How to Align Sales, Marketing and GTM Teams

Is everyone in the boat rowing in the same direction? One of the biggest challenges you may face is a siloed approach to go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

Why is alignment among GTM teams important?

Aligning Sales, Marketing and GTM teams can be a challenge, however silos can hinder growth and diminish your competitive edge. Each team may be focused on their own KPIs rather aiming to achieve a collective goal together. Aligning sales and marketing is not just a nice-to-have but a necessity for driving GTM success. So what do you do? Here’s how you can achieve seamless alignment and set your teams up for a successful product launch and sustained growth.

Establish a Unified Vision

Ensure that all teams are working toward a common goal. Having a unified vision across all teams is the key to getting alignment and breaking down silos.

Steps:

• Define a clear strategy: Outline our objectives, your key metrics to measure and success criteria
• Create Shared Goals: Break down the overall strategy into team specific objectives that tie back to the companies mission.
• Establish a communication frequency: Use Company wide meetings the communicate the goals and how the company is trending toward them. Use meetings with project drivers to keep track of the individual tasks required to accomplish the goal, use project managment tools like Click-Up or Asana to collaborate on projects as team.

Benefits and Examples:

• Prioritization and decision making: As an operations team, you will receive many requests from stakeholders. When your unsure when to prioritize what, aligning the priority to the unified goal can help
  • Example: If the Sales team requests to clean up some legacy data in the CRM for historic reporting purposes. This could be an important task and has obvious value however if it does not tie into the overall company objective, it should only be worked on after primary objectives are on track.
• Stronger Team Moral: Clarity of purpose boosts team confidence as members understand how their contributions impact overall success.
  • Example: If all team know that targeting more mid-market brands is the goal, each team will know what needs to be done to reach that goal and can work towards it. Marketing will focus on bringing more of these lead to the top of the sales funnel, product can build features that are beneficial to these brands, and sales can update their strategies to best win these brands.
• Customer Experience: A cohesive vision ensures that all customer touch points from marketing to sales are delivered with a consistent message.
  • Example: Similar to the example above, if mid-market brands are the target, Marketing can deliver copy and assets that target this market and sales can leverage the same information to win customers.

Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration

Create a culture of collaboration with regular interactions among sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams.

Steps

• Joint Planning Sessions: Bring teams together during the planning process to align strategies, responsibilities, and tactics.
• Communication: Communicate the strategies, tools, assets, and processes each team is using to see how they can be leveraged by another department.
• Centralized Resources: Use tools like Notion, Confluence, or Click-Up to maintain a shared repository of plans, updates, and resources.

Benefits and Examples

• Increases Efficiency and effectiveness: Shared resources and joint planning reduces duplicate efforts and ensures you get the most out of your resources.
  • Example: Lets say the unified vision is to target customers who use a competitor. In this case, the sales team is attempting to close deals with customer who use the competitor and customer success may be focused on avoiding churn to competitors.
    • Marketing is creating content focused on comparisons. Sales can use this same content to win deals, customer success can use the content to avoid churn.
    • Sales and customers are having conversation and discussing feature comparisons. Product can use this information to determine the product features they need to work on to be most competitive
• Cross-functional skills development: Every team has their own set of skills they need to do their job effectively. In many cases these skills overlap so there is opportunity to cross train.
  • Example: If the customer success team is trying to retain and increase revenue. Sales teams can share scripts, demo decks, sales tactics and follow up strategies that customer success teams can leverage to avoid churn and upsell.
• Holistic Customer Insight: Each team is seeing a different customer perspective.
  • Example: Marketing may be seeing customer react to specific copy or landing pages, Sales may be hearing specific pain points from customers and customer success may be hearing certain successes. Bringing this all together gives a holistic view of the customer.

Align Metrics and Incentives

One common barrier to alignment is misaligned metrics and incentives. Marketing and pre-sales may be incentivized for volume rather than quality. Customer Success may be incentivized for up-sell but that may not be a KPI for other teams.

Steps

• Create Shared KPIs: Use shared performance indicators such as revenue growth, customer acquisition cost, and customer satisfaction.
• Team Oriented Incentives: Create incentives that reward collaboration and overall success rather than individual achievements.

Benefits and Examples:

• Shared Revenue Goals: Instead of separate targets for sales, marketing and other teams, a shared target encourages teams to work collectively toward the same goal.
  • Example: Marketing gets leads into the top of the funnel and feels the work is done and its up to the sales team to close. With aligned goals, marketing is encouraged to participate further down the funnel. The marketing team can provide sales with further insights to help them close such as what copy attracted these leads and insights on how the lead has engaged with the company.
• Unified Reporting Dashboards: KPIs can be measured on the same dashboard for each team. Ensuring everyone tracks progress using the same data.
  • Example: Some companies hold weekly (or at the very least quarterly) leadership meetings to deep dive into metrics across GTM teams. These sometimes take 1-2 hours. If most teams were focused on the same KPIs, it can streamline these meetings. The other metrics are still important but you can choose to review them as needed when you have a question of the primary KPIs.
• Collaborative Bonus Structures: Bonuses can be tied to overall company performance rather than just individual team performance.
  • Example: When pre-sales goal is to just generate leads in the funnel, some teams will push for volume rather than quality and efficiency. Sales teams may focus closing as many deals as then can rather than focusing on which deals will have the best LTV and retention.

