Data-driven GTM strategy: Designing your processes

In our previous article, we tackled the foundational question: “Do I collect all the necessary information?”—essentially building your data model. Now, in this second part of the series, we’re diving into the next crucial step: “How efficiently and accurately do I collect the information needed?”

Here, we focus on the practices and methods aimed at acquiring and nurturing leads through your pipeline while ensuring the collection of essential data every step of the way. It's essential to keep in mind that your customers are the focal point of these processes, not merely internal conveniences.

Prioritising customer satisfaction over operational ease is key to avoiding unnecessary friction and optimising sales performance. Before diving into process design, it's vital to gain a deep understanding of your customers' journey— their stages, touchpoints, emotions, and decision-making factors.

So, before we explore how to define your processes, let's first navigate the intricacies of mapping your customer journey.

Mapping your customer journey

As we discussed above, your internal processes should align with your customer journey. Visualise it as two parallel venues that run side-by-side and cross each other at specific points. Your goal is to establish processes that seamlessly integrate with these intersections, and accelerate your customer through stages and toward achieving their desired outcome, which should coincide with a closed deal for you.  

However, that’s easier said than done. Mapping your customer journey is a complex, iterative process that involves understanding the myriad touchpoints and interactions your customers have with your business, from initial awareness to acquisition and then to retention and/or expansion. 

How to design your customer journey

While we will dedicate a detailed guide on how to map your customer journey in detail, let’s explore here what this exercise looks like on a high level. 

1. Identify the stages

First, break down the customer journey into distinct stages, typically following a framework like Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Purchase, and Retention/Expansion.

2. Identify their goals and aspirations

For each of the stages, identify what the goals of the people involved in the buying process are and how you can tailor your efforts to help them achieve those goals.

3. Map out the touchpoints

Then, for each stage, list all the touchpoints where your customer interacts with your brand. This includes online channels (website, social media, ads) as well as offline interactions (sales calls, events, customer service).

4. Understand the customer experience

It’s time to understand what your customer is thinking, feeling, and doing. Are they confused by your website navigation? Excited about a product feature? Frustrated by the long waiting time for customer service? Try to put yourself in their shoes, or even better actively gather feedback from existing customers and Closed Lost deals.

5. Identify decision-making factors

Pinpoint the key factors that influence your customer's decisions at each stage. This might include price, features, brand reputation, customer reviews, or ease of use, among other things.

6. Locate information sources

Try to understand how your buyers get informed about solutions like yours. Do they search online and where? Do they ask their peers or trust online communities?

Mapping your customer journey is supplemented and enhanced by other practices like defining your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), your buyer personas, and the decision-making unit for each customer type, but we will dive deeper into those in a separate article. 

Aligning your processes with your customer journey

With your customer journey in place, you are ready to start building your processes around it to engage and excite your existing and potential customers.

1. Assign ownership per stage and touchpoint

First, it’s crucial to establish clear roles and responsibilities, both on a team and individual level. Doing so will allow you to promote accountability while ensuring everyone is aware of what they have to do and what their part looks like. 

Make sure to define which department (marketing, sales, customer success) owns each stage of the customer journey and ensure they have the resources and authority to impact their areas effectively.

2. Define objectives and priorities per stage

For each stage of the journey, it’s important to articulate clear objectives and priorities. This could range from educating the customer or lead, prompting interest, and fostering engagement, to ultimately driving conversions. At this step, we have found it invaluable to discuss expectation setting with the broader revenue team. It is crucial to align on what expectations you should build to leads and customers at each stage. 

Establishing clear objectives and priorities per stage and defining what the expectations you set look like at each stage helps teams focus on the most impactful activities that drive the desired customer actions.

3. Establish KPIs and other activity metrics

To keep track of your team’s performance throughout the journey you have to define how you will measure it. To do so, establish the KPIs or other performance metrics that will define success at each stage and that collectively narrate what your team is excelling at and where there’s room for improvement.
For example, a high conversion rate could define success at the awareness stage, customer acquisition cost (CAC) could help quantify our effectiveness during the decision phase, and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) may define success post-purchase.

Picking the right KPIs and metrics it’s a small science itself, so we will make sure to publish a relevant guide on how to pick the right metrics for success.

4. Identify handoff points between teams and individuals

Smooth transitions between different stages of the customer journey are vital for a seamless experience. Identifying and clearly defining the handoff points between teams and individuals ensures that customers are passed along the journey without friction or loss of information. 

This involves specifying the exit criteria under which a customer is moved from one stage to the next and who is responsible for each transition. Effective handoffs are critical to maintaining momentum and engagement throughout the customer journey, as well as for setting and meeting expectations.

5. Put together SLAs

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are commitments between service providers and users regarding the quality and availability of the service offered. SLAs can be established internally to set expectations for response times, resolution times, and overall service quality at different stages of the journey.

These SLAs ensure that teams are aligned in delivering a consistent, high-quality customer experience and provide a benchmark for measuring performance and identifying areas for improvement.

Another valuable benefit of SLAs is how they communicate and promote ownership and accountability.

To learn more about SLAs and how to successfully use them check out Hubspot’s guide to Service Level Agreements.

That was it for this week! Next Week: Set up your tech stack to support your processes. Stay tuned as we dive into how to leverage technology to streamline your operations and drive even greater success.