GTM Strategy: Is Alignment the Trend We’re Missing in 2024?

The right GTM (Go To Market) strategy has always been crucial to success in the dynamic business world. An effective go-to-market strategy framework ensures you’re choosing the right audience for your product launch, creating the best content for the most valuable channels, and paving the way for exceptional customer experiences. 

Of course, as technology and consumers evolve, GTM strategy trends often evolve with them. In the last year, for instance, we’ve seen the rise of generative AI to transform the GTM process, with 98% of marketers already embracing this technology in some way. 

There’s also an increasing focus on omnichannel campaigns, immersive interactions, and hyper-automation in the modern world. However, in the race to embrace new innovations, companies may be overlooking one of the most important GTM trends of all: alignment. 

Without alignment, the various teams in your organisation can’t work cohesively together on building relationships, retaining consumers, or even embracing new technology. Here’s why GTM alignment is a must for business leaders in 2024. 

What is GTM Alignment? The Basics

Go-to-market alignment, or GTM alignment doesn’t just mean connecting the dots and data between your marketing and sales teams. In today’s world, comprehensive alignment means ensuring all the pieces of your go-to-market strategy are connected, from sales and success programs to product development, and marketing campaigns. 

Fully aligned teams share the same goals, ensuring every team member is working towards the same vision, and monitoring the right metrics. They have access to the same data, so they can make intelligent decisions about how to increase sales, boost retention, and increase marketing ROI. 

They also ensure you can consistently drive opportunities to your business, with the same approach to messaging, and highlighting your company’s value propositions. 

Consistently, studies have shown that GTM alignment significantly improves the chances of a successful go-to-market strategy. In fact, up to 70% of GTM strategies fail as a result of misalignment between teams. Despite this, only around 14% of B2B organisations have an aligned process that connects product, operations, marketing, and sales groups. 

Without alignment, things can get disorganised quite quickly, leading to missed deadlines, errors, and even delays in your go-to-market journey. 

The Importance of GTM Alignment in 2024

The value of GTM alignment isn’t an entirely new concept. For decades, analysts and business leaders have agreed that strong alignment between teams helps to facilitate consistent growth. Some studies even indicate that companies who align their revenue teams achieve 19% faster growth and 15% higher profitability than their peers. 

However, there are certain trends and evolutions in the business landscape that make GTM alignment even more important in 2024. Customer journeys are growing more complex, competition is increasing, and budgets are dropping among businesses worldwide. In this difficult environment, alignment could be the key to a stronger foundation for your GTM strategy. 

Here are some of the main reasons companies will need to double down on taking a “holistic” approach to their GTM strategy this year.

1. Alignment is Crucial for Digital Transformation

As mentioned above, various new technologies are emerging in the modern market to support sales, product development, customer success, and operations teams. This includes generative AI, one of the most exciting new innovations to hit the modern landscape. 

Unfortunately, without alignment, it’s difficult to fully take advantage of these new tools for a few reasons. First, innovative GTM technologies, like AI and automation platforms, generally rely on data. The more data you have about every stage of your customer’s journey, the more effective your tools will be. 

For instance, if you’re embedding generative AI into each stage of the customer journey, you need to be able to infuse your “bots” with data about how customers search for products, make purchasing decisions, and what kind of issues they might face. 

If your various GTM teams are disconnected, you end up with a disjointed view of the full customer journey and tools that ultimately deliver inconsistent experiences to consumers.

Alternatively, if you can align your teams, your data, and your processes, you can take full advantage of the latest innovations in the market. You can train your bots and systems with comprehensive insights into the customer journey, making it easier to automate processes, reduce time to purchase, and potentially increase customer retention. 

2. Relationship Building is Essential in 2024

In the last couple of years, there’s been a major shift in the way consumers interact with brands and their products. The traditional “sales funnel” is quickly being replaced with a comprehensive “customer journey flywheel” which involves focusing on delivering excellent experiences through every touchpoint. 

Consumers now expect businesses to commit to building powerful, long-lasting relationships with them, through personalised interactions, proactive support, and even customised sales strategies. Without alignment in the go-to-market strategy, you automatically end up with a disjointed customer experience. If your marketing teams don’t know what benefits convert prospects into loyal customers, they’ll struggle to attract leads to send to the sales team. 

If sales teams don’t know how to effectively address consumer objections and concerns, based on feedback from customer success teams, they won’t convert as many leads. When customer success teams don’t know what consumers are looking for, they can’t create service plans and onboarding programs that pave the way for retention and advocacy. 

As economic issues and rising competition in every marketplace make customer churn into a more significant issue for business leaders, creating an aligned team to engage, retain, and maintain customer relationships will be more important than ever. 

3. Alignment Reduces Operational Costs

Competition for customers is increasing in 2024, particularly in areas like the SaaS and technology landscape. Customer acquisition costs are increasing as new advertisers enter the marketplace, and engagement on common marketing channels is trending downwards. 

Companies need to be able to experiment with new strategies to capture, convert, and retain leads if they want to stay ahead of the competition. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to take an agile approach to GTM experimentation, as budgets continue to dwindle. 

Virtually every business is trying to do more with less in the modern landscape, relying on leaner teams, and technology consolidation. Alignment between your GTM teams can help you to ensure you’re making the most of your budget, by giving you access to more comprehensive data. 

Aligned teams can share insights with their GTM colleagues, to pave the way for proactive, and intelligent experimentation.  Sales teams can share insights with marketing teams about which channels drive the most leads, making it easier to know how to distribute your budget. Customer success teams can help sales teams understand how to better onboard customers and pitch products to increase time to value, reducing the risk of lost opportunities. 

GTM Success in 2024 Depends on Comprehensive Alignment

Alignment might not be a new concept for modern GTM teams, but it’s something that businesses need to focus on a lot more in 2024. Before you can start investing in new technologies, gaining an edge over the competition, or increasing retention, you first need aligned teams. 

Alignment between your sales, marketing, and customer success specialists is crucial to ensuring you can adapt to today’s customer-journey-focused landscape. Without alignment, you risk falling behind your competitors and damaging your reputation with a disjointed, fragmented approach.