How to achieve GTM alignment?
Setting the tone for a successful GTM partnership among Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product
According to HubSpot, organizations with strong GTM alignment deliver 38% higher sales win rates and 24% faster revenue growth over 3 years. Is this surprising? Whether you’re trying to accelerate mid-funnel pipeline, improve top of funnel quality and volume, or capture more revenue per customer, alignment is key to achieving these.
Together, marketing, sales, and customer success own the relationship of the customer from the first point of contact until they renew/churn, in essence they own the revenue cycle. But I’d also go a step further and include “product” in my GTM alignment.
Having cohesive alignment ensures a consistent customer experience. With word of mouth recommendations carrying the highest weight in B2B buying cycles (73%), happy customers should always be the goal.
73% of buyers rely on word of mouth during the buying process
(source: Wynter 2024 B2B SaaS Buyer Journey report)
What is GTM alignment and how do you achieve it?
Everyone is in agreement on the key messages and singing from the same song sheet.
This means you agree on the key problems you solve, how to frame the messaging around it, what that message is, and how it’s incorporated and repeated throughout the sales process (decks, cadences, demos), marketing (collateral, advertising, website), customer success (drip campaigns, 1:1 meetings) and within the product itself.
There needs to be clearly defined and shared vocabulary, definitions, metrics and goals.
For example:
What are the definitions of an MQL/SAL/SQL/Opportunity stages, etc.?
What are the goals for each group? Examples might be: top of funnel quality, NRR, increase in market share, activating your partner network, capturing more revenue per customer…
What’s the criteria each group will be measured on for success?
Try defining your SaaS flywheel on how you attract, retain, and develop champions. 👇
Everyone needs to share consistent feedback and commit to accountability.
Often in sales and marketing there is the “blame game.” Whether it’s sales not following up, not enough high quality ‘at bats’ from marketing, features missing from product, or high churn. When you start playing the “blame game” you are not working as a cohesive executive GTM team.
Sales beating their bookings target but ARR is suffering due to churn is not something to celebrate.
Same for Marketing crushing their MQL or SQL goals and sales not hitting their quota, this is not something to celebrate.
When Product hits their deployments on time, if sales and marketing aren’t hitting their numbers, then there is misalignment.
If churn is high (regrettable or not), and sales isn’t hitting their targets, you’re not growing.
Own your area and hold others accountable to theirs.
Communicate with one another on a regular cadence with the right people in the room.
In order for there to be accountability you have to know who to hold accountable. Each GTM head should be present and should have agreed upon goals and metrics you are, as a company, trying to achieve.
“To be clear is kind, and to be unclear is unkind” — Brene Brown
As Brene Brown says, “to be clear is kind, and to be unclear is unkind.” Be curious and ask questions to challenge your colleagues. No one grows if they’re not challenged. You won’t always have the right GTM team in place. But just remember skills are trainable and attitudes are adjustable, so use your executive influence and super communicator skills to make a stronger 💪 GTM team.
In a future post I will talk about how to be a super communicator to help talk through difficult situations like these when you’re not necessarily in agreement. Stay tuned.