This assessment is intended as a tool for founders or other leaders to assess their Go-To-Market (GTM). GTM is complex and can encompass a broad range of activities. These expand exponentially as your organization grows. This structure helps break down success (or failure) into all of the various components, so that you can find what is working and do more of it, and find what is not working and fix it.
The assessment is arranged from the top of funnel through the customer journey, closing, retention and expansion. Generally it’s best to address issues from the top of the funnel down: if you don’t have enough leads to speak with, it’s hard to assess or experiment on your customers’ journey, let alone test different pricing structures or legal terms.
Rate each activity between 1 to 4. One means you are either not doing anything, or not seeing any results from what you are doing. Four indicates your company is doing as good a job as possible, and investing more would not yield meaningful results.
We recommend against using decimals (1.5, etc.). Be bold. There is also no average score by design: this forces difficult conversations and deeper thought; you can’t just give yourself C’s and move on. It’s either a failing grade or a passing grade.
That said, there is nothing inherently good about being at 4 or bad about being at 1. The goal is to find areas where improvement would deliver a big impact. To be intentional about where you are investing your time and resources. Many times we have seen the visible projects–a new website, for example–get prioritized over less visible projects–more cold email automation–even though that aspect was pretty good already. This leads to poor results.
While the template breaks each area down into component pieces, they do interact in reality. You can send great cold emails, but if you have a terrible website people will not respond. If you have a great website but it’s designed for someone who isn’t your ideal customer, it will not perform well. And so on.
Figuring out how to assess or how the various aspects of GTM interact is where experts (like us!) can help. You may already have experts in your cap table or network, and this could be a great tool to give them to help you self-assess.
If you don’t, or you’d rather not go to your investors with your problems, you can find us at silverwood.ai and [email protected]. You can also connect with Alex our founder on Linkedin here where he posts insights and tools like this all the time. We’re always happy to meet with founders and learn about their GTM experiences.
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