Blog, Expert Advice

Cien’s Growth Essentials Series:  How to Run a Successful 2-Month GTM Analysis & Transformation Project – Part 2

By Ivan Redini, Director Partner Success, Cien.ai

“For your clients, receiving their Heat Map analysis is like waiting for a test after going to the doctor. You don’t want any bad surprises, but you also want to know why you have not been feeling well lately… “

– Ivan Redini, Director Partner Success, Cien.ai

This is the second part of this 2-part article, the previous section was published a week ago.

Reviewing The Findings

For your clients, receiving their Heat Map analysis is like waiting for a test after going to the doctor. You don’t want any bad surprises, but you also want to know why you have not been feeling well lately…

Once it is ready it’s important that you can back up and explain what’s been going on and how you made the determination that this is both a current problem and a future opportunity. Almost always, the client will want to dig in more into details, and because we have populated an interactive dashboard with extensive filtering and export capabilities, this can usually be done in real-time, generating additional “aha moments”.

The Transformation Plan

A transformation plan needs two things to be successful:

  1. To address the urgent problem
  2. A problem that can realistically be addressed in a predefined time. 

That excludes certain problems, like a market that is too small when you don’t yet have a product that is ready for an adjacent market (developing a new product will most likely take several months at minimum). The key is to be able to say: “Look at this problem. It’s prevalent in your org, except in this group/segment/location. So, we know it is not impossible to solve. How can we get the rest of your company to perform like these people do?”

Here is how we measure the problem and how we will be telling you how you make progress. If you solve it, there is a big dollar prize!

Changing Behaviour

Track, track, track: Once the GTM transformation plan has been agreed upon, keep stakeholders accountable for progress by tracking the underlying KPIs (not just actual revenue). At Cien.ai we use a special “Management Dashboard”, to be able to track things like pipeline quality or rep effort with Cien’s unique TrueAI KPIs. This will allow you to feel confident that the problems are truly fixed long before the actual revenue benefits materialize.

What Does Success Look Like?

For us at Cien success can be defined like this:

  1. Everyone involved felt it was a worthwhile exercise and they are eager to use the same approach on other not-yet-solved problems for even faster growth acceleration.
  2. We had a clear “success definition” at the beginning of the project
  3. We connected and calibrated the system in days without a lot of effort.
  4. We calibrated the system so that it matches other dashboards and stakeholders’ expectations.
  5. We quickly identified the most important problems.
  6. After some additional digging and discussions, all stakeholders were comfortable that the problems were important, fixable, and identified based on sound analysis. 
  7. The plan to solve the issues was based on a combination of behavior changes and additional technical tools that gave insights and decision support.
  8. The plan got started within a month and showed progress in just a few weeks.
  9. The plan was executed until the goals were met and there was a real quantifiable benefit.

About The Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series

This article is part of our Growth Essentials Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the non-technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the technical details of how to measure the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Practical RevOps Analytics Series”.