Perhaps you’re wondering how GTM-aligned marketing differs from what most people know marketing to be.
In the last 12 or so years, marketing has been structured as a leads/awareness/communications team, with its own KPIs and deliverables, similar to Sales and other teams in the company. The result has been that much of marketing is not in sync with sales and the other critical teams of the company.
Marketing can generate leads, but without tight operational alignment, those leads won’t be efficiently converted by sales. Messaging drifts, qualification breaks down, and sales teams spend more time filtering than closing.
If marketing is ineffective, sales might close early deals through team heroics combined with the founder’s hustle, but it rarely scales. Without clear positioning, enablement, and operational support, every deal becomes bespoke. Quota attainment becomes dependent on individual performance rather than repeatable systems.
Sales starts thinking differently about what the company needs to grow, so does marketing, and so do the other teams.
The marketing leader develops a product marketing strategy with positioning and messaging, but the sales team has no idea of the messaging, and the positioning is almost never used in sales pitches or in the efforts of customer success to upsell or cross-sell.
The result is fragmented, inefficient growth.
Of course, the issue is not with marketing. This stems from how most founders set up their teams:
- Marketing is responsible for demand
- Sales is responsible for revenue
- Customer success is responsible for retention
So, each team is naturally set up to work in silos. GTM-aligned marketing is what breaks down that silo.
What is GTM-aligned marketing?
GTM marketing takes its strategy, motions, metrics and direction from the company’s GTM strategy. Even though this should be a no-brainer, the challenge is that most founders do not have a GTM strategy in place for their business.
You’ve probably created a product marketing strategy for the launch of a new product and tagged it GTM, as in go-to-market strategy. 8 out of 10 marketers have done that.
But a go-to-market strategy is different from a product launch strategy.
GTM sits at the intersection of product, market, people, and revenue, and is the means of delivering your company’s mission and vision to customers, with your people becoming your brand ambassadors.
Clearing the Confusion About GTM
| What GTM is NOT: | What GTM is: |
| Not a campaign |
|
| Not a product launch plan | A growth system that governs how your company:
|
| Not a quarterly initiative | It cuts across marketing, sales, and customer success |
| Not a sales or marketing initiative | A CEO-owned system created in alignment with the high-performing revenue teams |
How does a GTM strategy actually help your marketing?
- It enables your CMO or marketing leader accurately determine the right KPIs and growth motions that your business needs. This is important so that your marketing lead isn’t wasting 60 days doing discovery and 90 days running strategy development to hopefully figure out what they should do to help your business grow.
- It shortens time-to-revenue by removing misalignment from marketing, sales, and customer success through single-truth reporting and coordinated plays.
- It makes sure you grow fast, and your team can handle the growth without burning out by putting the right people and enablement ramps in place.
- It helps your revenue team to quickly spot the next stair of growth by combining the data trends from the single-truth reporting with market analysis.
The 4 elements of GTM-Aligned Marketing
Maturity-metrics fit
In GTM marketing, this is the foundational step that ensures that marketing correctly interprets the business’s maturity stage and selects the right growth KPIs and metrics before moving into marketing strategy or execution. Way too often, marketers and fractional CMOs deepdive into strategy first and end up chasing the wrong KPIs for the company.
There are three business maturity stages:
1) Problem-market fit/ideation stage
Focus: leads generation and sales volume
KPIs include: CPL, MQLs, outbound KPIs, meetings booked, funnel conversion rates, closed won revenue
2) Product-market fit stage
(Here, you now have a product that customers believe in and renew on)
Focus: target customers you’re pursuing, and expansion possibilities
KPIs include: Renewal rates, engaged accounts, pipeline coverage, deal velocity, ACV, CAC, GRR
3) Multi-product stage
Focus: long-term customers with expansive lifetime value.
KPIs include: NRR, expansion, LTV, gross margins, multiproduct expansion
ICP Clarity
One of the most frequent reasons most businesses fail is that they can’t clearly identify who their ideal customer profile is. At the early stage, the business explores the total addressable market, before narrowing down to the total relevant market, and then identifying the customer groups that show the most intent to buy. To clearly identify the ICP, you need to generate a lot of leads to be able to quantitatively develop the parameters that clearly identify your ideal customer profile.
GTM marketing works with the sales and customer success teams to clarify the company’s ICP and ensure marketing is not wasting spend on the wrong segments.
Operational alignment
Operational misalignment is probably the number one cause of CEO headaches when it’s time to report to the board.
Picture this, Maggie from marketing says, “We generated XYZ leads over the last quarter using a mix of influencer and SEO marketing, and we saw that the CPL from the SEO channel increased slightly while the CPL from the influencer marketing decreased compared to data from the previous quarter, so we’re scaling influencer marketing to maximise the lower CPL”
Sheila from Sales, however, gives a totally different story, saying, “Out of the XYZ leads from marketing, only PQR leads were qualified and alignedwith the ICP, which is about half of what Maggie says marketing sent us. Out of that number, 70% of the qualified leads are attributed to the SEO marketing, so it’s better to scale that instead”.
Can you see theproblem there? Both sales and marketing are working out of alignment. But the company has just one single goal, and it is to generate pipeline and revenue growth sustainably.
GTM-aligned marketing breaks down this silo by working with a single, central data source that defines the ICP, positioning and messaging for all, as well as receives, analyses and interprets the data from all teams using one single, cross-functionally-accepted standard.
Expansion readiness
This last leg proactively answers the question: What do members of the marketing team need to shorten the time to their respective quotas? GTM-aligned marketing is closely in tune with the company’s growth goals, and actively watches out for the performance gaps it needs to close to maximise team output in the immediate term.
Ahead of any expansion or major change, it also proactively factors in the knowledge gaps, technical gaps, skill gaps, and other resources that the the team will need to meet the growth KPIs.
Now, of course, it is the CEO who chooses what trainings, playbooks, resource allocation or enablement allocation to approve for the teams. That is one of the main reasons why the GTM strategy should be owned by the CEO in every company. The CEO, together with the leaders of the company’s revenue teams, build the GTM strategy and puts the necessary people and enablement ramps in place to ensure growth is sustained.
In conclusion, GTM-aligned marketing bridges the gap between sales, marketing, customer success and the CEO to create effective growth marketing motions and strategies that ensure growth is predictable, scalable, and efficient.
Adenike Kizo
Fractional CMO for businesses | I work with CEOS to deliver GTM-aligned marketing that delivers consistent pipeline, predictable revenue, and efficient growth for early and growth-stage businesses.
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