Every founder who pays for go-to-market work eventually asks the same question: did it work? It sounds simple. In hotel tech it rarely is, because sales cycles are long, buying follows the season, and half a dozen other things changed in the business at the same time.

The answer is not to give up on measurement, and it is certainly not to accept a report full of activity. It is to decide, before the work starts, exactly what should change, by how much and by when. This is how I set that up with the hotel tech companies I work with.

Start with one metric, not a dashboard

GTM work should be aimed at a specific leak: demand, conversion, activation or retention. I describe these four in the four places revenue leaks in a hotel tech company. Whichever leak you choose, pick the one metric that best measures it. Proposal-to-close rate. Days from contract to go-live. Share of new properties still active at ninety days.

One metric keeps everybody honest. A dashboard of twenty numbers guarantees that something went up, and something going up is not the same as the work succeeding.

Alongside the metric, agree the target and the date. Not improve conversion, but move proposal-to-close from its current level to a specific higher level by the end of a named quarter. A target can be missed, and that is the point. A goal that cannot be missed cannot tell you anything either.

Write the baseline down before anything changes

The baseline is the current value of that metric, with the date range, the data source and how it was calculated. It needs to be written down and agreed before any change is made. It sounds bureaucratic. It is the only thing that makes the question did it work answerable three months later.

If the data is too messy to produce a baseline, that is the first finding. Fix the tracking, then start the clock. Measuring against a number reconstructed afterwards invites everyone to remember the starting point that suits them.

Separate leading and lagging indicators

Revenue is a lagging indicator. In hospitality it can trail the work by a full quarter or more. So agree on leading indicators that should move first. If the fix is to the demo, the leading indicator might be the share of demos that progress to a proposal. If the fix is to onboarding, it might be the share of properties that complete their first live booking within fourteen days.

Leading indicators tell you within weeks whether the change is doing what it was meant to. Lagging indicators confirm whether it mattered commercially.

Be careful to choose leading indicators that genuinely sit upstream of the result. Demo attendance is easy to count, but if the leak is in proposals, better attendance proves nothing. The test is simple: if this number improves and nothing else changes, would you expect revenue to follow? If the honest answer is not necessarily, choose a different indicator.

Allow for the season

Hotel tech buying rises and falls with the hotel calendar. Properties avoid switching systems in peak season and make decisions in the quieter months, a pattern I explain in why hotel tech sales cycles stretch across seasons. That means a before-and-after comparison can mislead badly. A rise in demo bookings in shoulder season may simply be the season.

Compare against the same period last year as well as the period just before. Where volume allows, compare cohorts of properties that entered the funnel at similar points in the season. It will not be perfect, but it will stop you crediting or blaming the work for the calendar.

Consider an onboarding fix at a booking engine company

Picture a hypothetical booking engine company whose leak map puts activation first: only around half of new properties take a direct booking in their first thirty days. The agreed metric is the share of new properties with a live booking within thirty days. The baseline, from the previous two quarters, is written down along with the same quarter from the year before.

The onboarding redesign goes live. Within six weeks, the leading indicator, properties completing setup in the first fortnight, has clearly improved. Three months on, the thirty-day activation share is up against both comparisons. Churn at ninety days is not yet readable, so the report says so, and names the date it will be. That is what an honest measurement looks like: specific, dated and clear about what is not yet known.

Refuse activity dressed as results

Posts published, emails sent and demos held are worth tracking. They are not outcomes. A GTM report that leads with activity is usually covering for a metric that has not moved. Ask for the target metric first, against its baseline, then everything else.

The same discipline applies inside your own team. When a campaign is reported as a success because it generated a lot of leads, ask what happened to those leads at the next stage. Volume that does not convert is cost, not progress, and in a small hotel tech company it quietly consumes the sales team's time.

Build the review into the engagement

Agree the review dates at the start: a leading-indicator check around six weeks, a lagging-indicator check at three months, and a decision point after that. In the first 30 days of a GTM engagement, the measurement set-up is part of week four, not an afterthought.

Where to start

If you cannot yet say which metric your GTM work should move, start there. Run the 12-point leak audit on your own numbers. It will show you where your biggest leak sits and give you a baseline to measure against.

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