Note: This blog post was contributed by Jacob Karp, Strategic Account Executive, People.ai
It’s no secret – many technology companies are vulnerable to the current economic downturn. While tech startups are particularly feeling the pressure, even stalwarts such as Netflix, Meta, and Telsa are making cuts.
To be fair, some factors are largely outside of any single corporation’s control. Inflation, rising labor costs, and geopolitical conflicts – among other factors – are creating plenty of uncertainty.
Still, many of these companies scaled their go-to-market (GTM) organizations over the last 18 months. Now, more than half of these same companies are downsizing or in a hiring freeze.
That begs the question – did the GTM data actually back up these hiring motions?
Did these organizations really have a large enough total addressable market (TAM) to support this many sellers and other GTM employees? Or were they working off spreadsheets with incomplete datasets and inaccurate projections that impaired their planning and hiring efforts?
In many cases, the latter scenario is quite possible.
Leverage GTM data to put current and prospective employee interests first
Many of the companies experiencing layoffs could have prevented or mitigated the number of hirings and firings. They simply needed to use their own GTM data to back their hiring decisions.
Asking, investigating, and answering some of the following questions would have led to a more informed growth strategy:
- What is the QAM/TAM we are running at?
- How many ideal customer profile (ICP) tier 1s and 2s fit into this TAM? (I.e., The companies with a high propensity to buy.)
- What is the average sales cycle time?
- What is the average sales price (ASP)?
- What is the average ramp time of sellers across segments?
- How many accounts can a seller actually meaningfully engage?
- What should quotas be, based on historical averages?
The list of potential questions can go on – but that’s a solid sampling of considerations.
Again, questions like these can and should be answered using GTM data – so long as it has been captured and meaningfully analyzed.
But more often than not, that complete data set is not in a system of record. Not in Salesforce.com or another CRM, not in a business intelligence tool, not anywhere. So, decisions get made out of spreadsheets with data sets that are incomplete and outdated.
The unfortunate consequence is that too many people are getting hired – and then fired.
Read more about using GTM data to improve hiring strategies and sales performance
As we continue to grapple with the current economic downturn, it’s imperative that businesses change the ways in which they hire, allocate territory, and enable their GTM teams. Complete, accurate, and actionable GTM data can help companies monitor and validate outcomes to ensure their hiring strategy is working, or pivot or slow down if it isn’t.
Having the right systems to capture and present these insights is vital to the health and performance of your organization – from hiring to ramp plans to ongoing sales coaching.