How Lack of Deal Health Insight is Killing Your GTM

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a plan that details how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy their product or service and to gain a competitive advantage. A GTM strategy includes tactics related to pricing, sales and channels, the buying journey, new product or service launches, product rebranding or product introduction to a new market. (Gartner)

GTM is your organization's blueprint. 

To be successful, all departments must be aligned and moving toward the same objectives. The importance of GTM in business strategy cannot be overstated; it is the foundation upon which successful market penetration and customer acquisition are built.

Yet, too often, GTM is hamstrung by a lack of deal health insights —insights that provide a granular view of each potential deal, encompassing factors like engagement level, deal flow speed, and possible roadblocks. 

Deal health insights offer a real-time pulse on the likelihood of a deal closing, allowing businesses to adjust their strategies, reallocate resources, and proactively address potential roadblocks.

‍When organizations lack these crucial insights, GTM strategy suffers significantly.

Without a clear understanding of deal progression and health, businesses risk misallocating resources, pursuing leads less likely to close, and/or failing to capitalize on potential opportunities. This lack of visibility means inefficiencies, missed forecasts, and, ultimately, a weakened market position.

This article will dig into the negative consequences of the lack of deal health insights, define GTM bloat (aka, the biggest problem hiding in plain sight), and share how the Copy.ai platform can help.

The consequences of missing (or incomplete) deal health insights

Informed decisions and timely actions — 2 keys to business health and longevity. 

Having a true understanding deal health insights — the pulse of every potential sale or customer engagement — is essential. Missing or incomplete insights are like navigating a ship without a compass ... flying blind.

Eventually, the plane will crash.

Poor deal health insights can hinder decision-making processes, lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue, and hurt customer satisfaction and retention.

Hinder decision-making processes

Executives and revenue teams (sales, marketing, customer success) lean on deal insights to gauge the viability, progress, and potential bottlenecks of deals in the pipeline. Without them, decisions are based more on intuition and gut rather than data ... increasing the risk of missteps. 

We see this scenario far too often: a sales team invests time and resources in a deal with little chance of closing. Meanwhile, they ignore a promising opportunity that — with proper and timely attention — has a good chance of closing.

According to Bain & Company research, there is a "consistent correlation between a company's ability to make and execute decisions effectively and its financial performance over time."

The same study suggests that, on average, over 5 years, "companies that excel in decision effectiveness return to shareholders more than 4 times what their peers do and grow profits as measured by earnings before taxes at a rate 5.5 times that of their peers."

Negative impact on customer satisfaction and retention

"It costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one." – Philip Kotler, American marketing author, consultant, and professor emeritus.

Retention is the name of the game for businesses. 

Beyond the immediate financial metrics, the lack of deal health insights can have a profoundly negative impact on customer satisfaction and retention.

Insights into deal health often include customer feedback, concerns, and the overall engagement level — all crucial aspects of a customized customer experience. Without this information, companies risk misaligning offerings and/or failing to address emerging customer needs. This, in turn, leads to dissatisfaction and, ultimately, attrition. 

According to a 2022 Qualtrics study, "companies with the best customer experience ratings outperformed their industry peers' stock performance between 2019 and 2022 and doubled their lead over companies that provide poor customer experiences."

A recent Forrester study (commissioned by Adobe) found that "brands who are experience-driven outperform their peers in business metrics spanning the entire customer journey. They also realize significant year-over-year topline gains, namely:

• 1.4x revenue growth
• 1.7x customer retention rates
• 1.6x customer lifetime value”

The stakes of overlooking deal health insights are high, impacting not just immediate sales and revenue but also long-term customer relationships and market positioning.

Businesses that invest in robust systems to capture and analyze these insights position themselves to make informed decisions, seize opportunities, and foster enduring customer loyalty, laying a solid foundation for sustained success.

How the lack of deal health insights contributes to GTM Bloat

As we shared here, GTM bloat refers to the inefficiencies, complexities, and clutter that build up in an organization's go-to-market operations over time. 

