A Fresh Look at the B2B GTM Investment

It's An Investment, Not a Budget

The shift from traditional budgeting to investment-based thinking represents a fundamental change in how B2B software companies approach resource allocation. Think of your budget like an investment portfolio: each allocation should have a clear thesis, expected return profile, and risk assessment. Also, as it is with investments, you make decisions about what to invest in based on what your objectives are combined with your risk tolerance within that time window.

This investment orientation, instead of a budget orientation, requires establishing clear metrics for success—not in the activity, but in the overall business impact. For demand generation investments, look beyond simple lead counts to examine pipeline velocity, conversion rates at each stage, and ultimate revenue impact. For sales investments, consider the cost of customer acquisition overall, not just traditional capacity planning. For customer success investments, consider both direct impacts (improving churn, retention rates, and expansion revenue) and indirect benefits (reduced support costs, improved adoption, and customer loyalty).

The Problem with Industry Benchmarks

Many companies fall into the trap of using oversimplified benchmarks like "marketing spend should be X% of revenue" or "sales capacity should support Y pipeline coverage." Another mistake is to take a benchmark of vendors in your space based on public information (because they are a public company) when you might be in an earlier stage or in turnaround mode. These metrics ignore crucial contextual factors that shape optimal resource allocation, which include:

Company situation: Early-stage companies require more investment in education around need or market fit, thought leadership, and competitive positioning, while mature companies or market leaders need focus on optimization, expansion, and conversion.

Product complexity: Complex solutions typically require higher investment in content discovery, sales enablement, and customer success compared to product-led (PLG) solutions that require more emphasis on promotions and competitive value.

Customer segments: Complex enterprise deals might justify higher customer acquisition costs due to customer lifetime value, while more commercial companies need more efficient acquisition models with a bigger investment in operations, customer experience, and digital-first funnels.

Instead of benchmarking against peers, develop internal metrics that reflect your specific business model and business situation.

Zero-Based Budgeting

Zero-based budgeting doesn't mean starting from scratch every year. Rather, it means every investment should justify its existence in the context of the overall company priorities and the organization's strategic situation.

First, clearly articulate your strategic priorities across your go-to-market, not just within the silos. For example, if one of your strategic goals is to protect and expand your customer base, every proposed investment should demonstrate how it supports that goal and is aligned across functions.

Next, map current spending to these priorities. You'll often find significant resources allocated to activities that don't directly support your strategic objectives. This might reveal you're spending heavily on broad pipeline development when your strategy requires focused account penetration.

Finally, build your budget from zero, prioritizing investments that directly advance your strategic goals. This might mean reducing investment in traditional trade shows to fund account-based marketing programs or shifting resources from general customer support to dedicated enterprise success managers.

Customer-Centric Investment Planning

Traditional functional budgeting creates artificial boundaries that can hurt customer experience. Instead, map investments to key moments in the customer journey that are currently causing friction.

Discovery Phase: How do prospects first encounter and learn about your solution? This might involve coordinated investments across thought leadership, content marketing, community building, and product-led growth initiatives.

Evaluation Phase: What resources do prospects need to build conviction? This could include trials or demos, security documentation, or ROI calculators—crossing traditional marketing, sales, and product boundaries.

Implementation Phase: How do you ensure customer success? This might require investments in onboarding automation, training resources, self-serve support, and professional services capabilities.

Expansion Phase: How do you drive account growth? This could involve product analytics, customer marketing, and account management resources working in concert.

Aligning Authority with Outcomes

Create clear decision-making frameworks that match responsibility with control over resources. It makes no sense to give a budget to a functional leader and then have the executive team micromanage where the money goes. If this is happening in your organization, it may be due to a lack of clarity in business strategy and prioritization. Once those are set, decision authority should go to those with the most situational awareness.

Program Investments: Individual teams might have autonomy over tactical spending within their domains, subject to ROI targets.

Cross-Functional Investments: Establish a governance structure with representation from all impacted functions to evaluate major cross-functional investments and give the group decision authority.

Strategic Investments: Executive team oversight for large, strategic bets that could fundamentally impact the business model.

Fixed Versus Discretionary Costs

In today’s modern business, costs that were once programmatic or one-off have become more fixed, run-rate costs. These costs often determine the success of other investments and should be protected and prioritized first.

Always-On Customer Experience: Today, being open for business requires continued investments in digital methods that were once counted as distinct programs. How can you make sure they are accounted for to ‘keep the lights on’? Those costs may include website, search, customer events and engagement, pricing changes, and CX optimizations.

Technology Infrastructure: Does your tech stack support your go-to-market motion? This includes your customer experience platform end-to-end, including, CRM, marketing automation, customer success platforms, community, customer self-help, and data analytics.

Development and Enablement: Are your teams equipped to execute effectively? This includes leadership development, sales training, modern skill development, and coaching. Remember, your people are your biggest asset.

Project and Change Management: How do you effectively manage new transformation or modernization initiatives or cross-functional projects that haven’t been executed before? This might require investment in project management, documentation, and collaboration tools.

Consider the Following

1. Start with a clear strategic plan that articulates your growth priorities and target outcomes.

2. Map your current spending against these priorities, identifying areas of misalignment.

3. Conduct a zero-based budgeting exercise, building up from core strategic requirements.

4. Create cross-functional working teams to identify and address friction points in the customer journey.

5. Establish clear governance frameworks for different types of investment decisions.

6. Build comprehensive ROI models that include both direct costs and operational requirements.

7. Implement regular review cycles to assess performance and adjust investments accordingly.

Remember that modernizing your go-to-market investment strategy is a strategic and iterative process. Start with the areas of greatest strategic importance or the biggest friction points, then expand based on learnings and results. The key is maintaining focus on strategic alignment, customer experience, and impactful outcomes based on your unique company situation, rather than on historical patterns, industry conventions, or activities your competitors are doing.