How to Scale Your B2B Startup Faster With Go-to-Market Data

Every SaaS company wants to scale their business; few companies know how to do it effectively and efficiently. 

Scaling requires executive and revenue leaders to think about the following:

• People: What new hires do we need to bring on board? 
• Processes: Where are we experiencing bottlenecks and how can we improve them?
• Tech Stack: What technology tools do we need to implement to support our growth?

But don’t forget one rarely-discussed component of scaling: your data infrastructure. 

Your data infrastructure (how you capture, review, and analyze information about your prospects) is not usually considered as a critical component to growth, but it holds a lot of value: Strong go-to-market data can revitalize win rates, optimize your messaging, and close deals faster.

3 Things That Happen With Data as You Scale

How does the quality of your data impact the growth of your business and the way decisions are made? 

Need More Data to Understand Your Customers

During the very early stages of a company, the founders are typically involved in every discussion with prospective customers. That allows them to build a pretty accurate understanding of their customers’ pain points and challenges because they've participated firsthand in those calls. 

Because they’re directly involved in those initial calls, they can easily glance at customer data (or data in their CRM) and immediately tell if the status of any given opportunity seems appropriate and if the information about it seems up-to-date. But as the company grows, it’s less practical to have the founders on each prospect call as more salespeople are hired to grow sales. 

The impact: With growth, the founders are more removed from their initial detailed understanding of their prospects and must rely on data to inform their decision-making.

Need Standardized Data to Understand Your Opportunities 

Much of the data in a CRM is populated by the way salespeople interact with the CRM. As companies hire more people onto their sales team, revenue leaders often forget to configure the CRM in a way that enforces consistent behavior. 

The amount of data entered in these tools becomes unmanageable using the traditional analysis tools like spreadsheets or reports within your CRM.

The impact: As the sales team grows, each salesperson inputs data into the CRM and uses the CRM in their own way, leading to inconsistent data that is difficult to analyze. Information about opportunities is not standardized, which can lead to an inaccurate picture about your pipeline.

Need Accurate Data to Identify Actionable Insights for Growth

As your company acquires more customers, it also gathers more data into your various tech stack tools (CRM, marketing automation, sales enablement tools, etc.). The sheer amount of data in your tools makes it more difficult to expose high-impact actionable Insights for the senior leadership team. 

Why? Companies begin to overly customize their CRM to the point that it’s difficult to pull the right data to begin analyzing it. In addition, many companies working to scale haven’t hired a full-time analyst yet to dive into the data on a regular basis.  

The result: You end up with a bunch of data stuck in your tech stack that never sees the light of day to become actionable. It leads to more reactive and less efficient decision-making, which can be detrimental if you are trying to scale quickly.

Listen to Scott Stouffer elaborate on these three problems that companies face as they try to scale.

How do you combat these scaling challenges? Create an intentional plan around capturing, managing, and analyzing the data in your tech stack as soon as possible.

Some actionable tips:

• Automate the way you capture data: For example, invest in a conversation tool like Gong or Chorus to record prospect calls, then add automated trackers that flag important phrases or words. It will allow your founders to keep your finger on the pulse of what the market is saying. 
• Invest in RevOps as early as you can: Having a dedicated revenue operations resource (whether in-house or a partner) helps ensure that all data is captured in a way that is standardized and accessible for analyzing. It’s a lot easier than to reconfigure your tech stack every time there is a new CRM administrator. 

Too many companies wait until it's painfully obvious that they have to invest in their data infrastructure. By that point, they're incurring substantial issues with scaling (wasted spending, stagnant growth rates, stalled pipeline, etc.). Making these investments upfront will drive more efficiency for your company downstream.