GTM misalignment is one of the most expensive and least visible problems in a SaaS revenue organisation. It's expensive because it causes leads to go cold at handoffs, deals to close on wrong-fit customers, and churn to accelerate in the first 90 days. It's invisible because every team is doing their job well — by their own definition of their job.
The moment I walk into a new engagement, I ask three people to define "qualified lead." The Marketing VP, the VP of Sales, and the Head of Customer Success. I have yet to get the same answer twice.
Why Three Teams Are All Doing the Right Thing (And Still Failing)
Marketing's reality
"We're generating leads that match our ICP. High engagement scores. Budget confirmed. Decision-maker conversations initiated."
Sales's reality
"The leads Marketing sends aren't ready to buy. They need six months of nurturing. We're wasting time on demos that go nowhere."
CS's reality
"Sales closes deals we can't deliver on. Customer expectations are set wrong. We spend the first month managing disappointment."
All three perspectives are accurate. The problem isn't performance — it's the absence of a shared operating model. Each team has built their own definitions, their own metrics, and their own version of the customer lifecycle. Where those definitions don't match up, friction lives. And friction costs money.
The Three Handoffs That Break Most Often
The MQL → SQL handoff
Marketing hands a lead to Sales and considers it a win. Sales picks it up, does one call, can't find budget or urgency, and marks it lost. Marketing's MQL volume looks great. Sales's conversion looks terrible. Both numbers are real — and both are meaningless in isolation.
The real problem: MQL was never defined as "likely to convert in this quarter." It was defined as "engaged with our content and matches firmographic criteria." Those two things are not the same.
The SQL → Closed-Won handoff to CS
Sales closes the deal. The AE moves on to the next pipeline. CS picks up the account and discovers the customer was sold a feature that doesn't exist yet, a timeline that isn't realistic, or a use case that doesn't match how the product actually works.
This isn't a Sales integrity problem — it's a handoff structure problem. There's no formal mechanism ensuring the commitments made in the sales process are captured and transferred to the team responsible for delivering on them.
The expansion and renewal signal
CS identifies an expansion opportunity. It sits in a spreadsheet or a CS tool that Sales doesn't have access to. Sales is cold-calling existing customers about upsells that CS already had in flight. The customer feels the friction — and concludes you don't have your act together.
The underlying issue in all three cases is the same: each function has optimised for their own metrics, not for the customer's experience of moving through your system. Alignment happens when you optimise for the through-line — the customer journey — not the function-level scorecard.
Building the Shared Operating Model
The fix isn't a meeting. It isn't an all-hands presentation about "working better together." It's a documented, CRM-enforced operating model that defines:
- Every lifecycle stage from first touch to expansion — with a shared definition that all three teams have agreed to
- The entry and exit criteria for each stage — what has to be true for a record to move forward
- Who owns what at each stage — and what happens when ownership transfers
- The shared metrics that measure the health of the through-line, not just individual function performance
When this model lives in the CRM — not in a slide deck, not in a shared doc, but enforced by the system itself — alignment stops being a cultural aspiration and starts being an operational reality.