‘Pivot!!!’ – It’s not just one of our favorite Ross Geller moments from Friends… It’s what almost every business is trying to do right now in the face of truly unique circumstances. Whether your business is pivoting its offer entirely, or only how you deliver it, one thing is common – your go-to-market strategy needs to change.

With impact to your budgets and teams, changes to markets, and buyer behavior becoming increasingly more unpredictable - how do you know what to change and where to start?

Start with the data. Here’s what data points will help inform your strategic pivot.

Executives:

Your plate is full on the best of days, and these are far from the best of days. You’re likely reviewing your funnel more than usual and using it to make key decisions for your business during this time. Do you have the data you need, and can you rely on it?

Three data points you can look at today:

•  Forecasting. Are you taking your full funnel into account from lead to opportunity or just sales stages with a higher probability to close? 
• Close rate (Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead to Sales Qualified Lead to Opportunity) benchmarks might be out the window right now but looking at what has happened will help you get creative where you need to and make cuts where you need to. 
•  Attribution reporting. Do you know where your revenue is actually coming from? Events? Existing business cross-sell? Organic search and social? Paid ads? Sponsorships? Referrals? Tech review platforms? Hopefully it’s all of the above but you won’t know until you look and identify your big winners.

Sales Leaders:

Your team isn’t out networking, they can’t go to tradeshows, and visiting client sites is off the table… so what are they doing to drum up business and keep the business they already have?

Three data points you can look at today:

• How many cold leads vs warm leads vs hot leads are they focused on? Start with hot and work your way to cold. Or better yet, send those cold leads back to marketing to warm up. 
•  Activity doesn’t equal revenue. Make sure the activity KPIs you’re measuring have a revenue impact so you’re incentivizing the right behaviour. 
•  How penetrated are your existing accounts? Your CRM should show you what you’ve sold into each account, and equally importantly, what you haven’t. If your solutions can help right now and your existing customers don’t have all of what you offer, it might be time to reach out.

Marketing Leaders:

With traditional marketing channels like tradeshows and events temporarily closed, many businesses are shifting to an online strategy (if they weren’t there already). Instead of following the crowd, take a look at what your data is telling you and let that lead your way.  

Three data points you can look at today:

• Where are your Marketing Qualified Leads coming from? Find the channel that’s delivering the highest volume of quality MQL’s and go all in there. Don't hold your event budget hostage, redirect!
•  What percentage of net new contacts are in your ideal customer profile? Use this to review your content strategy. If that percentage is high, your content is working. If it’s not, this is the right time to tweak your content.
•  How are your ad’s performing against the platform benchmark? If you’re not hitting the platform benchmark in the first 48 hours, chances are you never will, and you need to switch up the ad.

It’s an emotional time right now, and it should be – we need to lead with heart, today, more than ever. But we must make smart decisions, our businesses, teams, families and economies are depending on it. Balancing your heart with your head is always required in business and today is no exception.

Really look at your business and use the data – it’ll tell you what you need to know. `

If you’re not collecting the data you need to make important business decisions, reach out. We can help.