• Our MQLs suck
• Our SDR team doesn’t know what they are doing
• Marketing makes content that nobody looks at or cares about
• Marketing doesn’t understand who our buyers are
• Sales goes rogue; they don’t sound anything like our brand or positioning 
• Sales makes promises our products and services can’t deliver
• Product isn’t building what our customers want

Sound familiar? Yes, that’s rhetorical.

Have you ever thought about how that looks to your prospects and customers? 

Shocked Pikachu face… It ain’t good.

Everyone TALKS a good game about the buyer experience. But when there is tons of internal friction, positional and functional silos, and a lack of operationalized cross functional collaboration, what you have is go-to-market kryptonite. 

As marketing or sales  leaders, here are a few questions we should be asking ourselves:

• How is marketing enabling sales with content? Is it collaborative?
• How is the marketing team operationalizing feedback from customers, sales, and account management,?
• How much time does your SDR team spend on building and grooming lists and managing tech? 
• Is your SDR team focused on targeted outreach based on intent signals?
• Are your SDR and Sales team consistently working from a shared game plan? 
• Do sales, marketing, and product have the same view of your ICP and buying groups and speak to the value of your products and services in a consistent way?
• Is sales equipped to share success stories that are aligned to use cases and buyer personas? 
• How often are you inspecting all of these things?

For many organizations, going from average to good, or good to great, building or strengthening organizational habits and patterns of cross-functional collaboration has an outsized impact on performance. When we get better at these things, morale improves, waste is reduced, conversion rates through the funnel go up and go faster, and CLTV often goes up.  

This by no means covers everything we should be asking or considering when it comes to solving the problem of misalignment across our GTM teams, but it’s a good place to start.