If you work in enterprise B2B marketing or sales, you know the drill: too many tools, a mess of spreadsheets, and a lot of noise about “alignment.” Go-to-market strategies are supposed to be crisp, but they usually end up duct-taped together. There’s a new wave of platforms promising to fix this. Today, I’m diving into Factors, a B2B GTM software tool that says it’ll streamline the chaos.
I’ve spent a few weeks living with Factors—using it, poking at its weak spots, and seeing if it actually helps a complex team get out of its own way. Here’s the real story.
Who Should Care About Factors?
Let’s be real: if you’re a small team or just getting started with B2B, this is probably overkill. Factors is built for medium to large enterprises—think multiple sales and marketing teams, product launches that span countries, and execs who want dashboards more than they want answers.
If you’re already juggling Salesforce, HubSpot, a project manager (or three), and still feel like you can’t see the forest for the trees—keep reading. This is for you.
What Does Factors Actually Do?
There’s a lot of marketing fluff around “streamlining GTM” and “breaking down silos.” Here’s the boiled-down version:
- Centralizes GTM Plans: Instead of that monster spreadsheet, you get one (mostly) live source of truth for GTM strategy, campaigns, and ownership.
- Tracks Progress in Real-Time: See who’s doing what, what’s stuck, and which team is dropping the ball.
- Integrates With Your Stack: Connects to Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and most of the usual suspects. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes with hiccups (more on that later).
- Dashboards for Days: Tons of reporting and visualization options, which look great in meetings.
- Playbooks & Collaboration: Preset GTM templates, commenting, and assignment features help keep everyone pointed the same way.
In theory, it’s your GTM nerve center—a place to plan, execute, and track everything that matters.
Setting Up: The Good, the Bad, and the Annoying
The Good
- Clean Onboarding: Factors walks you through setup with a straightforward wizard. No mystery meat navigation here.
- Import Existing Plans: You can pull in current GTM docs from Google Sheets or Excel. It’s not perfect, but it saves hours.
- Role-Based Access: You can lock down who sees what, which matters when you have competing sales teams or execs who shouldn’t touch anything.
The Bad
- Integration Weirdness: Salesforce and HubSpot connections worked, but not without a few retries and one call to support.
- Learning Curve for Non-Marketers: If your sales or product teams aren’t used to structured planning, expect some grumbling.
The Annoying
- Initial Data Mapping: When importing old plans, you’ll need to clean up column headers and formats. Not a deal-breaker, but it’s not “upload and go,” either.
- Notifications Overload: By default, Factors loves to email and ping everyone for everything. You’ll want to tune this down fast.
Pro Tip: Set aside a day to get your core team aligned in the tool. Don’t try to roll it out piecemeal—confusion multiplies.
Features That Actually Matter (and the Ones That Don’t)
Worth Your Time
1. Real-Time Progress Tracking
The “status board” view is the heart of Factors. You see every campaign, owner, timeline, and blockers at a glance. This kills the endless “where are we with X?” emails. For orgs with lots of moving parts, this is gold.
2. Playbooks
Preset GTM playbooks get you out of “blank page” hell. You can customize templates for launches, cross-sells, or expansions. No need to reinvent the wheel every quarter.
3. Integrations (When They Work)
When set up right, pulling in data from Salesforce or HubSpot means your GTM plans reflect reality—not just wishful thinking. This keeps the strategizing honest.
4. Reporting & Dashboards
You get detailed, customizable dashboards. Leadership wants pipeline coverage by region? You can show it, live. But don’t fall into the trap of reporting for reporting’s sake—show only what’s useful.
Meh (or Ignore)
1. Built-In Chat & Comments
If your org already lives in Slack or Teams, you’ll probably ignore the in-tool chat. It’s fine, but no one needs another place to ping people.
2. Gamification
There are “badges” and “points” for completing tasks. Unless you’re managing a team of summer interns, it feels unnecessary.
3. Mobile Experience
You can check status from your phone, but it’s clunky. This is a desktop-first tool, so don’t expect to do real work from your iPad at the airport.
Where Factors Shines
- Visibility: You see exactly where things stand, who’s responsible, and where the bottlenecks are. No more “I thought you had it?” moments.
- Accountability: Assigning owners and due dates means there’s a clear paper trail. If something’s late, the blame game ends fast.
- Repeatability: The playbooks help teams avoid reinventing the GTM wheel every time. If you launch products often, this saves real effort.
- Executive-Friendly: Dashboards look polished and are easy to export. You’re not scrambling before the board meeting.
Where Factors Falls Short
- Integration Troubles: The promise is “plug and play,” but expect to spend real time getting Salesforce, HubSpot, and other data sources synced up. If your CRM setup is non-standard, expect even more pain.
- Adoption Curve: Sales teams, especially, can be slow to adopt another tool. If you can’t show them immediate value (like fewer check-in calls), they’ll ignore it.
- Overwhelm Factor: Too many features can be a downside. You’ll need to resist the urge to use every dashboard or workflow—less is more.
- Cost: No surprises—enterprise tools aren’t cheap. Pricing isn’t public, and it’s a “call us” situation. If ROI isn’t clear within a quarter or two, finance will ask tough questions.
Real-World Tips for Making Factors Work
- Start Simple: Don’t try to map every process into Factors on day one. Pick one big launch or initiative and get that humming first.
- Limit Notifications: Seriously—customize alerts, or your team will click “mute” and miss the important stuff.
- Own the Data Hygiene: Garbage in, garbage out. Designate someone to keep plans and integrations tidy, at least at first.
- Train, Don’t Assume: Run a few live walk-throughs. Don’t just send people a login and hope for the best.
- Measure Early: Set clear KPIs for what you want Factors to improve (like campaign velocity or pipeline visibility). If you can’t measure it, you won’t know if it’s working.
Should You Buy It?
If you’re a midsize or large B2B org and your GTM process feels like herding cats, Factors is worth a look. It does a solid job of centralizing plans, surfacing problems, and keeping teams honest. But you’ll need patience to set it up, and you’ll need buy-in from more than just marketing.
If you can’t get adoption—or if your stack is already tightly integrated with other tools—the juice might not be worth the squeeze. Test it with one team before rolling it out company-wide.
Keep It Simple, Iterate Often
Here’s the bottom line: GTM software like Factors can help, but it won’t fix broken processes or bad teamwork. If you keep things simple, focus on the features that help you move faster, and don’t get lost in dashboards, you’ll get value. Start small, learn as you go, and don’t be afraid to cut what isn’t working. That’s how you actually streamline.