Quick GTM Fixes You Can Tackle This Week

This week: 3 ideas for GTM fixes. How close is AI to replacing product managers? And what is the difference between determined and stubborn?

3 Quick GTM Fixes You Can Tackle This Week to Improve Pipeline Quality and Velocity

Respond to Every Demo Request!

Many SaaS demo requests go unanswered.

Typically, the rep handling the request checks the company and person, decides it is not ICP, or not worth the time, and then ignores the request. Meanwhile, the prospect wonders how long it will take to get an answer or if their request was lost.

The Fix: Use a templated response that explains your ICP and asks qualifying questions.

For example: "Thanks for your request for a demo. We find that customers who get the most success from our product have more than 200 employees and at least 3 physical offices. Can you let me know your current employee count and office locations so that I can plan the best way to show you the value of our product?"

Most of the time, if the prospect sees they don't match the requirements, they don't respond. However, you've educated someone about your product! They may move to a larger company or recommend your product to a friend. Occasionally, the prospect replies and meets your criteria. They might be a consultant, an agency on behalf of a customer, or work for a group company.

Either way, you might secure a deal that would have gone to a competitor who replied.

Follow Up Tasks on Leads and Opportunities

It can be alarming to discover how many leads and opportunities are just floating in space, with no next task planned. The record sits in your CRM until the owner randomly opens it and remembers they were supposed to do something.

If you audit your CRM and find leads or opportunities that have not been updated in weeks or months, this is a common reason why.

I've worked with companies that have excellent discipline around follow-up tasks. Reps open their CRM and already have a task list of all the activities they need to do today, tomorrow, and this week.

Conversely, I've seen many companies with no process for this. Some reps set tasks, while others don't. Some create Excel sheets with their tasks or write lists in a notebook. This slows down your pipeline movement, as follow-ups take weeks instead of days.

The Fix: Every lead or opportunity must have a task attached with the next action and date. This can be as simple as 'try calling again tomorrow' or 'check if they have responded to my email'. It could also be a more complex task, such as submitting a proposal.

This fix can be challenging because it requires cultural change. Reps who have never updated their tasks might push back, feeling untrusted or micromanaged.

Success will come from the CEO/CRO insisting on the process and getting automated reports that capture leads/opportunities with and without tasks, the number of completed tasks, the number of new tasks created, etc.

Opportunity Handover Process When Reps Leave

When an AE or SDR leaves your company, their (deactivated) CRM account is often still full of leads and opportunities.

Eventually, these get reassigned to a new owner who doesn't know anything about them, and so much time has passed that everything gets closed as lost.

The Fix: Implement a process to transfer all open leads and opportunities when an AE or SDR is leaving. Their direct manager must be accountable for this.

All leads should be moved as soon as you know the rep is leaving so another rep can start working on them ASAP. All opportunities need to be reviewed with the manager, and a transfer plan created. Does the new rep need to be introduced? Does the new rep need an explanation of the account and discussions so far?

All this needs to be a documented process, with a reporting step from the manager once they know a rep is leaving and after the rep leaves to ensure the process is followed.

How close is AI to replacing product managers?

Expert prompting is necessary to make responses from a model any good. As a result, most people underestimate how close ChatGPT and other tools are to replacing the work of a human. Whenever you see the headline of an article or scientific paper that says “ChatGPT can’t do x,” it’s usually because they didn’t use the latest model and didn’t make use of prompt engineering

The experiment - take some 'hard' product manager tasks and compare a human output with an AI output.

The result - in 2/3 tasks, people prefered the AI output, even when they could clearly identify that it was AI generated.

Read more here

The Right Kind of Stubborn

Paul Graham's awesome new essay is worth a read:

Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.

Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads against a wall and get nowhere.

But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not?

Read more here

That's it for this week.

Catch you next time.

Chris