How to run a GTM retro to find and fix your biggest problems
A framework, template and solution library
Quarter-ends and year-ends are the ideal moments to conduct a retro of your go-to-market. A GTM retro is immensely helpful for bringing your team together to diagnose the root cause of your GTM problems, improve cross-functional communication and get aligned on priorities, goals and tactics for the coming quarter and year.
This issue covers everything you need to conduct your own retro and use it to diagnose and fix the biggest problems in your GTM, including:
How to use a framework to organize your GTM retro
How to diagnose and fix problems in how you generate leads
How to diagnose and fix problems in how your outreach to prospects
How to diagnose and fix problems in your closing process
How to diagnose and fix problems in your new customer onboarding process
How to diagnose and fix problems with demonstrating impact to customers
How to diagnose and fix problems in your upsell process
How to use a framework to organize your GTM retro
Using a framework ensures everyone in the GTM team uses the same definitions and speaks the same language. This minimizes the ability to hide behind vanity metrics or point fingers at other teams and creates a foundation for alignment and a transparent discussion.
I like to use a two-sided funnel framework that shows a customer’s journey from being an ideal prospect out in the world to being an ideal customer of the company:
Each stage of the customer journey is described by a series of volume metrics and conversion metrics. Use my GTM retro template to assemble these metrics into a single doc and get your whole team involved in the process.
How to diagnose and fix problems with lead generation
If your Session to Lead conversion rate is low (<2%), the problem is your messaging is too cryptic.
When your messaging is too cryptic, your prospects struggle to understand exactly what you do and how you fit into their existing workflow. If your messaging is peppered with jargon like “seamless”, “advanced”, “real time”, “AI-powered” or hyperbole like “the world’s first”, its too cryptic.
The solution is to rewrite your messaging from your customer’s perspective, by summarizing how they describe their problems and your solution. To jumpstart this, go read my post on How to use AI to improve your messaging.
If your Lead to MQL conversion rate is low (<25%), the problem is that your prospects are experiencing a disconnect between the value prop for sharing their contact info and the value prop for evaluating your product.
A common cause of this is creating lead magnets that are broadly relevant to your target buyer but not relevant to what you are actually selling. No lead nurturing program can overcome this.
The solution is to focus on capturing MQLs directly rather than trying to nurture them from Leads. This forces you to focus on converting high intent traffic. For more on this, go read: How to maximize the bottom of your marketing funnel
How to diagnose and fix problems with outreach
If your MQL to SQL conversion rate is low (<75%), the problem is that your MQL criteria are too soft.
The most likely cause is usually that your lead scoring has been set up to make MQL goals attainable, rather than to indicate actual fit and intent. Clicking around your website and attending a couple of webinars doesn’t equate to having a desire to purchase.
The best solution is to flip the script and make your MQL criteria as strict as possible, for example by defining MQL as booking a meeting with a salesperson or signing up for an online trial of the product. Doing this will force you to rethink your lead generation and lead nurture to focus on higher intent prospects.
If your Target Account to SQL conversion rate is low, your outbound messaging is not relevant to your target audience.
While you can play around with call scripts and email templates for eternity, the root cause is more likely to be that you are targeting too broadly, causing your messaging to be generic and therfore more likely to be ignored.
The solution is to shrink your target account list way, way down and leverage your network to get warm introductions with personalized messaging. For more on this watch my video lessons on:
How to diagnose and fix problems in your closing process
If your Win Rate is super-low (<10%), the problem is that you are talking to too many unqualified prospects.
Common causes of this usually happen upstream of the sales team, when a sales development team is focused purely on booking meetings or a marketing team’s MQL criteria are too soft (as described earlier).
The solution is to align incentives across sales and marketing, so that 33-50% of an SDR’s variable compensation is tied to bookings and MQL is defined as a prospect who wants to talk to a salesperson.
If your Win Rate is low (10-25%), the problem is one or more of the following:
Rushing to prescribe a solution before understanding the problem your buyer is looking to solve. The solution here is to do more thorough discovery, so that you can tie the solution to what your buyer cares about. For more on this go read: How to prepare for and run a discovery call and How to run a successful product demo.
