Aligning Your GTM Teams - 7 Tips to Improve Your Performance
A strong growth story starts with aligning your GTM teams. When your team is in sync, your efforts are amplified driving more pipeline, smoother handoffs and better retention. But alignment doesn’t happen by chance; it needs to be an intentional act.
Here are strategies to consider to improve your alignment.
1. Shared Goals, One GTM Plan
The foundation to alignment is aligning on goals. This starts with ensuring your capacity, pipeline and bookings models all work together to generate targets across all teams. To do this:
Capacity Model: Align your sales and customer success teams on the resources (aka headcount) needed to meet plan. By understanding the capacity of each team (how many deals can sales realistically close, how man customers CS can manage), you can can more accurately set expectation for bookings and pipe required.
Bookings Model: The outcome of your Bookings Model drives the inputs into finance’s models. Your output here is tied to the Capacity and pipeline generated with assumed conversions and productivity.
Pipeline Model: Based on the outcome of how much you will realistically be able to book from your Bookings Model, work you way up the funnel to determine how much pipeline needs to be created by when to support those bookings. Your pipeline model will assume a certain % of the pipe generated will come from sales, marketing, CS and partner. These leading indicators will keep you ahead of future downturns from decreased pipeline creation.
By making sure all 3 models are tightly connected, you set realistic goals for sales, marketing and CS teams. This should remove the doubt about marketing having a pipeline/booking target. The answer is yes.
2. Regular Cross-Functional Reviews
Hold biweekly or monthly GTM reviews to track progress. Bring key players from each team together to review pipeline health, lead flow, deal velocity and customer feedback. These meetings should focus on identifying gaps, removing silos, and aligning priorities. Outputs here include action plans to resolve any shortfalls in bookings or pipeline, enablement efforts to increase effectiveness and competitive/messaging updates. I like to build out a monthly lookback that details what happened and get ahead of any impacts/things to be aware of for the coming months along with a larger quarterly review that goes deeper.
3. Customer-Centric Messaging
Ensure sales, marketing, and customer success speak the same language when it comes to customer value. Align on messaging, ideal customer profiles (ICPs), and pain points. Regular training or workshops can help refine how teams position your solution consistently across the buyer journey. The market is changing constantly. Staying in touch with the field is key. Customers and prospects will also help you understand how to prioritize product roadmaps as well.
4. Nail the Handoffs
Misaligned handoffs between marketing, sales, and customer success can erode trust. Clearly define the criteria for lead qualification, the process for sales-to-CS handoffs, and expectations for follow-ups. Use automation where possible to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Track key metrics along each handoff such as speed to lead for marketing to SDR and time to first value for sales to CS.
5. Align Incentives
Incentives drive behavior. Align comp plans so that marketing, sales, and CS are all invested in the same outcomes. For example, tying part of marketing’s bonus to sales pipeline or CS bonuses to expansion opportunities ensures collaboration across functions. Have a focus on multi-year deals this year? Make sure sales is incentivized to close those types of deals.
6. Invest in Tools & Data
Your tech stack matters. Sales, marketing, and customer success need access to shared, accurate data—whether it’s via a CRM, customer data platform, or business intelligence tool. Prioritize systems that integrate seamlessly and enable visibility into the full customer lifecycle. Ownership/admin can live in IT/business systems, but roadmap, adoption and utilization should stay within the Ops teams. Having a single source of truth from a data perspective makes analysis and strategy reviews much more productive. Remove the questions around correctness of data and focus on what the data is telling you.
7. Plan for Feedback Loops
Create formal processes for capturing feedback across teams. What insights does customer success hear that could refine marketing campaigns? What objections is sales hearing that can improve product positioning? Close the loop so everyone is informed and empowered.
Wrapping it up
Alignment isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing commitment. By investing in alignment now, you’ll set your GTM teams and your company up for sustained success in Q2 and beyond.
What strategies have worked for your GTM alignment? Let us know!