5 steps to move from growth-at-all-costs to sustainable scaling
June 30, 2025 
VP, Revenue Center of Excellence
Sales Leadership
VP, Revenue Center of Excellence
Hypergrowth is no longer viable.
With rising capital costs, shifting investor priorities, and macro uncertainty, sales orgs are moving away from expansion at all costs, toward a more sustainable strategy: striking a balance between growth and profitability.
A decade ago, Bessemer Venture Partners introduced “The Rule of 40,” which states that a healthy SaaS company’s annual revenue growth rate plus its profit margin should equal or exceed 40 percent. They recently introduced a new metric called The Rule of X, which prioritizes growth, but only if it’s sustainable and paired with improving margins over time.
For many GTM teams, this requires a significant recalibration. It means shifting their focus to operational efficiency, predictable revenue growth, and long-term profitability.
If you’re not sure how to tackle that shift, I’ve offered a five-step process below that I’ve seen work numerous times to help companies — and RevOps teams in particular — transition from growth-at-all-costs to sustainable growth.
(Using the Gong Revenue AI Platform makes each step easier, as it provides leaders and their teams with unified, accurate data and actionable insights.)
Step 1: Redefine your success metrics
The transition to sustainable growth begins with two things: a mindset shift and assessing which metrics you measure.
The mindset shift is up to you as a leader.
In terms of metrics, GTM teams can no longer be laser focused on numbers like annual recurring revenue growth and headcount expansion.Instead, they need to prioritize metrics like customer acquisition costs, net recurring revenue, deal velocity, and sales productivity. The former measure the size and rate of expansion, while the latter focus on operational efficiency and the long-term viability of that growth.
Here’s how to make this change concrete:
- Set new KPIs: Use an AI platform to capture every customer interaction, then consider which key efficiency and profitability indicators your new approach requires (e.g., talk-to-listen ratios, deal conversion rates, sales cycle lengths).
- Monitor activity-to-outcome ratios: Ensure that your reps’ activities (e.g., calls and meetings) translate into meaningful pipeline and revenue outcomes.
- Review pipeline health: Analyze each pipeline stage for signs of inefficiencies or deal leakage, then dig into your data to understand why it’s happening.
A revenue AI platform like Gong will be instrumental in your ability to complete these tasks accurately on an ongoing basis.
Step 2: Drive alignment across GTM teams
Misalignment between sales, marketing, and customer success wastes resources and hampers long-term growth.
A key part of transitioning to sustainable growth is getting your GTM teams on the same page, with a single source of truth.
Use a platform that provides a unified view of your customer interactions and the data hiding inside them. This will enable your GTM teams to provide customers with consistent messaging and seamless handoffs. Having everyone marching to the same drumbeat boosts efficiency and creates a smoother customer journey.
RevOps leaders can also use a unified, AI-driven platform to track the adoption of strategic initiatives across teams and ensure operational alignment.
Here’s where to start:
- Centralize communication insights: Track every customer interaction and make the insights from them accessible to all your revenue teams. (The Gong Agent, AI Theme Spotter, for example, uncovers recurring voice-of-the-customer themes that are easily shared.)
- Evaluate cross-team effectiveness: Identify gaps in cross-functional interactions, like missing handoff details between sales and customer success. Use a revenue platform to highlight when and why gaps occur.
- Enable strategic execution: Give your revenue leaders AI-backed insights so they can craft GTM strategies that are based on real-time data and result in effective deal execution.
Step 3: Enable more accurate forecasts
Sustainable, predictable growth requires accurate forecasting.
AI-driven deal insights are the key to identifying risks to deals and forecasts (e.g., missing decision-makers, stalled momentum). You can also improve accuracy by using insights to validate your forecast against real-time deal activities.
You’ll achieve more precise revenue predictability when you base your forecasts on data-driven insights rather than subjective inputs, with these tactics:
- Use deal health insights: Identify at-risk deals early and ensure that your pipeline coverage is accurate.
- Validate forecast data: Compare manually entered CRM data against AI-backed activity insights to ensure forecast accuracy.
- Adjust forecasting cadence: Shift to rolling forecasts that reflect real-time deal movement.
Simply put, Gong Forecast is the leader in enabling this level of capability, accuracy, and accountability in forecasting.
Step 4: Implement targeted, scalable coaching
Sustainable growth requires upskilling sales teams and replicating top-performing behaviors across the entire sales organization. That means pinpointing specific moments in calls or emails where reps can improve (e.g., objection handling, deal navigation), then providing them with tailored, scalable coaching based on proven behaviors.
Do three things to elevate your coaching:
- Analyze at the individual and team level: Use a data-backed analysis of skill gaps to understand who needs help with what, and when. Look at individual and team-wide trends.
- Create coaching plans: Use analytics to develop highly targeted, data-backed coaching programs for reps and teams.
- Track coaching’s impact: Monitor improvements in key metrics like talk ratios, setting next steps, win rates, or call effectiveness.
Have everyone work from a unified platform where they can easily access their skill-set data. That way, leaders and reps will know where to focus their coaching or self-improvement efforts.
Step 5: Strengthen customer retention
When sales orgs move toward sustainable scaling, they often rely on retaining and growing existing accounts. Aim for exceptional post-sales experiences that minimize churn, with help from these three strategies:
- Monitor renewal risks: Use sentiment analysis to identify accounts with declining sentiment or competitive mentions.
- Surface upsell opportunities: Track customer interactions to surface changing needs or interest in new products or services.
- Enable customer-centric engagement: Share deal insights with your customer success team to ensure proactive and personalized outreach.
Chart a profitable path forward
Growth is still important and always will be. But in this macroeconomic climate, with investors increasingly focused on long-term, sustainable, profitable growth, companies have to recalibrate — or risk failure.
Companies that master this transition early will have a significant competitive advantage, building resilient businesses that can weather economic uncertainty.
I have full confidence in Gong’s ability to help your revenue teams focus on long-term, sustainable, and profitable growth using the five-step process above. With the platform’s real-time analytical capabilities and centralized data, your GTM teams can create a foundation for growth that doesn’t just survive market shifts, but thrives because of them.