Moving to proposal before establishing your buyer’s critical event. When your deal lacks a critical or compelling event, your buyer lacks urgency and there’s no point wasting your time to put together a proposal that’s just going to sit on the shelf. You can spot this if you’re seeing a lot of “timing not right” or “decision delayed/deferred” in your closed lost reasons. For more on this go read: How to use a sales framework to troubleshoot your deals.
Sharing proposals before understanding the decision making process, in particular all the stakeholders and what they care about. You can spot this if you see a lot of “buyer stopped responding” in your closed lost reasons and/or a lot of closed lost deals that have only one contact attached. The solution is to bring all the decision makers into your sales process, by identifying them, understanding their needs and reflecting their needs in your proposal. For more on this, go read: How to bring decision makers into your sales process and How to run a trial or proof of value.
How to diagnose and fix problems in your new customer onboarding
If the percentage of customers reaching your 1st impact milestone is low (<90%), there are 3 possible reasons:
You have not defined your first impact milestone. This is very common when your onboarding process focused on provisioning system access instead of delivering impact. The solution is to define your first impact milestone and re-structure your onboarding process around demonstrating first impact to all the stakeholders who were involved in buying the product. For more on this go read How to drive more growth from your customers.
Your sales team is overselling the impact your product delivers. This is very common when doing business in a new category where there is limited information available on what to expect. The solution is to clearly define what success looks like, ideally in terms of a metric that customers can understand, and adjust your sales pitch to set expectations that are aligned with reality.
Your sales team is selling to customers outside your ICP. This is very common when selling to early adopters, as early adopters often like to try new things for the sake of learning as much as for the sake of driving their business.
If your Time to 1st Impact is longer than your sales cycle, the problem is that your onboarding process is too complicated.
Your new customer’s patience with you is strongly correlated with the scope of what they’ve hired you to do. The greater the scope, the greater the patience and vice versa. If they can make a $10k purchase decision in under 30 days, they aren’t going to be happy waiting another 2 months to see the impact.
The solution here is to onboard new customers with use cases and feature sets that can be quickly implemented and to come back later to activate more parts of the product, either through training or upselling.
How to diagnose and fix problems with demonstrating impact to customers
If your Logo Retention Rate is low (<70% if selling to SMBs, <90% if selling to enterprises), the problem is that your customers are not seeing the recurring impact of working with you.
Recurring revenue is a function of recurring impact, however you can’t always assume that your customers are seeing or feeling the impact. You have to actively remind them of it on a regular basis.
If you sell to SMBs, a simple solution is to send a weekly or monthly recap of their activity on your value metric e.g. “Congrats, last month you used Chili Piper to book 200 meetings for your 4 sales reps. Here’s the breakdown by date and time.”. Everybody likes a pat on the back and it’s shocking how many B2B tools still do not do this, instead opting to send a generic newsletter that nobody asked for.
If your sell to larger enterprises, the solution is to have regular check-ins and business reviews with your customers and to orient them around your value metrics. Show the metrics, ask what they think of the results and use their response as the starting point for a conversation about how it’s impacting their business and what else is top of mind for them.
If your Revenue Retention Rate is lower than your Logo Retention Rate, the problem is that your customers aren’t seeing the product as a must-have.
The most common example of this is a customer with unused seats. A salesperson persuades a customer to buy more seats than they really need in order to hit quota. Six months later, half the seats are still unused and a year later the customer renews with fewer seats.
While this can be helped by creating onboarding plans for all user groups, it also requires making a cultural shift away from celebrating big deal sizes and towards rewarding high utilization and rapid upselling.
How to diagnose and fix problems with upselling
If your upsell win rate is lower than your new logo win rate, the problem is that you have limited upside to your product. To address this you to need start by understanding where you are falling short of your customers’ needs. The simple way to do this is to set up a process to gather feedback from your customers in a way that your product team can take action on.
If your average contract value for upsells is substantially lower than for new logos, the problem is you are giving away too much of the product in the initial sale. The solution is to observe which features get most used initially vs after 2-3 months and turn the latter group into an add-on that you can charge for separately.
If the percentage of customers with an upsell deal is low, the problem is your upsell process is not clearly defined. The solution to this is to build an account plan where each of your customer success and salespeople go through each of the customers in their book of business and identify all possible upsell opportunities. Then track your progress against these these opportunities to see whether a meeting was held, if an upsell deal was created in your CRM and if the deal was won or lost.