Go-To-Market Breakpoints
What are GTM Breakpoints?
Go-to-market breakpoints are the key pieces of your go-to-market that can make or break your organization’s ability to achieve success. Think of them like the pieces in your go-to-market puzzle. The six most common breakpoints are: Strategy, Organizational Design, Growth Modeling, Measurement & Data, Process & Systems, and Team Skills.
In order to optimize your go-to-market we review each of these six breakpoint categories to find the gaps and disconnects. Using this structure helps make pain points and problems tangible and clear.
Here is how we define each go-to-market breakpoint and examples of how each can affect your GTM success:
GTM Strategy
Go-to-market strategy, meaning any aspect of your go-to-market that is strategic and involves targeting, approach, and/or methodology. The organization’s leadership team is in charge of defining your GTM Strategy and has the greatest impact on your company’s success. If many of your company’s pain points involve this breakpoint you will likely see big disconnects between your company’s current performance and your revenue goals.
Organizational Design
Organizational design is anything that involves how your company structures, groups, and leverages your people. This is something that is defined by your leadership team and typically needs to evolve as your company grows or pivots. If this breakpoint is an area your company is struggling with you may observe some of the following pain points: certain teams feeling under-resourced, lack of clarity in terms of roles and responsibilities, inconsistent or poor customer experience.
Growth Model
The Growth Model breakpoint refers to scaling, capacity, resource, and hiring planning in relation to revenue forecast. Leadership in charge of this and managers should provide input from the front-lines. When your growth model is not defined or ineffective your company is likely to experience growing pain such as resourcing issues, unpredictable pipeline, unaddressed business opportunities.
Measurement & Data
Measurement & Data is all about your company’s success metrics and ability to measure performance quantitatively. Success is defined by leadership and measured by managers, ICs, and systems day-to-day. Without useful metrics and accurate measurement managers and leaders lack visibility into performance and forecasting becomes inaccurate.
Process & Systems
Process & Systems refers to anything related to your organization’s standard operating procedures. Processes must be defined by leaders, documented by managers, and adopted by ICs. Systems and tools should enable, automate, and connect all levels of the organization to the process. If Process & Systems are a main pain point for your company you will likely find performance and customer experience to be inconsistent; which limits your company’s ability to scale and grow.
Team Skills
Team Skills is anything related to your people’s knowledge, skill-levels, and use of key skills. Leaders and Managers should be reviewing and identifying skill gaps that undercut field success. When team’s struggle with key skills you are likely to observe poor or inconsistent performance.
Why we use breakpoints
Go-to-market breakpoints provide us a framework to analyze complex revenue and growth problems. This structured approach allows us to understand problems both broadly and in a focused manner. Optimizing and implementing a sophisticated GTM can be overwhelming due to the level of complexity and interdependencies. Breakpoints help make pain and gains more tangible and bite-sized allowing for greater organizational understanding and alignment.
How you can use breakpoints
As you and your team analyze your go-to-market and revenue performance try using breakpoints to look at issues from different angles.
By breaking down the problem into these categories we can start to identify trends and patterns.This allows us to better understand where to prioritize efforts and how to develop pragmatic solutions that resolve multiple overlapping pain points.
