Analyzing Go-To-Market (GTM) Metrics the Right Way: A Blueprint for Growth- Part 1 (1/2)

What #GTM approaches do analytics tools employ, and which one is the most effective for unlocking business growth? There are many approaches, starting with high-level, one-size-fits-all sets of KPIs, through teams' KPIs, financial KPIs, funnel KPIs, and more.

I'd like to propose a different approach that, in my opinion, is the best for unlocking growth. This approach is grounded in natural strategic thinking and, with the power of technology, enables us to see a high-resolution picture of our business.

Imagine a microscope that helps businesses identify their best and worst customers, understand the bottlenecks, and the path their customers are walking through—all based on data, without guessing or theories. Once the picture is clear, companies can easily align their teams and their activities with the right targets.

The approach I've coined as "Meaningful Grouping" ?is based on the assumption that a company's customers consist of several groups, not just one. These groups differ from each other in segmentation (e.g., small company, big company, from Asia or Europe, etc.) and also in the experience they had with the company (e.g., a small company from Europe will likely have a different sales cycle than a big company from Asia). A point to discuss later is how we make sure that this grouping is meaningful and based on data and not legacy and or arbitrary assumptions of the company.

The "Meaningful Grouping" approach suggests that if we measure all customers as one bucket, one group, we will never get the chance to understand the real picture. The numbers will provide an inaccurate picture in the best scenario and a misleading picture in the worst scenario (think of high churn percentages for small companies compared to big companies—if all are taken together, you get a percentage that says nothing, and improvement actions cannot be tracked correctly).

Let's take a step back for a moment and reflect on how most CEOs and executives, whether or not they have an analytics platform, answer one of the top business questions: who are our best customers, and who are our worst customers?

The model most executives take to address this question is to delve into a set of "segmentation" questions, including location, company size, who closed the deal, how they heard about the company, and what journey or engagement they had (such as attending an event or registering for a free trial and so on). Please note that the last set of questions is related to the customer's journey (experience) with the company.

These two elements—the segmentation and customer journey—are basically a grouping exercise done intuitively by the CEOs and are the most critical factors that, if identified and managed correctly, influence immediate growth.

The more alignment we achieve between segments and journeys, the greater our chances of success, as we are able to build meaningful groups that we can manage, track, and improve over time. The number of groups a company can effectively manage can vary between 3-8 but certainly cannot be much higher (e.g., 20), as this would reduce their meaningfulness and operational capabilities.

Now, let's imagine for a moment that we've successfully identified these 3-8 customer groups; what about their metrics? Tracking these groups of customers with an analytical platform that wasn't designed for this purpose is indeed very challenging.

Even in 2023, CEOs and executives often lack the necessary tools and visibility into the data needed to explore questions related to segmentation and customer journeys.The key to success lies in tracking and measuring multiple levels of segments with multiple journeys and all the related calculations, such as cohorts, concentration, CAC, etc. This is a task that only technology built specifically for this purpose can provide.

This is precisely what novvo.ai does. novvo provides a data-driven technology for discovering and visualizing customer groups.

novvo.ai features a robust calculation engine and an AI layer for analyzing multiple segments and their various journeys, all conveniently visualized in a simple pre-built dashboard. novvo offers user-friendly navigation that's suitable for adoption by all GTM teams. It also includes benchmarks, alerts for anomalies, AI capabilities, and many other unique features.

But, this is just a glimpse of novvo's uniqueness and the intelligence behind it. I invite you to try novvo.ai and experience it for yourself;? it's free.

In my next post in this series, I'll discuss one of the top metrics to track the customer journey: "Time to Value," a metric that is sometimes overlooked and neglected.

I'd love to hear your comments, questions, and learn from your experiences. Please feel free to comment below.

Cheers!