Define Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Ambiguity can lead to confusion and inefficiency. Having roles and responsibilities mapped out clearly helps with execution, collaboration, and accountability.

Steps

• Identify Key Roles: Determine the essential roles for achieving your GTM strategy, ensuring each team has clearly defined contributions
• Develop a RACI Matrix: Map out responsibilities for every major task or initiative to ensure their are no gaps or overlaps.
• Communicate Regularly: This is a theme for many steps but most important here. Use recurring team meetings to check progress and make any necessary adjustments as your strategy develops.

Benefits and Examples

• Eliminates Redundancies: Clear roles ensures that teams do not duplicate efforts which maximizes efficiency
  • Example: Lets say to improve customer experience you implemented a process for the Customer Success Team to run QBRs with their clients. This included building out decks and scripts for communication, processes for tracking, and a communication cadence.
• Alignment with Goals: Clear responsibilities ensures that every role contributes to the teams and organizations objectives.
  • Example: The product team may be finalizing a feature development. Marketing may be unclear on the features unique value proposition and how to position it and sales may not know how to pitch the new feature. With a shared goal alignment such as “Launch a new feature in x time and achieve 15% increase in adoption in 3 months, teams determine what their responsibilities are to reach this goal.
• Enhanced Collaboration: Clarified roles reduces friction, prevents misunderstandings, and encourages teams to better communicate as they need to collaborate on specific tasks.
  • Example: Using the product feature example above, Marketing, Product, and Sales would all need to communicate and collaborate to reach the goal. There will be some overlap between marketing and sales when it come to positioning and pitching the new feature.

Implement Feedback Loops

Feedback loops help teams learn from both successes and failures. It also creates a culture of continuous learning and adaptability.

Steps

• Collect input from all teams: When launching a new project, let teams know that you expect feed. Then hold them accountable by requesting feedback from all teams after the launch.
• Review Customer Feedback: Customer feedback is sometimes overlooked when it comes to changes that happen in the GTM process however this can be the most insightful.
• Act on feedback: Act on the lessons that are learned and refine the process and strategies. This shows teams who are providing the feedback that you are listening and helps you improve.

Benefits and Examples

• Increased Agility: Continuously learning allows teams to adapt strategies quickly rather than waiting for the quantitative data.
  • Example: You rolled out a new lead targeting strategy but your typical sales cycle is 60 days. This would mean you would potentially have to wait that long or longer before determining if the new strategy was a effective. However with a feedback look between sales and marketing, you can quickly collect qualitative data from sales reps to determine if the new leads are responding as excepted to the product offerings.
• Improved Decision-Making: Feedback from teams and customers gives you the information you need to determine if the completed work is making the impact that you expected. It can also help you make decisions in the future with related projects.
  • Example: Lets say to improve customer experience you implemented a process for the Customer Success Team to run QBRs with their clients. This included building out decks and scripts for communication, processes for tracking. You learn from CSM feedback that the decks aren’t covering the pain-points for the customer. Now you can quickly adjust the content of the deck and determine what next steps you may need to take to address the pain points.

Invest in the Right Tools

There are so many tools out there and its can be difficult to know which ones you actually need vs which ones just have great marketing and sales teams and did a good job of getting your attention.

Steps:

• Identify Pain Points and Objectives: Clearly evaluate the challenges you are facing as a Go-to-Market Team. Having a good understanding of the teams needs will help you find tools that benefit multiple teams typically results in a better ROI.
• Engage Stakeholders: Stakeholder engagement results in buy-in for the tools that you choose. This in turn results in better adoption, tighter feedback loops and better ROI.
• Research and Plan: Research tools that could be potential solution. As you are evaluating calculate the ROI and determine the success metrics. Create a rollout plan and include a plan to reevaluate after the rollout to determine if the success criteria was met and that you are getting the expected ROI.

Benefits and Examples

• Better ROI: Teams that are involved in selecting tools have a better understanding of the different features and benefits the tool may offer. This can result in getting the most ROI out of a specific tool.
  • Example: Your company is exploring a data enrichment tool for the sales team to have better lead data. One of the attributes the tool provides is tech stack data that tell the sales team when a company is using a competitor. The customer success team could use the same data to determine when an existing customer is trialing a competitor resulting an early churn indicator. You can also leverage existing customer data to verify the accuracy of the enrichment tools you are evaluating.
• Adaptability: When teams communicate their pain points and are involved in the decision making process of selecting new tools they will more effectively adopt the new tools.
  • Example: Sales managers are listening to individual recordings to provide call coaching. The marketing team is relying on feedback from sales teams and fields in the CRM to understand customers. In this situation there are clear pain points for sales and marketing. Implementing a tool like Gong solves for both pain points. Sales can now listen to snippets of calls or search for specific keywords. Marketing teams can do the same.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash