Business Transformation
Business transformation isn't measured by how many projects launch. It's measured by how many survive the first difficult quarter without being demoted to secondary priority.
“A transformation that doesn't touch how the sales team gets paid is a transformation that only concerns the board slides.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy GTM is the real bottleneck
A company can redesign product, technology, and organization, but if how the commercial team is measured and incentivized stays the old way, behavior in the field doesn't change. The transformation stalls exactly at the point of contact with the customer.
Transformations that succeed treat GTM as one of the first functions to redesign, not the last: new KPIs, new training, new success criteria communicated before the initiative's public launch.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: announcing an ambitious corporate transformation with budget dedicated to technology and internal communication, but without allocating resources to reform commercial processes and incentives.
Second mistake: measuring transformation success only on internal adoption indicators (training completed, tools implemented) instead of real commercial indicators (pipeline generated with the new approach, win rate).
Practical Application
A B2B company invests €1,200,000 in a digital GTM transformation (new CRM, new marketing automation platform) but keeps the old transactional model's sales quotas unchanged. After 9 months, new CRM adoption is at 89% but pipeline generated with the new account-based approach is stuck at 6% of the total. After reforming quotas to explicitly reward ABM-generated deals, that share rises to 38% within two quarters.