4 Actions to Take Immediately if Your GTM Teams Are Misaligned

It’s a beautiful thing when your go-to-market (GTM) organization is in sync. Customer-facing teams that work together smoothly build a seamless path for the buyer journey. Aligned teams share critical insights, deliver a consistent message, and generally collaborate to build a seamless experience, 

On the other hand, if your GTM teams struggle to cooperate, every point of friction between them becomes a bump in the road of your buyer journey. To 80% of buyers, the experience you provide is as important as your products or services. Without cross-team alignment, you’re not likely to get far with them.

We’ve rounded up advice from CEO David Obrand on actions to resolve GTM misalignment. 

Symptoms of GTM misalignment

While you might suspect your sales, customer success,and marketing teams are at odds, you may not realize how many nuisances tie back to GTM misalignment.

These common issues signal problems across GTM functions:

• Frustrated leads and potential customers: Lack of coordination across teams, conflicting messaging, or exaggerated claims make the target customer journey feel inconsistent and chaotic.
• Goals and KPIs at odds: Team-level performance metrics get in the way of team collaboration or even conflict with revenue goals.
• Data silos and disagreement about facts: Failure to share information slows down decision-making and keeps teams from using or trusting business data.
• Delays or friction during handoffs: A fragmented customer journey causes delays and burdens buyers, leading to lost opportunities, weakened customer relationships, or damaging your brand’s reputation. 

It’s important to recognize these as more than internal nuisances. They are symptoms of an organizational dysfunction that disrupts the customer experience and undermines your revenue goals. 

"...They'll hear one thing from marketing and a totally different thing from sellers, and that creates a lot of confusion and very rarely leads to a successful outcome.”

Actions you can take to align GTM efforts

Aligning your GTM teams is a top-down process. Revenue leaders must set the tone and ensure that everyone follows the same processes and works towards the same goals. These four actions can fundamentally change how your GTM teams work — and work together.

1. Form a GTM council

“Sales and marketing must work as one cross-functional team. “ — David Obrand, CEO of Salesloft

Establish a GTM supergroup with representatives from Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success. This cross-functional team should meet regularly and maintain communication between meetings to keep all teams aligned on revenue targets.

2. Standardize processes

“The top revenue-generating companies build resilience by standardizing their processes, making them less vulnerable to market shifts and better equipped to seize opportunities.” — David Obrand, CEO of Salesloft

Create a unified playbook for the broader GTM team with guidance to align messaging and engagement. This will help make your sales motion consistent and repeatable.

3. Set shared goals and KPIs

“If you guide sellers to actions that don't drive the right outcomes, they will immediately lose confidence in either the system or leadership.” — David Obrand, CEO of Salesloft

Discourage a single-minded focus on throwaway metrics like the number of meetings booked, the number of assets published, or call resolution time. Instead, develop shared revenue goals and metrics that all teams can support and track collectively to drive real revenue. This will reduce confusion, foster cooperation, and help everyone see their part in the big picture. 

4. Implement RevOps

“With commonalities in execution behavior, the patterns of what's working and what's not will surface faster along with the data to validate the need for optimization, whether it be to the process, messaging, or training/onboarding.” — David Obrand, CEO of Salesloft

If you can, introduce a Revenue Operations (RevOps) function. RevOps unifies operations across sales, marketing, and customer success. RevOps serves as the backbone that supports data sharing, process standardization, and performance measurement across all GTM teams.

Maintain alignment with a unified workflow

Software can’t solve GTM misalignment on its own, but you can set your GTM teams up for success by putting them together on one platform. 

A unified workflow improves cross-team communication, makes it easy to standardize processes, and gives RevOps and Revenue leadership complete visibility into activities across the Revenue organization. 

A revenue orchestration platform gives your GTM teams the confidence and shared experience to connect with your customer base, and better and achieve repeatable revenue. The corresponding boost in performance also improves employee morale and retention.

To learn more about the barriers to predictable revenue and how to overcome them, download our guide, Build to Win: How Actionable Revenue Insights Drive Consistency and Repeatability in Revenue Growth.