Signs of GTM Misalignment

8 signs you might be out of GTM alignment: 1. You don’t have a comprehensive view of the customer lifecycle 2. Every department has their own ops person with different data - there is no one single source of truth 3. The same words (eg “Revenue”, “Funnel”, “Onboarding”) means different things in different departments 4. Each exec goes to a different conference to learn a different set of tools that don’t integrate 5. You don’t have a consistent definition of your ICP 6. You're consistently asking, “Should we sell to this person?” implying that even if you’ve defined your ICP, your team doesn’t actually believe you mean it 7. Product, Sales, and Marketing are sending different emails to the same customer multiple times per week without coordination 8. Nobody at the company can agree on how you’re going to hit your growth targets Alignment comes from the same KPIs from a single source of truth, governed by a coherent and uniform methodology of the customer journey, and aligned against ongoing and recurring customer impact.

Your website says one thing. Your sales team says another. Your product does something else entirely. I once watched a sales rep actively discourage prospects from visiting their own company website. Let that sink in. This isn't rare. I've seen this pattern repeat at dozens of B2B startups: → Marketing tells one story → Sales tells another → Product builds something else entirely → The website is so out of date, who knows what it's claiming The misalignment isn't just embarrassing––it's killing your conversion rates. Here's the truth most founders miss: The fastest way to align your GTM teams isn't another strategy offsite or slide deck. It's redesigning your website and sales pitch together. When you force everyone to agree on the exact same language, you have to answer the hard questions: → Who are we really built for? → What problem do we actually solve today (not tomorrow)? → How are we genuinely different? → Why should prospects care right now? When sales, marketing, and product finally align on these answers, your website and sales pitch transform from liabilities into your most powerful GTM assets. Want a quick test of your team's alignment? Pull up your homepage right now and ask each department leader to explain who you serve and why. If you get different answers, you've found your real GTM problem.

Every GTM team says they're aligned. But when marketing celebrates a 50% increase in MQLs while sales complains about lead quality, you've got a bigger problem than misalignment. Here's what we learned at Default after watching hundreds of "qualified" leads churn: When marketing doesn’t understand the pipeline stages, CS doesn’t know what MQLs really mean, and sales just wants to reach quota, you get a fragmented revenue engine where teams have their own definition of "success." Usually to the detriment of your overall growth. We’ve had this happen to us a couple of times where we’ve onboarded a customer, only to have them churn not long after, leaving us to question what went wrong in the process. It's really interesting that what one team considers a “win” sometimes creates downstream challenges for another team. And what you want is a cohesive machine that works towards sustainable growth, instead of optimizing for occasional spikes in revenue. This is why I’ve been racking my brain lately to come up with a scalable way of aligning marketing and CS – the polar ends of our revenue spectrum – on what makes a good customer so that we can make it part of our revenue OS. So here's what we've started doing internally: We run "alignment sessions" where we analyze churning customers together as a full GTM team and ask: "Should this account have entered our funnel in the first place?" It might sound like an odd question, but it forces us to confront uncomfortable questions: • Did we close this deal out of greed?  • Was this customer ever truly qualified?  • What signals did we miss during the sales process? The goal of this isn't to point fingers. It's to make sure that going forward, we're more careful with who we let into our pipeline. So far, these alignment sessions have been a step in the right direction. As soon as all teams started speaking the same language, we’ve seen a shift away from the "throw it over the wall" mentality that is so common in most organizations. Turns out when everyone gets a voice in defining what "qualified" really means, you build a sturdier business with way fewer leaks. Has anyone got a sound strategy to make sure teams aren't optimizing in silos?