How to build your 2024 GTM plan

Get ahead of the game

2024 is shaping up to be another challenging year for businesses. Between the impact of inflation, concerns over upcoming elections in the US and Europe, high stakes trade wars and other global conflicts, we are likely to remain in a period of economic uncertainty for some time to come.

However, this does not mean businesses have to sit on the sidelines. History has shown us that chaos always creates opportunities for startups, favoring those who take a proactive approach, build achievable plans and implement an operating framework to manage execution - while frustrating those who wing it, wait for things to go wrong and get consumed by endless fire drills.

In this post I go through the five essential steps to building your 2024 GTM plan and include links to deeper dive guides on each topic from the archive.

1. Run a retrospective on your recent results to diagnose your issues

2. Turn your growth ideas into an achievable plan

3. Build a realistic sales forecast

4. Build your GTM team

5. Get help from an expert

1. Run a retro on your recent results to diagnose your issues

Doing a retro of your last few months’ results is one of the most effective ways to kick off your planning because it helps get everyone on the same page in 3 areas:

1. Diagnosing issues. Retros allow teams to reflect on their work and identify which issues need to be addressed most urgently. This helps with setting priorities.

2. Aligning strategies and goals. Retros help functional teams align their strategies and goals with the overall goals of the business. This helps with planning.

3. Improving communication. Retros improve communication within and across teams by providing a regular forum for discussing progress, sharing thoughts and ideas and working together to find solutions. This helps with managing variance once you start executing.

Don’t wait until the year is over to do your retro — take your last few months’ of data and kick it off today, especially if you have already started your 2024 planning. I’ve developed frameworks and templates for running retros for both sales-led and product-led GTMs here:

Sales-led GTM: 🔗 How to run a retrospective for a sales-led GTM

Product-led GTM: 🔗 How to run a retrospective for a product-led growth GTM

2. Turn your growth ideas into an executable plan

There’s no getting away from the fact that every business always has more ideas than they have resources to execute them. This can easily get out of hand as people get stretched too thinly across multiple projects causing confusion and horse-trading of resources, resulting in conflict and knee-jerk reactions when goals aren’t hit.

To make sure you pick the right ideas, get the right people to work on them, build realistic plans, set achievable goals and most importantly, manage the variance between goals and actuals, you need an operating framework that ties together your strategy, metrics and ideas into priorities, plans and results.

As a former COO of a growth-stage startup, I developed a simple operating framework to get product, engineering, sales and marketing teams aligned around a growth strategy and translate it into execution. The framework is made up of 8 components:

1. Strategy. What is our approach to growth?

2. Metrics. How do we measure our strategy?

3. Initiatives. What are the things we could do to move the metrics?

4. Priorities. What order are we going to do the initiatives in?

5. Resources. Who is doing the work and how long will it take?

6. Goals. What result do we expect from executing each initiative?

7. Actuals. How do our results compare to our goals?

8. Variance. How do we explain the difference between our goals and actuals?

Putting the framework into action spans 5 steps:

1. Turning Strategy into Metrics

2. Turning Metrics into Initiatives

3. Turning Initiatives into Priorities

4. Turing Priorities into Plans and Goals

5. Tracking Goals vs Actuals and Managing Variance

For more on this with an example in a B2B company: 🔗 How to turn your great ideas into results: An operating framework

3. Build a realistic sales forecast

Forecasts invariably get unrealistic when they are driven by tops-down calculations that are designed to achieve a revenue growth rate that makes investors happy or a burn rate that buys the company more runway to find growth, rather than being grounded in the realities of the market and customer needs.

Sales leaders invariably bear the brunt of unrealistic forecasts, often pressured into accepting the gap between dreams and reality as “stretch”, only to fall short on attainment, lose credibility and risk losing their job.

Overcoming unrealistic forecasts is a 3 step process:

1. Challenge the tops-down assumptions with market data.

2. Build a bottoms-up forecast with accurate pipeline and run rate data.

3. Be clear about what you need from other teams to make the forecast higher.

For a step by step guide on how to do this: 🔗 How to build a realistic sales forecast

4. Build your GTM team

Hiring is always a hot topic of debate during the planning process. With the wide range of roles on offer in building a go-to-market team, it’s all too easy to hire the wrong people or to hire too many people too soon and find yourself stressed about burn rate six months later.

Having gone through this journey with multiple startups, I’ve developed guiding principles for startup hiring and a framework for deciding which roles to hire, when to hire them and what their key responsibilities should be.

The guiding principles are:

• Sales is a distribution channel for a product that solves a customer problem. If you don’t have a couple dozen initial customers with the same use case and pain points, don’t hire a sales team.

• Marketing amplifies sales. Don’t hire a marketing team before your sales team is predictably closing deals at a small scale or you’ll just piss a load of money down the drain.

• Minimize role specialization. Early stage business don’t require a lot of specialized roles because most of the gains come from doing the broad strokes things that do not require deep expertise. Each new role also adds cost and complexity and limits your ability to adapt to changing needs.

• Manage new functions directly. As a founder you need to understand how a new function works in the context of your company in order to figure out what type of person to run it. This is why your first 3 salespeople should report to the CEO, rather than a VP of Sales.

The 3 stages to building out a GTM team are:

1. Founder-led sales, where the founder gets the initial customers, identifies the core use case and pain points.

2. Sales as distribution, where salespeople increase the prospecting effort, account managers improve retention and repeatable processes emerge.

3. Marketing amplifies sales, where a marketing generates leads, reduces buying friction and a predictable outcome starts to emerge.

For a detailed breakdown of each stage, including specific roles, key responsibilities and an org chart: 🔗 How to build your go-to-market team

5. Get help from an expert

Most early-stage startup CEOs don’t have much GTM experience, yet find themselves serving as their company’s de-facto GTM leader and faced with a very steep learning curve.

Many look for outside help however hiring a full-time CRO is usually way too expensive whereas the value in a traditional advisor is limited to ad-hoc problem solving.

A fractional CRO (like me) can be the ideal solution; an expert coach who guides you through refining and executing your GTM, for a fraction of the cost of a full-time exec.

For more on deciding if a fractional CRO makes sense for you, how much it costs, and what a typical engagement with me involves: 🔗 What is a fractional CRO?

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