Overcoming the Challenge of Misalignment in GTM Teams

Various challenges can harm the success of your go-to-market initiatives, but for many teams, one of the biggest roadblocks of all is misalignment. According to one report, 35% of survey respondents said the misalignment in GTM teams was their biggest challenge in 2023. 

Unfortunately, the problem is likely to become even worse in the years ahead, thanks to changing buyer preferences and trends, evolving market dynamics, and even disconnect between distributed workers. Misalignment is poison to successful GTM strategies. It makes sales cycles longer, leads to wasted resources, and can even harm customer experiences. 

So how do companies prepare to address the ever-evolving challenges causing misalignment in the GTM space, and what are the repercussions of allowing misalignment to continue?

GTM Misalignment in 2024: The Emerging Challenges

There are plenty of different issues exacerbating the problem of misalignment in GTM teams today. First, the rise of remote and hybrid work is leading to bigger silos between different groups in the workforce, who don’t have a chance to regularly interact and share knowledge. 

Digital transformation can help to address this issue by bringing team members together through the cloud. However, if different employees are using unique apps and tools, this widens the gap between your employees, creating “walled gardens” of information. 

Secondly, go-to-market team dynamics are changing. Building a go-to-market team used to mean simply trying to connect your sales and marketing professionals. Now, there are multiple different groups involved in GTM success, from product managers to customer success experts. 

Connecting all of these individuals around shared goals and targets is complicated, as each segment of your team will have its own specific metrics and KPIs to monitor. At the same time, how companies measure overall GTM success is changing. Many companies, particularly those in the SaaS B2B sector, aren’t just looking at overall growth.

They’re focusing more heavily on customer experience and reducing churn, with metrics like “Net Revenue Retention”. What’s more, on top of all that, companies are broadly rethinking their go-to-market motions, looking beyond standard events and webinars, to multi-faceted strategies that combine digital and offline channels relevant to their target audience. 

The Problem with Misalignment in GTM Teams

Misalignment in GTM teams is a difficult issue to overcome. Unfortunately, failure to align your teams has a significant impact on your company’s results. In fact, one Harvard Business Review article found the misalignment of GTM teams costs companies over $1 trillion a year.

Another report from IDC found that weak alignment causes companies to lose up to 10% of their potential revenue growth. 

Studies consistently show that alignment improves revenue and business success. In one report, alignment between sales and marketing teams increased revenue by 55%, and improved relationships with target accounts by 71%. Yet according to a Forrester Resulting report, 9/10 teams say they’re misaligned when it comes to strategy, process, content, and culture.

The reality is that misalignment and lack of synergy cause poor customer experience, issues reaching sales targets, and disruption. It can prevent companies from entering deal cycles early enough, meaning they miss critical opportunities. 

Lack of alignment can even force companies to take a “reactive” rather than “proactive” approach to growth, meaning they’re constantly responding to a loss of market share, rather than actively looking for ways to expand and evolve. 

How to Address Misalignment in GTM Teams

Overcoming misalignment in GTM teams isn’t easy, particularly as the landscape continues to evolve. However, there are ways that companies can begin to address the issue, such as:

1. Creating Alignment Around Goals

As mentioned above, alignment can suffer when different groups are working towards various goals, without a clear view of how their contributions benefit the business overall. Simply telling your team that you want to increase your revenue from new customers by 50% in the next year causes confusion.

Sales teams know what they’re working towards, and which metrics to monitor, but customer success and marketing teams are left out of the loop. The key to addressing this issue is showing every staff member how their work contributes to the wider vision of the company.

If your goal is to increase revenue from new customers by 50%, you’d ask your:

• Sales teams to monitor new accounts and win rates connected with new customers, focusing specifically on targeted accounts that have the best potential for long-term growth.
• Marketing teams to analyse the number of marketing-qualified leads being passed to sales teams, and the level of engagement generated by campaigns focusing on highlighting the benefits of your products and solutions to new buyers.
• Customer success teams to track the number of customers they successfully onboard into your business, and the adoption or usage rates of these customers.

Show everyone how their efforts impact the overall success of your GTM plan.

2. Create a Single Source of Truth for Knowledge

One of the most effective ways to ensure that your GTM teams are aligned is to ensure everyone has access to the same data and resources. This means creating a single source of truth for all of the key data and insights that matter most to your GTM teams, this could include:

• Buyer personas: Insights into which types of customers might use your products and services, and their use cases, goals, and pain points to overcome. Provide comprehensive insights into demographic, behavioural and psychographic data. Offer sales, product, marketing, and success teams examples of how they can support each type of customer.
• Value offering: Overviews of the overall value you’re offering to your customers, and your positioning in the market. How do your solutions compare to the competition? What causes customers to choose your offerings instead of other solutions? How do the benefits of your product or service align with specific user needs?
• Campaign data: Which marketing, sales, and customer success strategies are working for your company, or have worked in the past? How did you measure their success, and what do you want to replicate for future campaigns? Which challenges or risks do you want your teams to avoid, based on previous campaigns?

3. Facilitate Communication and Collaboration

Finally, for true alignment between your GTM team members, you need to ensure you have a company culture that encourages honest, transparent, and consistent communication. This doesn’t just mean planning a weekly all-hands meeting where everyone shares their insights. 

It also means encouraging teams to consistently communicate between themselves, whether it’s in person, or using different tools. Create a calendar that every employee can follow, with specific milestones, times for meetings, and collaboration expectations. Track the communication between your employees regularly, and find out how often they’re sharing their individual data, findings, and discoveries with other staff. 

Look at whether there are any specific disconnects between certain groups and what you can do to address this issue. For instance, if sales and marketing are regularly communicating, but they rarely touch base with customer success, consider arranging meetings specifically for these groups. 

Addressing the Misalignment Issue in GTM

Misalignment in GTM is a common issue that harms your ability to grow, increase revenue, and unlock opportunities in a competitive landscape. As the GTM space becomes more complex, requiring more employees to work seamlessly together, finding ways to improve alignment will be essential to your future success. 

Bridging the gaps between your teams, and keeping them aligned around the same data, insights, and goals, will protect you from endless challenges, as you scale your GTM strategy.