Is your GTM more “Going Through the Motions” than “Go To Market?”

Is your GTM more “Going Through the Motions” than “Go To Market?”

David Brock wrote this excellent post about waste in B2B sales.

Take a minute to read it.

David was writing in response to recent posts on LinkedIn that were advocating for revenue leaders to apply lean manufacturing principles to GTM.

The problem, he noted, was that the authors of these various posts had somewhat conveniently overlooked the single most important organizing principle of lean manufacturing: eliminating waste in the process.

The primary objective of lean thinking in an organization is to continually improve processes to maximize customer value while minimizing waste (waste being defined as any activity that doesn’t add value.)

So, as David points out, if you’re going to advocate for applying lean thinking to GTM you have to start by addressing the huge sources of waste that are illustrated by the inefficiencies in lead generation and, most importantly to my mind, the waste resulting from the microscopically small win rates (20% and less) that are typical in many organizations today.

It’s all well and good to talk about applying lean manufacturing principles to your GTM.

But if you don’t start the conversation by focusing on how to eliminate the major sources of waste in your selling processes, like your rock bottom win rates, and how to mitigate their impact by improving your execution, then your GTM is less “Go To Market” and more “Going Through the Motions.”

Be sure to read Barry Trailer’s comment on David’s post as well. It is also right on point.

If sales leaders want to apply assembly-line thinking to selling, then they should also expect to be measured by assembly-line standards.

For instance, if you’re a sales leader and your team has a 20% average win rate, then that is similar to the manager of a manufacturing operation having a 20% First Pass Yield (FPY) of products off their production line.

In rough terms that means that only one out of every five units that came off the production line worked according to specification and could be shipped to customers.

That is the very definition of waste. Just like all the wasted selling time sellers invest in the 4 out of 5 opportunities they don’t win.

A manufacturing manager wouldn’t have that job for long if that 20% FPY persisted.

Yet, we tolerate sales leaders delivering 20% average win rates in sales as if it is no big deal.

And, unlike in product manufacturing, where nearly all defective products can be reworked (at a cost) to boost FPY, in sales most deals cannot be “reworked” once the order has been given to the competition.

So, unless the product they’re selling is a transactional sale, sales leaders would be better off to stop their fever dreams about selling as a cookie cutter assembly line process.

Because as persistently low B2B win rates demonstrate, that way of selling is incredibly wasteful.

And if leaders don’t have the appetite for eliminating waste in their selling, and actually improving their selling processes to improve win rates, then they’re just Going Through the Motions. And that’s not helping anybody.