Enterprise RevOps and Sales Ops leaders face relentless pressure to refine their go-to-market (GTM) strategies. What worked last quarter may already be obsolete, and manual processes can rarely keep pace with shifting market conditions.
Unlike mid-market companies, enterprise sales teams generally need a more complex, more nuanced go-to-market growth strategy. They have more stakeholders, far more complex approval chains, and massive volumes of data.
This post explores how enterprise organizations can build a GTM growth strategy that drives profitability, speeds up execution, and builds revenue in a predictable way.
How Is Enterprise Go-to-Market Strategy Different from Mid-Market GTM?
Enterprise go-to-market strategy is far more complex than mid-market strategy is.
In mid-market companies, a small team with just one or two decision-makers can quickly align sales, marketing, and product strategies.
At the enterprise level, competing priorities across departments tends to create more friction. Also, departments are usually far bigger than their downmarket counterparts, so it can be difficult to communicate across so many different people.
Each team brings its own data, goals, and perspectives, requiring ongoing coordination at every level to stay on track. There's coordination involved in keeping each team on the same page, and then there's coordination needed to keep multiple teams rowing in the same direction.
Data volume adds another layer of difficulty, as enterprise organizations generate more information than humans alone can draw meaningful conclusions from. With all that data, it's very hard to extract signals from the noise. It’s also difficult to align the org around which data set(s) should be the north star(s) that guide multiple teams. Most importantly, the traditional annual planning cycles that many enterprise orgs engage in are often too slow to keep up with market changes. To remain competitive, many leading enterprises are moving towards adjusting their go-to-market (GTM) strategies based on real-time data and emerging trends.
Common Pitfalls in Enterprise Go-to-Market Strategy
Lack of Agility
Enterprise companies that rely on annual go-to-market models can often fall out of sync with evolving customer needs and competitive marketplaces. While strategies are often planned on a 12-month cycle, market dynamics tend to shift much faster than that.
When comp plans lag behind the market, all sorts of problems can ensue. Your reps may end up targeting the wrong buyers, selling products that no longer align with market needs, or focusing on outdated priorities. Moreover, in a large enterprise sales organization some teams may finish planning before others even begin. Such a disjointed process can erode the inertia of complex deals.
Whether it's due to siloed teams making decisions in a vacuum, a lack of visibility into real-time data, or even a general hesitance to "mess with" an existing system that appears to be working well enough, most enterprises know they should be planning or re-planning quarterly. Unfortunately, many still aren't.
That said, by revisiting their plans every quarter, enterprises can ensure that:
- Messaging aligns with current customer pain points.
- Sales plays target real opportunities.
- Resource allocation aligns with market opportunities, and forecasts are based on actual performance data.
A leading enterprise might take this a step further by establishing real-time, continuous feedback loops for the team organizing their GTM strategy via customer interactions (e.g., call recordings, usage analytics), sales metrics (like pipeline velocity or close rates), direct customer feedback (surveys or NPS), and competitive intelligence (new product launches or pricing shifts).
When this data signals a market shift, teams can promptly adjust their go-to-market strategy by redrawing territories, updating pricing and messaging, and modifying incentive plans.
For example, say your company wants to focus on expansion within existing accounts, as opposed to focusing on adding new logos. To accomplish this, the GTM team would modify territories, quotas, and incentive plans to reward selling a new product to existing customers rather than bringing in new ones.
Or, to choose a different example,, if a competitor cuts prices in a key market segment, the sales team may want to re-prioritize outreach to focus on customers less sensitive to price, or to expedite a new discount strategy.
Siloed Teams and Data
When RevOps, sales, marketing, and product teams operate in isolation, go-to-market execution suffers. Misalignment virtually guarantees friction at every stage of execution — from managing sales pipeline to closing deals.In many enterprise companies, each of these groups develops its own strategy. The result is usuallyincompatible plans and competing success metrics.
Division between RevOps/sales planning teams and incentive compensation teams creates particularly costly disconnects. Key challenges include:
- Misaligned Incentives: Sales reps pursue individual targets that may conflict with strategic goals.
- Territory vs. Compensation Clashes: Sales assignments don’t always align with pay structures. When reps are given a quota to hit an an incentive structure that rewards desirable actions (such as selling certain products to certain types of companies), if they're assigned a territory that makes hitting those quotas too difficult, it can hurt both morale and the sales numbers.
- Sales forecasting: When data is trapped in different systems, it's very hard to create an accurate forecast that everyone can align to.
Speed to Market: The Key to Optimizing Revenue Potential
The Shift from Annual to Quarterly GTM Models
Many enterprise companies are moving away from rigid annual go-to-market strategies towards quarterly models.
Several factors are driving this transition. First, customer demands now shift more rapidly than they did even 15 years ago, with buying criteria and priorities changing even monthly. Additionally, startups can spin up very quickly and leanly, which makes it easier for them attack large enterprises. As a result, enterprise businesses who can’t make rapid strategic pivots risk major disruption.
Technological advancement also plays a significant role. A decade ago, enterprise sales organizations lacked the technical capabilities to execute rapid shifts in GTM strategy. Now, however, AI-powered platforms can enable teams to consolidate organization-wide data, reallocate resources, and communicate changes to global sales teams in days rather than months.
Ideally, enterprises should adopt a quarterly go-to-market cycle that follows four steps:
- Develop a strategy based on fresh market intelligence and performance data.
- Deploy targeted sales plays with aligned messaging and incentives.
- Systematically gather feedback from customers and sales teams.
- Adjust messaging, positioning, and execution tactics for the next quarter.
Advantages of Quarterly GTM Iterations
Shorter go-to-market cycles drive:
- Faster Adaptation to Market Conditions: When conditions change, companies don't have to wait months for the next annual planning cycle to begin. They can just integrate new information into their next 90-day plan and adjust accordingly.
- Tighter Team Alignment: When timelines are shorter, teams are more likely to stay aligned. This is because it's virtually impossible to move faster without consistent team consensus.
- Better Decision-Making: AI technology and advanced analytics identify patterns, detect market shifts, and recommend sales play adjustments in near-real time. This can lead to data-backed decisions helping maintain pace.
How Varicent’s Sales Performance Management Solution Drives Go-to-Market Success and Agility
Break Down Silos
Varicent unites sales planning, incentive compensation, and RevOps into a single, connected platform. Everyone sees the same data, so teams can stop wasting time on reconciliation and instead spend their time focusing on executing their go-to-market strategy.
This alignment and elimination of silos improves both sales execution and forecasting. If you want territory plans, comp plans, and real performance data to stay perfectly in sync, you’ll need a platform capable of enabling that level of cross-team collaboration.
A solution like Varicent can bring these elements together in near real time.
By using a unified system rather than relying on a "waterfall" approach (where one team finishes planning before another even begins), you can reduce planning time and make your organization more nimble. When all stakeholders collaborate from day one, you’re better positioned to pivot quickly in response to market shifts.
Faster Strategy Adjustments
Our sales and revenue performance software offers a single, integrated platform that consolidates data from territories, quotas, compensation plans, and headcount, all in one place.
By unifying these workflows under one system, every necessary adjustment flows seamlessly from one team to another. If you change a territory, quotas and incentives update automatically, ensuring transparency and alignment across the organization.
Instead of spending weeks manually reconciling data in multiple tools, you can finalize decisions in minutes, confident that each shift is reflected where it matters most.
When market conditions shift, RevOps leaders can immediately model changes to:
- Sales territory and quota planning
- Compensation structures
- Resource allocation
The AI-powered "what-if" scenario modeling allows teams to compare multiple strategies and implement the best approach instantly.
For example, a RevOps team could quickly assess how shifting 15% of their sales force toward an emerging product line might impact quarterly revenue targets, compare this strategy against three alternative approaches, and implement the winning strategy immediately.
More Effective Decision-Making with AI
Varicent’s AI continuously analyzes enterprise-wide data in real time, providing RevOps leaders with actionable insights.
We also let you quickly build scenarios with AI, and let you use AI to automate the plan-building process and documentation. The first saves you time, and the second helps people stay on the same page.
Unlike traditional spreadsheet analysis, our machine learning algorithms detect subtle trends — such as early signs of customer churn, territory imbalances, and quota misalignments — before they impact revenue.
See How Our Platform Delivers Profitability, Speed-to-Market, and Revenue Predictability
Varicent provides enterprise RevOps leaders with the tools to help your team achieve:
- Profitability through optimized resource allocation.
- Speed-to-market via streamlined quarterly planning.
- Revenue predictability powered by AI-driven forecasting.
Our integrated platform eliminates the barriers preventing your enterprise organization from executing effective sales and go-to-market strategies.
Want to see exactly how Varicent can solve your specific revenue challenges? Our team will show you precisely how leading enterprises use our platform to drive growth and outpace competitors.
View our interactive demo today, or book a custom demo with a Varicent team member.
