.

ICP & Buyer Persona Definitions

If the wrong ICP/Buyer Persona has made it this far in your customer lifecycle, you can expect two things:

They will end up churning
But not before they burn through more resources than the value of winning them

When you add up the costs of marketing, sales rep time, special accommodations, custom packages, discounts, and CS ticket requests, etc., by the time non-ideal customers churn, you’re likely at a net loss. This will also skew your metrics for Gross Retention, NRR, churn rate, NPS scores, account health, GTM Efficiency Ratio & Margin, and Growth Rate, not to mention the unmeasurable impact on your brand via negative Word of Mouth.

Sales Handoff & Onboarding Process

There needs to be a clear and easy process for the handoff of important information from sales to CS, so that the customer experiences a smooth transition. Your new customers shouldn’t have to explain what they do and why they bought your product to their CSM during their kickoff call.

Then, you need a defined onboarding and/or implementation process. It can be as simple as sending an email to login to their new account and watch some training videos, or as massive as a months-long hands-on implementation like we see with Salesforce. It will depend on your product.

Customer Success Process

Once you’re done with onboarding and/or implementation, your team should have a process for checking on these new accounts and driving adoption of your product. What do your customers need to accomplish for their experience to be successful? What do your CS reps need to do to get them there? How will you track this progress?

Account Health Monitoring

This will be your process for tracking product usage and overall account health. If they’re not using the product or the account is at risk, what is the protocol to address this? If the account is healthy and there is high usage, can we get them into an expansion/upsell pipeline before their renewal?

Expansion & Upsell Process

What is our process to identify an account as a potential expansion/upsell opportunity and how do we get a meeting with them to discuss it? Who owns expansions? Will the CSM, AM, and/or AE be involved in that process? What is the pipeline management process for this type of deal?

Renewals Process

Assuming our accounts are healthy, what is our process to ensure renewal goes off without a hitch? When do we email them about an upcoming renewal? What else do we need to do to maximize renewals?

Many companies mess this part up by sending out an automated renewal reminder 30 days from the renewal date, only for the customer to cancel because they never got value from the product. At this point, it’s already too late. That at-risk account should have been caught earlier and addressed according to our Customer Success Process.

The whole point of a Renewals Process is getting ahead of it.

NRR Targets & Optimization

Just like with our sales/pipeline targets and quotas, this isn’t so much of a process as it is a compass for where we’d like our team to focus, which will affect the results we see is our CS metrics.

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