While GTM Flow certainly sounds like a desirable state, achieving it may sound challenging. For the subscription businesses I help, the most common concerns are:
- “We don’t have time.”
- “We don’t have to fix our entire process. All we have to do is…”
- “We already understand our success based on [x] metric.”
- “Even if we wanted to achieve GTM Flow, we don’t know how to get there.”
Fortunately, the effort is generally worth it. If you operate a subscription business, flow is the single most valuable state for your company. If you’re hesitating about moving toward flow due to one of those concerns, perhaps these perspective shifts can help:
1 – No Time
Many business leaders believe themselves to be too busy to optimize their revenue operations. In the short term, they may be right. In the long term, however, they’re costing themselves success.
Fearful business leaders may be correct that aligning toward GTM flow will slow down some operations to enable future growth. They may also be right in prioritizing other issues instead. However, people often overestimate the costs of changing and underestimate the value of compounding improvements. In these cases, it’s important to ask: How long are you willing to have multiple teams sprinting in different or wrong directions before correcting course?
2 – Seeking a White Knight
Subscription businesses require many pieces working in tandem. In addition to exceptional leaders in product, marketing, sales, and customer success, they require high-quality interfacing. If your company isn’t achieving flow, no single fix or new hire will solve it. I call this belief the “white knight hypothesis” because companies often find themselves saying “All we need is a great leader in [product/sales/marketing/customer success]” instead of recognizing the real, systemic issues that pervade their company.
In a subscription business, there is no shortcut. No single marketing campaign, product feature, or team leader will solve your problems. Your organization is ever-changing and adapting, so it must continuously align all its elements.
3 – Legacy Approaches
Some business leaders may say “I don’t need to know my Revenue Flow Score. I can tell how well the company is doing by our [sales productivity/pipeline growth/other metric].”
While legacy metrics are meaningful measures, they’re trailing indicators. They don’t tell you if your system is about to break, nor do they tell you where it’s being held back and how to fix it. A quarterly assessment of alignment may uncover opportunities for growth or problem-solving where you least expect them.
Typically, people find themselves more willing to invest in new approaches like RFS when growth slows. This strategy only patches problems instead of maximizing your overall success. Even if sales numbers are good, your company could still be falling significantly short of its potential.
In some cases, companies need to exhaust every other answer in order to realize there’s truly no substitute for flow. They always do, however… or else find themselves replaced by a company that does.
4- But How?
Some functional leaders are reluctant to shift toward a flow mentality because the change is frightening. They may fear the change as a threat to their career or be skeptical of their ability to impact every aspect of their organization. These are real, human concerns that need to be addressed through effective human resources strategies.
A cohesive team works very differently from a siloed workforce. The first step is recognizing and realizing the importance of making a shift toward flow for the business as a whole. The second is instilling that recognition in every leader. Only then can you align all those leading individuals toward a single, cohesive state of flow.
Interested in overcoming the blockers between you and a flow state? Learn more today.