GTM bloat hinders a business's ability to quickly and effectively take its products and innovations to market. It bogs down operations, creates confusion, dilutes focus, and makes it challenging for organizations to execute on strategy.

The lack of deal health insights is a significant contributor to GTM Bloat. When teams lack precise, actionable data on the health of their deals, they often compensate by adding more processes, tools, or checkpoints to gain control and visibility. 

This leads to an overcomplicated GTM process that is hard to navigate and slow to adapt.

How do you know when you are experiencing GTM bloat? What are the root causes? Like any ailment, there are common symptoms. For GTM Bloat, these systems include: 

• Redundant (redundant) processes
• An overabundance of disparate tools that don't communicate with each other
• Excessive focus on metrics that don't drive actionable insights 

For example, a GTM team might use multiple CRMs to track customer interactions and deal progress, creating confusion and inefficiencies. These symptoms can often be traced to a lack of comprehensive deal health insights.

Without a clear understanding of where a deal stands, teams usually introduce additional steps for approval or review, unnecessarily complicating the GTM strategy.

Companies that leverage advanced analytics to gain real-time insights into their sales pipeline can often streamline their GTM processes, reducing bloat and enhancing performance. 

But what does the “other side” look like? The good.

The (positive) impact of deal health insights on GTM success

Understanding the health of your deals is pivotal for GTM success. But what are those key metrics and leading indicators? 

In no particular order:

1. Lead response time

Simply put, the speed at which your team responds to new leads. 

Quick response time = more leads.

Slow response time = lost deals.

Monitoring this metric can help you understand if your team is engaging with prospects efficiently and whether there's room for improvement in how you respond.

2. Conversion rates

Conversion rate — the percentage of leads that turn into closed-won deals — is a critical metric.

Tracking conversion rates at various stages of the sales funnel provides insight into the effectiveness of your sales tactics and marketing messages.

A detailed analysis of these rates provides critical data to help identify stages where prospects may drop and give insights into when (and how) to improve overall conversion.

3. Deal velocity

This metric refers to the speed at which deals move through your sales pipeline.

A faster deal velocity implies a more efficient sales process and a shorter sales cycle. 

By tracking how long deals remain at each sales funnel stage, you can identify bottlenecks and implement strategies to accelerate the sales process.

4. Customer engagement levels

Engagement levels measure how actively your prospects are involved with your platform and/or brand — interactions with marketing content, responses to outreach efforts, participation in product demos, and more.

All (positive) engagement matters. 

High engagement levels typically indicate a healthy deal, reflecting buyer interest and time investment.

How to track and measure deal health with the right tools

Incorporating tools and platforms to track and analyze these metrics can transform your GTM strategy from reactive to proactive.

• CRMs.
• Sales analytics platforms.
• AI-driven predictive analytics.

All 3 are tools that provide real-time data and offer predictive insights, enabling sales teams to forecast deal outcomes with greater accuracy.

With the correct data at your fingertips, your team can focus efforts where they are most needed, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales process and driving greater success in your GTM initiatives.

Future proof your business with GTM AI

Copy.ai's GTM AI platform eliminates the bloated tech stacks and processes that are killing your bottom line. 

Automate hundreds of tasks and to-dos and focus on the non-mundane, revenue-generating aspects of your job.

As we shared here,  imagine a world where AI handles manual busywork while amplifying human creativity and strategy ... where insight flows seamlessly across departments, leading to coordinated targeting and outreach ... where every employee is empowered to accomplish more each day. 

This future is possible with unified GTM AI.

The Copy.ai platform aligns sales insights with marketing objectives, directly feeding marketing copy for landing pages, emails for sales outreach, and other buyer-facing content.

The Copy.ai platform enables a smoother customer journey through our AI-driven workflows, which power personalized and timely communications.

It's time to get accurate deal health insights and eliminate GTM bloat.