CREATELENSES – Page 10

3 Feb, 2025 | Admin | No Comments

7 Top CRO Tips on Annual Planning

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

7 CRO tips for smarter annual planning

1. Set core goals and bet on “S-Curves”

Owner’s 2025 plan revolves around two key elements:

Core Initiatives: A set of seven essential strategies that, if executed well, will drive the planned revenue growth (for Owner in 2025, 2x revenue growth).
S-Curve Bets: Three experiments designed to unlock future growth beyond the current year. They also future-proof the existing year.

“S-Curve bets help us anticipate market saturation or operational bottlenecks before they happen. If demand gen slows, conversion rates drop, or outbound outreach hits a wall, these bets ensure we have new growth drivers ready.”

2. Plan for attrition – talent planning is just as critical as revenue planning.

A major mistake companies make is assuming 100% of their team will hit 100% of their quota, which rarely happens.

Key capacity planning elements:

Losing a mid-market rep can cost a company 35-40% of their quota capacity for the year. Even with a talent bench ready, ramp-up time significantly impacts revenue attainment.
Quota buffers should range from 5% to 35%, depending on the company’s growth stage and risk tolerance.
Retaining top performers is essential. As the job market heats up, assuming all top talent will stay is risky.

“If you lose a top performer, their quota still needs to be met. Without a strong talent bench and retention strategy, you’re scrambling to reallocate pipeline and onboard a replacement—losing valuable momentum.”

3. Design a plan with the future in mind, where you want to be

Help Scout’s annual revenue plan is a collection of activities that drive toward Iconiq’s Enterprise 5. By using these benchmarks, we ensure that the capital we’re allocating toward growth initiatives is efficient and keeps a longer-term view in mind:

ARR Growth: How quickly are we growing and which growth levers do we need to add?
Net Dollar Retention: How well are we retaining revenue?
Rule of 40: How are we managing spend relative to our growth?
Net Magic Number: How efficient is the Sales and Marketing spend?
ARR Per FTE: How efficiently is the team scaling to support the revenue?

This plan is made possible by clear inputs (key activities) and outcomes (results) that drive the company towards those key metrics.

“A revenue plan without clear inputs and outcomes is not a plan.”

4. Set unreasonably ambitious goals (but know your team)

The best companies set aggressive goals – not because they always hit them, but because ambitious targets drive outsized outcomes.

That said, goal-setting is situational:

Winning teams thrive on stretch goals. If a team has strong momentum, pushing for aggressive targets fuels performance.
Struggling teams need confidence-building goals. If a team had a tough year, setting more attainable (but still difficult) targets can rebuild belief and execution discipline.

“Building a growth company is an unreasonably hard thing to do. The goals need to mirror that.”

5. Stay the course, communicate and make progress visible

Most companies announce their key initiatives early in the year and only revisit them quarterly. This isn’t enough.

Best practices for visibility:

Frequent updates in all-hands & team meetings. Tie back discussions to initiatives—what’s coming up, what conflicts with them, and what needs realignment?
Celebrate early milestones. Momentum matters. Showing progress keeps teams engaged and aligned.
Make deliberate course corrections. If an initiative needs to be dropped, communicate why, what was learned, and where the focus is shifting.

“Stick to it. Too many companies change course too often – adjust deliberately, based on data and feedback.”

6. Align internal and external partners

Successful annual planning goes beyond the revenue team and requires alignment across all key stakeholders.

At GitHub, primary GTM plays serve as the foundation for not just Revenue, but also Product, Marketing, Finance, and other teams – all internal and cross-functional partners. These plays ensure that all functions are driving toward the same objectives.

External partners are just as critical. A well-aligned channel strategy ensures partners understand key objectives and GTM motions, making them more effective in the market.

GitHub runs a virtual Partner Kickoff, leveraging content from their Revenue Kickoff, so partners show up to customers fully aligned and prepared to add value.

“When internal teams and external partners are aligned, the entire GTM motion becomes more effective”

7. An annual plan is a living document

An annual plan is a hypothesis, not a rigid contract. The best CROs adapt based on market feedback, internal insights, and evolving priorities.

“No one expects their annual plan to be 100% right. The best planning processes treat the plan as a testable hypothesis—adjusting as new data emerges.”

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GTM 131: Being CMO Under Mark Benioff of Salesforce and the Innovator’s Dilemma

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If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

Spryng by Wynter: March 24-26, 2025 (Austin, TX)
Pavilion CMO Summit: April 17, 2025 (Atlanta, GA)
Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
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Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Dallas, TX)
GTMfund 2025 events TBA (global)

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This newsletter was entirely written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi and Scott Barker (not AI!).

