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The 7 Rules for a Good GTM Offsite
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This week’s research note includes:
GTM is Better Together: Take our survey and be the first to see the results!
GTM Research: How to structure a GTM offsite for maximum success
Introducing GTM Made Simple Live: a weekly LinkedIn Live that will dig into this topic further
GTM Events: Events you should know about
GTM is Better Together
“GTM is Better Together” is a revolutionary new vision that the future of GTM is better together with unified teams, tech, and trust. This is a weekly feature where we will share the latest announcements related to this important initiative.
We need your help!
We're preparing a comprehensive benchmark report and are inviting GTM leaders from companies across various industries to contribute by taking our most important GTM survey to date!
Your insights will help shape the future of GTM strategies and provide invaluable data for our report. Plus, you'll get exclusive early access to the findings!
GTM Research: How to plan a great offsite
A weekly deep-dive into new GTM research and insights
There are two stats from our recent research that we keep thinking about:
56% of B2B companies missed their revenue goals last year.
71% say that lack of internal GTM alignment is a bigger blocker to business growth than external market forces or competitors.
So although we have identified and explored 15 specific GTM problems, the underlying cause behind many of them might just be a lack of strategic alignment.
There are a lot of ways to crack that nut. Last week, we shared three GTM frameworks that can increase alignment.
But since the pandemic, many teams have gotten away from what we consider to be one of the most important ways to increase alignment:
a strategic leadership offsite for the executive heads of your GTM Team.
Why Should You Have a GTM Team Offsite?
The cost of GTM team misalignment is high, and the benefits of alignment are also huge:
Increased Strategic Alignment:
According to a study by Harvard Business Review, companies with highly aligned employees have 72% higher success rates with strategic initiatives.
Improved Performance:
Research from McKinsey & Company shows that organizations that regularly engage in strategic planning sessions are 2.5 times more likely to outperform their peers in terms of revenue growth.
Enhanced Innovation:
A report by PwC found that 61% of executives believe strategic planning offsites foster more innovative thinking and problem-solving capabilities.
Despite the clear value of an offsite, we see clients (and, ahem, a few of our own former companies) either skipping offsites, or running them without any clear preparation or agenda.
If a company were planning to spend six or seven figures on a new product, acquisition, piece of capital equipment, or even a new GTM vendor, every detail would be inspected with care to make sure it was a wise investment.
A good offsite represents a comparable level of investment when you think about the collective time, travel expenses, and salaries of your most highly-paid, strategic, and valuable leaders in a room for a few days determining the future of your company for the next 6-18 months!
So let’s give our GTM offsites the same level of attention and planning! They are a strategic investment in the future.
How to Set Up a GTM Offsite For Success
Harvard Business Review reports that 88% of executives believed that their leadership team meetings did not produce decisions on important strategic issues.
OUCH.
In our years organizing, running, and participating in GTM executive offsites, we have a few hard and fast rules that will make these experiences more useful.
The CEO must be in the room. At the end of the day, the CEO is the only one with the authority to make cross-functional decisions and is the true owner of GTM
All the functional heads must attend: Key players on the GTM team include sales, rev ops, marketing, product, and customer success. Here are some thoughts on the roles of various members of the GTM team.
Engage a skilled facilitator with no stake in the game. A neutral, independent, impartial third-party should facilitate to ensure all voices are heard. They focus on the process, not the content. When a CEO is the facilitator, it can dampen participation, discourage disagreement and make the CEO choose between leading the team and keeping the meeting on track.
Identify desired outcomes before the meeting starts. What decisions do you hope will get made? What are the most important objectives for the meeting?
Select the right location. Choose a location that will foster productivity and creativity. It should be comfortable, free from distractions, and provide necessary facilities for meetings and activities. It should also be accessible to all participants, considering factors like travel. Most importantly, it should be offsite! Don’t attempt to do this work in your regular office or on Zoom.
Give your schedule some breathing room. An offsite should include learning, participation, collaboration, and some team building time.
Ensure effective follow up. The best offsite can be sunk if it doesn’t result in any changes. Set expectations before the offsite for regular check-ins to stay on track or make adjustments throughout the year.
What to Cover in Your GTM Offsite
The GTM Operating System gives you a natural outline for what to spend time on in an offsite.
Each pillar of the GTM operating system has many elements but boils down to one key question. (Find the details on each pillar in our Guide to the GTM Operating System).
Answering these questions can form an agenda that will guide an offsite. And of course we have lots of tools and templates and frameworks (available to anyone, whether or not you are a GTM Partners customer!) that can further guide your exploration.
GTM Transformation Offsite
If everything we’ve just talked about is of interest and you can’t manage planning it yourself, we’re hosting an exclusive GTM Transformation Offsite this October in Atlanta.
We’re inviting 10 companies to join us for a two-day, all inclusive offsite designed to burn down silos and build a 2025 GTM strategy with your key team’s input.
You’ll have plenty of time to work through the questions we shared above with experts on every area of GTM, and at the end of the offsite, you’ll pitch your GTM plan to other participants to help stress test it.
After the offsite is over, you get three months of group support from GTM Partners and other leading industry experts to address any issues that come up with implementation.
Whether you come to our offsite or do your own thing, please consider this research note a call to plan an offsite this year and do it with careful consideration and deliberation.
Introducing GTM Made Simple Live!
Join Sangram every Tuesday on LinkedIn at 12:30 ET for a deep dive into the week’s topic, in this case, GTM offsites!
Tomorrow, Sangram will also be talking to Dev Ganesan, CEO of PathFactory, about their acquisition of Uberflip and what’s next for the company.
Sign up so the whole series is on your calendar, or join us on LinkedIn Tuesday!
GTM Events
A list of upcoming events of interest to GTM professionals
July 24, VIRTUAL: Capital Efficient Growth with Metropolitan Group
August 28, Atlanta: GTM is Better Together
September 10, Boston: GTM is Better Together
September 18-20, Boston: INBOUND 2024
October 14-16, Austin, TX: Pavilion’s GTM 2024 (use code GTMPARTNERS20 for 20% off your ticket)
October 16, Austin: GTM Made Simple Roadshow
October 22, NYC: GTM is Better Together
November 20, San Francisco: GTM is Better Together
Are you a B2B company between $10-100M in revenue who needs help with your GTM strategy and execution? We’d love to chat.
We so appreciate everyone who has read this far. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it, or if there are topics you want us to cover, let us know! You can send it to sarah at gtmpartners dot com.
Love,
The GTM Partners Team
