The Hidden Time Drains Burdening GTM Teams and What Leaders Can Do About Them

By Cara Pepper Day & Lauren Magee

 

Go-to-market (GTM) teams in the beverage alcohol industry are under more pressure than ever. Expectations around execution, visibility, compliance, and growth continue to rise, yet the tools and processes meant to support those goals often slow teams down instead.

This isn’t a technology conversation. It’s a leadership conversation about where time is leaking inside GTM organizations, and what leaders can realistically do about it.

During a recent discussion at WSWA Access Live, Andavi Solutions posed a simple but critical question to industry leaders: Where does your GTM team lose the most time today? The answers revealed both a challenge and an opportunity. 

While the industry continues to evolve, some foundational truths remain the same: 

• Teams need a place to retain institutional knowledge
• The 80/20 rule still applies when it comes to account segmentation and targeting 
• Leaders must continue to do more with less time, energy, and people

Time Is Money and GTM Teams Know It

In an industry poll, GTM leaders overwhelmingly pointed to manual data entry and cleanup as the biggest barrier to efficiency, followed closely by tool friction and the challenge of reconciling scattered data across systems.

These are not minor inconveniences. They represent hours lost every week, time that should be spent selling, coaching, and strengthening retail relationships. Over time, these hidden drains quietly tax performance and morale.

Five Common Time Drains Holding GTM Teams Back

1. Manual Data Management (46%)
   The Admin Tax No One Budgeted For

Many teams are still double-entering data, cleaning up errors, and managing siloed information across tools that were never designed to work together. The result is less time in the field and more administrative burden on reps.

What leaders can do starts with decision-making. Decide what data actually matters. What gets measured will improve, but measuring everything causes teams to lose focus and perhaps even waste time. Leaders should consider measuring administrative time itself, then narrowing data collection by eliminating “nice-to-have” fields that don’t drive action.

Just as important is a shift in perspective. Today, technology can capture data as a byproduct of selling actions rather than an added task. A rep can take a photo in an account and utilizing technology turn it into actionable data in real time. This changes the economics of data collection entirely.

2. Tool Friction and Workarounds (29%)

Juggling multiple apps that don’t reflect real-world GTM motion leads to workarounds, delays, and frustration. Over time, teams stop using tools the way they were intended, which erodes visibility and trust in the data.

As a leader, this is not a delegation problem. It is a responsibility. Leaders must select processes and tools designed specifically for how their teams sell. That means gathering feedback from reps in the market, not just administrators or IT resources, and asking a simple but powerful question: What slows you down today?

The most effective systems are optimized for speed, mobile use,  simplicity, and integrated back-ends. If a tool adds friction in the field, it will eventually be bypassed.

3. Reconciling Disparate Data (13%)

Execution data often lives everywhere at once: mobile apps, browser tools, distributor portals, emails, and spreadsheets. Without a single source of truth teams spend valuable time reconciling numbers instead of acting on them.

Leadership action here starts with creating a receptacle for institutional knowledge, a unified place where execution, pricing, promotions, and performance data come together. Automating data sharing across teams and aligning sales, finance, marketing, and operations around the same data foundation allows organizations to move from reactive reporting to proactive decision-making.

4. Store-Level Execution and Compliance Gaps (8%)

The relatively small percentage is somewhat surprising, given the importance of supporting national and chain accounts. When you have already done the most difficult part of securing an authorization or mandate, isn’t it foolish not to ensure you have 100% compliance on every active placement? When pricing, display execution, shelf standards, or menu placements are not consistently validated, gaps are often identified too late to correct. Technology that converts images into actionable data can help teams verify execution at the store level in real time. Surveys aligned to clear KPIs also enable leaders to monitor back bar, menu, shelf, and planogram compliance over time.

Many organizations strive for a “perfect store” standard, but leadership should understand that perfection is not static. It must be measured, reviewed, and continuously refined to drive sustained growth.

5. Lagging In-Market Insights (4%)

Many GTM organizations still rely on lagging indicators (Shipments/Depletions) to evaluate performance and incentives. When feedback delivery is delayed, coaching moments and, the window for adjustments are missed–and friction builds.

We see improved revenue with high-performing teams that focus on leading indicators of success and connect execution directly to outcomes. Do you have clear visibility into which of your team’s selling activities are driving the most case sales? That’s a question every leadership team should be checking and re-checking as consumer buying trends vary. The goal is not more pressure, but less friction. Data should enable better conversations, not slow them down.

Where Leaders Should Go From Here

Across all of these challenges, the takeaway is clear: 

Your GTM team’s time is your most valuable asset. Protect it.

Leaders can start by auditing where time is lost today, reducing administrative burden before adding new expectations, and simplifying GTM strategies so execution connects clearly to outcomes. Investing in tools that give time back, rather than demand more of it, is a leadership decision, not a technology upgrade.

Turning Hidden Time Drains Into Visible Wins

Andavi Solutions was built with a clear mission: Empower beverage and CPG suppliers, distributors, and retailers with an AI-driven platform that unifies data and images to drive actionable insights.

The Andavi platform brings together data from sales execution, pricing, promotions, planograms, and shelf insights into one intelligent hub, with AI and machine learning powering the transformation. From image recognition for menu and shelf compliance, to invoice matching for trade spend audits, to planogram validation, the goal is to turn complexity into actionable clarity.

Why does that matter? Because disconnected tools lead to disconnected teams. Eliminating friction between sales, strategy, and systems ensures everyone is working from the same actionable truth, while reducing vendor sprawl and deepening partnerships with a single, trusted platform.

When GTM teams are freed from unnecessary friction, they can focus on what matters most: executing in the market, strengthening relationships, and driving results.