Now that half of 2024 has passed, your executive leadership team will likely want to start thinking about starting the annual planning process for 2025. However, to know how to move your organization forward with your goals for next year, we need to look at how things have been going so far. Understanding where your business is on its growth plan at present is the first step to achieving commercial success in 2025.
Spurred by encouraging demand levels in Q1 2024, many CEOs invested heavily in go-to-market (GTM) as their growth strategy for the year. However, the perceived acceleration in demand growth in Q2 did not happen as expected, leading to declining confidence from many CEOs in their growth plans and GTM model. Although some leaders are already shifting back to managing EBITDA, many remain committed to pursuing increased growth, with or without increasing expenses.
Having worked with many clients to achieve value creation and sustainable commercial growth reliably, SBI has developed a tried and tested five-step process for annual revenue planning that enables executive leaders to align their GTM functions with their strategic growth priorities. The first step of this process begins with establishing a fact base on your organization’s current performance to evaluate how your GTM functions are executing against the relevant KPIs.
For this to happen, companies need a certain level of analytical rigor that comes from having adequate revenue technology for data reporting and insights. But based on findings from SBI’s Q2 2024 CEO Survey, data reporting and insights is the one area with the largest capability gaps across all respondents.
74 percent view it as critical to the success of their value creation goals, but only 38 percent admit that they are currently doing it right. At the same time, the majority state that they have no plans to invest more resources into improving their revenue technology to unlock higher-quality data reporting and insights.
SBI has two actionable recommendations for organizations that are currently facing this reality, based on our recently released CEO Value Creation Pulse for Summer 2024:
1. Streamline revenue technology stacks to refine commercial datasets. Eliminate unused solutions that complicate data ingestion and reporting that do not add value. This could help you reclaim as much as 20 percent of your revenue technology budget.
2. Empower revenue operations as the source for all GTM data. One common factor in top-performing companies is the presence of highly competent revenue operations leaders, who exert control over how commercial data is generated, analyzed, and reported to senior business leaders. This frees up functional leaders from having to gather their own data on performance metrics, allowing them to focus on execution.
Download our latest report, the CEO Value Creation Pulse, Summer 2024 for the full findings and insights from SBI’s Q2 2024 CEO Survey. We hope the data from this research will be useful in helping you to guide your organization to improved GTM performance and greater commercial success in 2025.