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Newsletter

24 Jan, 2025 | Admin | No Comments

Insight from a $1.3B acquisition and 7 startups

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

Insight from a $1.3B acquisition and 7 startups

The most successful companies understand that product and go-to-market strategy must be deeply interconnected.

Too often, businesses treat these as separate domains—one focused on development, the other on selling. But sustainable growth requires a cohesive approach, where every decision about the product is made with its market fit, buyer journey, and expansion potential in mind.

Scott Gifis has led the growth of seven startups, including serving as President at AdRoll and as President and COO of Frame.io, where he helped drive the company’s $1.3B acquisition by Adobe.

Drawing from his extensive experience, Scott breaks down four key strategies to successfully align product and go-to-market execution for scalable growth.

The 4 key considerations for aligning product and GTM strategy to drive growth

1. Your product is the foundation of your GTM strategy

The biggest mistake companies make is thinking they can simply add a go-to-market (GTM) strategy to a product that wasn’t designed with it in mind. Instead, leaders need to plan from the start how customers will find, use, and grow with their product.

Key questions to ask:

Who is your buyer? Is the person using your product the same one making the purchase decision? If not, a product-led growth (PLG) strategy may not be the right fit.
Can your product grow on its own? Some products, like Twilio, naturally expand as customers use them more. If yours doesn’t, you’ll need a different approach to scaling.
What is your customer’s journey? Think about how they first find your product, how they start using it, and what keeps them coming back. If your product is complex, a strong customer success team can make all the difference.

Your GTM strategy should complement your product’s natural strengths, not work against them. If your product isn’t designed for a certain growth motion, forcing it will lead to inefficiencies.

2. Pricing and packaging is the link between product and growth

Packaging and pricing are more than just setting a price – they define how customers perceive and use your product, influencing adoption and retention. Many companies overthink pricing or delay key decisions. Pricing is not set in stone, it should change as your business and customers’ needs evolve. It’s packaging, not just pricing, that needs to align with specific customer profiles. The right packaging helps define what features the product builds to win different customer segments and informs the GTM strategy. Pricing, in turn, follows from packaging decisions.

Best practices for smart pricing:

Know your customer – Create your packaging around on who is buying your product and how their needs change over time. This helps inform your product strategy and your GTM strategy around these packages with end customers in mind.
Offer value at every level – HubSpot is a great example: It adds new features as businesses grow, making it easy for customers to upgrade naturally.
Make it easy to understand – Complicated pricing can turn customers away. Keep it clear and match how they like to buy.
Don’t block key features – If integrations make your product more useful, don’t limit them. Instead, charge for extra.

3. Align the entire business around the customer lifecycle

Too many companies focus on internal functions (marketing, sales, CS) instead of aligning everyone around the customer’s lifecycle. Without a unified approach, marketing generates leads that sales can’t convert, product teams miss key adoption signals, and growth stalls at predictable revenue plateaus.

How to fix this:

Map every internal team’s KPIs to customer lifecycle success – If sales, marketing, and product aren’t working towards the same customer outcomes, friction will stall growth.
Clarify the difference between customer lifecycle and customer journey – The lifecycle is the overall relationship between customer and company, while the journey is how they experience the product and purchase process.
Unify goals across teams – Every department should share a clear understanding of entry and exit criteria at each stage of the customer journey.
Leverage cross-functional insights – Marketing, product, and sales must work in tandem. Product signals (e.g. feature usage, activation data) should inform sales outreach and marketing efforts.
Define failure criteria – It’s easy to measure success, but companies often fail to predefine when to abandon an initiative. Set clear failure benchmarks to cut ineffective programs early.

4. Building the right teams and tools for growth

Great strategies fail without the right people and operational alignment. Many startups make critical hiring mistakes, such as hiring too conservatively (one person instead of two) or prioritizing “experience” over grit and adaptability.

Team building cheat codes:

Never hire just one – Whether it’s sales reps or product managers, a single hire lacks comparison points. Invest in at least two people to create benchmarks and knowledge-sharing.
Hire for the problem today, not three years from now – A common mistake is hiring someone for a future vision instead of solving immediate needs. Prioritize what will drive the next 12-18 months of growth.
Look for T-shaped players—people with deep expertise in one area but cross-functional ability to collaborate across departments. These are the force multipliers who drive outsized impact.
Invest in customer success over SDRs – A strong CS function improves retention and expansion more than outbound prospecting ever will. Onboarding is the highest-ROI investment you can make.
Make revenue operations a strategic priority – GTM ops and finance must work from a single model of truth. If finance and sales teams present different revenue data, operational inefficiencies will slow growth.

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