You’re in the first stage of business transformation, Ideation. Here, it’s all about figuring out your problem-market fit. Repetition will help drive ideation for your marketing and sales team. Every prospect call teaches your team more about your best position in the market. As they keep making calls and closing deals, you’ll close in on your ideal customer and messaging, and learn who to stop selling to.

You’re in the second stage of business transformation: Transition, or product-market fit. Your GTM process should be focused on quality acquisition by design with aligned sales and marketing efforts targeting your best fit account segments. Teams should have named account lists with prescriptive plays that result in a better prospect experience, higher annual contract values, and customers that will renew.

You’re in the third stage of business transformation: Execution, or platform-market fit. At this stage your GTM process should be built around your best customer segments--not just net new account segments with key metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV), net revenue retention (NRR), or multi-product adoption (MPA), fueling your growth.

Measuring by function is a great way to give your departments the autonomy they need to learn, experiment, and make adjustments and smart decisions quickly. The more volume through the funnel the more opportunities to learn. Build a dashboard that makes it easy to track qualified leads, CPL, meetings booked, opportunity creation, and funnel conversion rates, and closed won revenue. These metrics are perfect for early stage growth but they are inherently inefficient so don’t sit here too long.

By tracking everything at the account segment level, you can quickly identify trends and growth efficiencies, make better decisions and predict the next quarter. You should be able to identify what’s working by account segments, industry, or vertical and be able to refine your go-to-market approach to improve account engagement, pipeline coverage, deal velocity, ACV, CAC, GRR, and magic number.

Great news: you’re highly mature in your metrics. Net revenue retention is your north star and you’re likely working to push it higher and higher further offsetting the customers you lose. Where it used to take 5 new customers to replace the two you lost, you’re in the clear if you keep expanding services to your current base.

Going after your total addressable market (TAM) is a great approach when you don’t know your ideal customer profile yet. It’s a great way to figure out who your ideal buyer is, the verticals and sizes of companies you are best suited to serve and the messaging that resonates most. But by its nature it brings with it a watered down one size fits all approach that can attract bad fit customers and waste resources.

Account segmentation has moved you past your total addressable market (TAM) and into the total relevant market (TRM). These are the companies you should pursue now because they’re your best-fit target accounts, and they present the highest priority opportunities today. Your goal is to drive awareness and engagement in these segments bringing accounts into your pipeline and progressing them through the funnel. Buyers are more likely to engage when you create multi-channel personalized experiences using a 1 to 1, 1 to few, and 1 to many approach as appropriate.

Just like in account based segmentation you will need to spend time identifying your most important customer cohorts to build advocacy and market your additional services and offerings to. Think of it like a revenue flywheel. When you sell a customer and you make them happy, you earn the right to provide more goods and services to them. By identifying your best customer cohorts you can appropriately align customer success, marketing, and sales to your highest value customer opportunities.

Autonomy across departments can be useful while you’re figuring out product market fit. Marketing needs to build the systems and workflows for generating demand and qualifying leads, while sales needs to focus on the mechanics of the sales process, and pipeline. Teams are operating independently with maximum ability to learn and make quick decisions for their function.

At this point your sales and marketing teams should be aligned operating from a common understanding of the data with shared goals tied to each segment becoming more and more efficient as they learn and scale with an operations leader for marketing and sales respectively. However, if you're struggling to stay aligned or teams are justifying or debating the numbers then it’s time to move to a centralized revenue operations function.

At this point the goal is to have sales, marketing, and customer success function as a unified, high-performing revenue team with a silo-free focus on revenue operations (RevOps). Rather than trying to do everything as efficiently as possible for their individual departments, they work together to create an effective business model for the entire company.

A reactive hiring and enablement approach is best when searching for product market fit. In this stage you're going to let things run hot, allow people to wear multiple hats and hire only when you must. Enablement should be kept to a minimum as you favor flexibility, empowering people to test and iterate quickly. You are conserving the resources of the company until you nail the problem market fit.

When you have reached product market fit it's time to invest in enablement and people ramps. Your people ramp determines how fast your people get things done and achieve success in their individual roles. Your enablement ramp is about figuring out what to do with your marketing, sales, and customer success teams, including training, documentation, decks, playbooks, kickoffs, and quarterly business reviews. In other words, how you enable your high-performing revenue team to be successful.

As a scaled business you move from how to enable and ramp your teams departmentally to how to prioritize among the many competing opportunities the company can choose from. The key here is being decisive about what the teams will focus on, and where the hiring will occur. The most difficult thing at this stage is telling teams what to stop doing and stop funding in order to make room for new growth opportunities.

Building an effective sales channel is critical to growth but before you spread yourself thin, pick a single channel (direct, partner, agency) and nail it before attempting to add another channel. Resist the urge to jump into new coverage areas or add a second product until your first product is successful as measured by new bookings and retention otherwise expansion can be a massive distraction and propel you downward.

If you’re right where the finance team predicted you would be at the end of the last quarter, and you’re able to duplicate this for multiple quarters in a row, then it’s time to increase your distribution by expanding beyond your sales channel. Essentially you are looking to replicate what you achieved in your sales channel but in a new geography, vertical, or segment (up/down market).

With strong sales channels and coverage (geo, vertical, segment) in place it’s time to push additional products through your distribution with the goal of providing more value to your customer base at a higher annual contract value driving stickiness and net revenue retention. The critical question here is whether to go deeper by covering more use cases in your current category or to go wide by entering an adjacent, emerging or established category with a new product. By figuring out what will naturally consolidate around your platform rather than other category platforms, you will make build, buy, partner decisions that create value instead of confusion.