GTM automation maturity stages: how we define them and what you can do to move along each

While there’s value in this approach, at least in the short term, we believe that your GTM automation strategy needs to be more holistic and systematic: You should bucket processes and automate them based on the order of your clients’ journey. Then, once your “GTM engine” is optimized and running at full speed, you can use automations to scale the team itself.

You can think of these bucketed processes as the following maturity phases: Lead Management, Pipeline Resilience, Elevate CX, and Scale GTM. Each consists of specific goals, automations, and, ultimately, enables the subsequent phase’s success.

Let’s take a closer look at each phase.

Note: While we recommend that you follow the phases in the order outlined above, business-specific circumstances may pressure you to shift their order. For example, if customer churn is a significant issue, you’ll need to prioritize the automations that fall under Elevate CX first.

Lead Management

Your ability to ingest, enrich, route, and nurture leads intelligently serves as the foundation of your GTM motion’s success. After all, if you’re not capturing and engaging leads effectively, you won’t be top of mind for prospects when they need a solution like yours.

Here are a few lead management automations you can build to help reps become aware of leads quickly and respond to them effectively:

• Once you collect certain types of intent data on a lead (e.g. they browse your listing and your competitors’ on a 3rd-party review site), a platform bot—like “Intent Bot”—routes it to the assigned sales rep in your business communications platform. Within the message, the bot can display the specific pages they viewed, additional 3rd and 1st-party information on the account, and specific buttons that, if clicked, trigger specific actions.

• Once a lead comes in, an enterprise automation (EA) platform enriches it with 1st-party data; the EA platform goes on to enrich it further with your preferred data enrichment tool (in the screenshot below, it’s D&B); if any required fields remain blank, the EA platform uses your 2nd favorite enrichment tool to try and populate these fields (in the screenshot below, it’s Zoominfo); this process repeats itself in near real-time until all the necessary fields are populated—at which point the lead would get routed to the rep.

Related: How to automate lead enrichment

Pipeline Resilience

Once you’ve honed your processes in the first phase and start to collect a substantive volume of leads, you’re ready to streamline the workflows that are geared towards maintaining high standards of data accuracy. 

Once put into place, these automations can help sales managers focus less on correcting data-related issues in your CRM and more on coaching their reps through deals. In addition, by working with consistently up-to-date CRM data, sales leadership can start to make better sense of their sales cycles. In turn, they’ll be better positioned to make improvements and forecast revenue.

Here are a few automations that can motivate your reps to input the necessary information from their opportunities into your CRM:

• A few minutes before a meeting ends, a sales rep on a call gets a notification in your business communications platform (from a customized platform bot) that a specific individual on the call isn’t a contact in your CRM. Using the platform bot, the rep can go on to add this individual as a contact under their associated account, all in a matter of clicks and without leaving the business comms platform.

• Once an opportunity’s close date expires, the rep that’s managing the opportunity gets notified via a platform bot (e.g. Workbot® for Sales) in your business communications platform. Within the message, the rep can go on to update the opportunity’s close date.

Elevating CX

Assuming you’ve executed on the preceding two phases successfully, you’re all but certain to grow your client base at a healthy clip. As this happens, the question of how you can retain your ever-growing roster of customers—and even expand the relationships—without overwhelming your client-facing employees becomes more important.

Automation can play a crucial role in helping you navigate client relationships at scale. Here’s just a few use cases that prove this point:

• Once a clients’ level of product usage rises to a certain threshold, a platform bot collects predefined types of information from your applications and uses them to populate a templated account health report in a Google Doc. The bot then goes on to share the report with the assigned CSM or AE (whoever owns customer expansion opportunities), enabling the latter to pursue the up-sell opportunity quickly, yet thoughtfully.

• Using a customized platform bot (e.g. “Rev Bot”) in your business comms platform, a rep can click “Create Customer Facing Deck” to trigger the deck-creation workflow. The bot goes on to collect predefined types of data from various systems—including the client’s subscription plan and product usage data—and populates all of the information it finds in the templated QBR deck your team uses. 

Scaling GTM

Now that you’ve established efficient, intelligent, and high-performing processes throughout the client’s journey, you’re ready to add “fuel to the fire” by scaling the team and your enablement efforts. 

Here are a few automations that let you do just that:

• Once a prospect mentions a certain competitor on a call recorded in Gong, the workflow gets triggered. A customized platform bot messages the rep that competitor’s battle card as well as teammates who’ve won deals against them. The rep can then leverage these insights to learn from their peers and use the right messaging in future conversations with the contacts at that opportunity.   

• You can help new hires in your GTM function identify the channels they should join on day 1 by sending them a message—delivered by a customized platform bot, like “Welcome Bot”—that points them to several. The message can share department-agnostic channels, GTM-specific ones, and even more lighthearted channels so that they can bond with their new colleagues.

Automate your GTM processes with Workato

Workato, the leader in enterprise automation, lets you implement any automation within these maturity phases—and much more. 

Using our platform, your GTM teams can access:

• A low-code UI, ensuring that individual GTM teams are able to build and maintain their own automations

• Pre-built connectors with more than a thousand applications—from Salesforce to Gong to HubSpot—and hundreds of thousands of automation templates, allowing your team to easily identify and implement high-impact integrations and automations

• Workbot, a customizable platform bot for Slack or Microsoft Teams that lets you bring automations into either platform