Operational Excellence
Operational excellence in GTM is not doing the same things faster. It's eliminating steps that add no value perceived by the customer throughout the commercial cycle.
“Automating a dysfunctional commercial process doesn't make it efficient. It just makes it dysfunctional faster.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhere GTM inefficiency really hides
Commercial inefficiency almost never lies in the single activity (writing a proposal, doing a demo), but in the handoffs between functions: the time a lead waits between marketing and sales, between SDR and AE, between commercial proposal and legal for contract approval.
An operational excellence program applied to GTM maps these handoffs, measures the time lost in each, and systematically reduces them, often with a bigger impact on closing speed than any improvement to the commercial message.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: investing in automating single activities (follow-up emails, proposal generation) without first mapping where time is actually lost along the funnel.
Second mistake: measuring operational efficiency only by volume handled per person, ignoring the error or rework rate that often accompanies a speed increase not backed by a solid process.
Practical Application
A B2B company discovers the average time between sending a commercial proposal and internal legal approval is 11 days, longer than the entire commercial negotiation phase. By standardizing the 4 most common contract clauses with pre-approval from legal, that time drops to 1.8 days, shortening the overall sales cycle by 14% without touching the sales team's activity at all.