Architecting a successful Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is one of the critical and complex strategic initiatives for any company. Like many things in business, it’s comparatively easier to develop than to execute. According to the Harvard Business Review, 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. In my experience working across the pillars of the GTM function, I’ve been lucky to learn from both successes and failures, and one factor has been at the core of both: alignment.
Let’s start with the age-old struggle of sales and marketing alignment. It’s hard to find a GTM conference that doesn’t have a keynote session dedicated to it. After all these years, what are we still missing? The teams aren’t strangers to collaboration, but 96% of sales and marketing professionals admit there are challenges with strategy alignment. This struggle is not only an employee experience concern; it has a quantifiable impact on the customer experience and company revenue. Productivity and execution are stifled when 80% of key commercial activities are missing contributions from one function or the other, creating collaboration drag. Organizations with high levels of collaboration drag are 37% less likely to achieve their revenue goals.
So how do we get from siloed to synced?
The universal focus across GTM teams is the customer; one of my favorite personal reminders is, “it’s not about us, it’s about them.” It starts with anchoring the team’s focus on intimately understanding the target customer, their key challenges, and how we can uniquely solve them. Oftentimes, each of these teams has their own data, insights, and viewpoints on the answers to those strategic questions. The reality is that they see the customer across different stages of the journey; the key is bringing those perspectives together to have a holistic view of the customer and the strategy.
Enter the “Revenue Team.” My best experiences with GTM success were oriented around fostering the mentality that sales and marketing were two parts of one function, all trying to drive sales velocity and revenue growth. Plan the attack together. Operationally, that translates into co-creating goals, metrics, and motions to achieve them, as well as the collaborative processes that get people aligned on what those actually should be.
On the topic of metrics, goals need to be both aligned and shared. That means we’re not only operating around the same definitions of success but also quantifying and tracking with the same metrics and reporting. Attribution is critical to understanding tactical performance, of course, but tactical performance alone doesn’t always equate to a successful GTM strategy and can often become the first place where alignment becomes fragmented. As a marketer, focusing on metrics that are a common currency for success inherently bring unity across the end-to-end function and answer critical questions like:
- Sales Pipeline: Are our acquisition strategies resulting in revenue opportunities?
- Sales Velocity: How effectively are we closing deals, and where can we optimize?
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Are we bringing in new business at an efficient cost and return?
- Revenue Growth: Are we pacing to our bottom line goal? More specifically, are we winning business in the ICP segments we’re targeting?
- Retention and Replacement Rate: Are we keeping the business we’re winning and demonstrating value to our customers? Are we growing new business fast enough to offset any attrition?
By identifying and defining accountability to these success metrics as one “Revenue Team”, we can speak the same language and share a common understanding.
Underscoring all of this needs to be an operational rhythm for the GTM function to collaborate to establish and perpetuate alignment. As the ways we work continue to evolve, getting multiple teams to operate in alignment means we must intentionally architect key collaborative moments in the GTM planning and execution process. Our GTM teams use Mural to co-create strategies; visualizing and documenting with AI enables us to clarify and align more quickly before we move to work within their specific functions. Discovering misalignment further down in the process drives frustration and wastes time in an environment where every company needs to move faster than their competitors to grab market share.
Getting these powerhouse functions to work in synchrony is hard. Silos naturally emerge, especially when you’re moving fast. That’s why GTM success requires intentional focus on rallying around the customer, building the strategy together, and agreeing on shared success metrics fosters the mentality of a unified team. And what I consider the most important factor: having mutual empathy and respect for each team’s unique contribution to the results. So, let’s go-to-market. Together.
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