Go-To-Market Alignment: A 7-Step Approach to Driving Revenue Growth, Operational Efficiency, and Customer Satisfaction

Alignment doesn’t happen by accident or by hiring a bunch of “team players” and allowing them to figure out how to collaborate. Instead, alignment must be driven as an intentional, structured, and ongoing process. When done right, it leads to greater operational efficiency and a stronger customer experience.

In many organizations, silos are the norm and alignment is the exception. Within cross-functional go-to-market teams, marketing may be laser-focused on MQLs or MQAs, sales may be hyper-focused on pipeline, and customer success teams pay close attention to customer adoption or value. Meanwhile, RevOps typically supplies the data needed to support each team’s specific goals.

With each team focused on different tasks, getting everyone aligned around a shared goal can be a real challenge.

Why alignment is non-negotiable

Go-to-market alignment is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. When your cross-functional teams collaborate, prospects and customers get a superior brand experience that closes more deals and drives higher ROI. The benefits of alignment go far beyond operational efficiencies:

• Organizations with strong alignment see 32% higher year-over-year growth compared to those without it (Aberdeen).
• Highly aligned teams experience a 67% increase in close rates (Aberdeen).
• Alignment leads to a 36% improvement in customer retention and a 30% reduction in acquisition costs (InsideView)

When you don’t align your teams, customers become confused and brands lose trust – and these negatives are experienced throughout the buying journey. Customers justifiably view your brand as a disjointed entity.

67% of B2B buyers say disjointed brand communication is one of their top reasons for disengagement, which can lead directly to customer churn.

Factors driving misalignment

Too often in organizations, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing”, a problem that erodes brand credibility and diminishes customer trust. Several common issues contribute to this kind of misalignment:

• Cross-functional teams focusing on different initiatives
• Teams incentivized on non-revenue-generating activities
• Lack of shared goals across departments
• Role confusion across teams
• Lack of structured, consistent cross-functional communication
• Different tech stacks across teams for managing engagement, pipeline, and forecasts
• No shared visibility into the full customer journey

Removing these big obstacles to alignment requires a carefully-considered and structured approach, which we’ll describe below.

Making alignment happen across the org

Driving go-to-market alignment requires all customer-impacting departments to come together to define exactly what they want to collectively achieve and how. From the top down, the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) would begin the process with a shared intention: “We’re going to align our marketing, sales, and customer success teams on these KPIs/metrics, and we’re going to have RevOps help surface the relevant data and create visibility to support our GTM alignment.”

From there, alignment should cascade throughout the organization:

• Departmental VPs align on goals and execution plans across their respective functions.
• Frontline managers ensure their teams are working toward those goals in a coordinated way.
• Individual contributors (ICs) in marketing, sales, and customer success align around their book of business and the high-value accounts they are responsible for supporting.

A 7-step approach to go-to-market alignment

This 7-step approach offers a practical way to evaluate where alignment stands today, set shared goals across teams, and build stronger collaboration through strategy, communication, tools, and recognition. By following these steps, you can bring your teams closer together and get more impact from every go-to-market initiative.

1. Start where you are now. It’s best to begin with an analysis of where you are today. You need to define a baseline around: (1) where you have effective alignment and (2) where you don’t. When it comes to shared data, for example, you’ll want to know what data points would be most relevant for go-to-market efforts and what shared tools would be needed to get everyone working from the same playbook.

2. Set common goals and KPIs. Start by bringing teams together to define shared goals. These should reflect what success looks like across the customer journey—think revenue growth, customer retention, and satisfaction. The key is to make these goals specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound. Once you’ve aligned on the big-picture outcomes, you can create supporting KPIs for each team to track their contribution toward those goals.

To make your go-to-market efforts even more effective, it helps to organize them into distinct focus areas, such as Net New, Retention, and Expansion opportunities. Each area will require different tactics and involve different teams to varying degrees. For example, marketing might take the lead in driving awareness and attracting new accounts, while customer success is better positioned to support retention and identify cross-sell or upsell opportunities within existing accounts.
Since each team plays a unique role depending on the focus area, it’s important to clearly define those roles and set targeted goals accordingly. This creates alignment, clarifies ownership, and helps every team member understand where they can make the greatest impact.

3. Develop a cohesive strategy. Create a cohesive plan or strategy so all teams are working collectively towards common goals. A cohesive strategy ensures that all teams understand how their roles impact the broader objectives.

Developing the strategy can involve joint planning sessions and collaboration on campaigns and initiatives. As part of those sessions, you should be documenting and/or mapping out how the teams will work together and align on activities within your programs. After all, knowing exactly who does what, and when, is what alignment is about.

4. Define communication structures. To ensure teams are focusing on the right activities, regular communication is key. This consists of scheduling regular meetings or updates where teams can share progress on KPIs, insights, and challenges. This structured cadence of communication fosters collaboration at the tactical and strategic levels, while enabling problem-solving across functions.

In addition, these regular meetings can be used as opportunities to share needs, insights, and best practices to drive the improvement of go-to-market efforts.

5. Utilize shared technology. Identify and implement shared tools or platforms across the teams for tracking performance metrics (and to support reporting).

This shared visibility can help each team understand the full customer journey and how each department contributes to moving it forward. Bonus points if you can layer in KPIs into the customer journey.

6. Create a feedback loop. Establish a feedback mechanism where insights from one department inform the strategies of the others. For example, customer success can provide valuable, timely feedback to marketing on customer pain points, impact, and value. Sales can inform Marketing on plays they think would be valuable based on their knowledge and experience.

7. Celebrate shared success. Recognize and celebrate when teams meet or exceed their KPI targets together. This builds morale and reinforces the importance of collaboration. Success provides its own momentum for strengthening go-to-market alignment.

How Demandbase powers alignment

Aligning around the customer journey requires that all your GTM teams leverage account intelligence at all stages of the buying journey, from selecting target accounts to crafting relevant messaging that meets prospects where they are, to closing deals and driving lifetime customer value.

Demandbase brings all of this together by combining your customer and account data with third-party and behavioral data, giving you a single, comprehensive view of each account. It becomes the one place where all teams can see which accounts are engaged, what actions they’ve taken, and what to do next.

Demandbase even helps you improve your alignment and operational efficiencies by identifying pipeline gaps and revenue leaks within the revenue engine you’re building. That way, when challenges arise, you can diagnose them quickly and address them with data-driven solutions that keep your operations moving along efficiently.

Alignment is an ongoing commitment

Go-to-market alignment isn’t something you check off a list; it’s a continuous effort built on collaboration, shared goals, and a unified approach across teams. When marketing, sales, and customer success are aligned around the full customer journey, organizations see stronger growth, better retention, and more meaningful customer experiences.

With the right foundation—strategy, structure, and tools like Demandbase—teams can move in sync, drive revenue more effectively, and build a go-to-market engine designed for long-term success.

See how Demandbase helps unify marketing, sales, and customer success around shared goals.