Sales Is Part of Your GTM Team. Act Like It.

Yes, the sales team is part of the go-to-market team. Not adjacent to it, not downstream from it, but structurally inside it. A go-to-market strategy that treats sales as a separate function, handed a brief at the end of the planning process, is not a GTM strategy. It is a marketing plan with a handoff problem.

GTM is the complete motion from identifying who you are selling to, through how you reach them, to how you convert and retain them. Sales sits in the middle of that motion. Removing it from the planning table does not make GTM leaner. It makes it fictional.

Why This Question Gets Asked at All

The fact that this is even a debated question tells you something about how fragmented commercial functions have become inside most organisations. Marketing plans the message. Sales works the pipeline. Revenue operations manages the data. Product owns the roadmap. And somewhere in the middle, customers experience a company that cannot agree on what it is selling or why someone should buy it.

I have sat in enough GTM planning sessions to know how this usually goes. Marketing presents the positioning, the campaign calendar, and the lead targets. Sales nods along, goes back to their floor, and runs their own playbook. The two teams share a CRM and not much else. When results disappoint, marketing points to lead volume and sales points to lead quality, and both are telling a version of the truth.

The structural answer is that GTM is a cross-functional discipline. BCG has written about this directly, noting that effective go-to-market strategy requires alignment across marketing, sales, and HR, not just a marketing brief handed over a wall. The coalition framing is useful because it stops you thinking about GTM as something one function owns.

What Go-to-Market Actually Covers

GTM strategy covers the full commercial motion: target audience, value proposition, channel mix, pricing approach, sales motion, and retention model. Every one of those components has a sales dimension. Pricing is negotiated by sales. The sales motion is how the value proposition gets tested in real conversations. Channel mix includes direct sales as a channel. Retention is partly owned by account management, which in many businesses sits inside the sales function.

If you strip sales out of that list, you are left with a positioning document and a media plan. That is not a go-to-market strategy. That is the marketing component of one.

Pricing is a good example of where this breaks down in practice. BCG’s work on B2B pricing and GTM strategy makes the point that pricing decisions are inseparable from the go-to-market motion, particularly in complex B2B environments where sales teams negotiate terms in the field. If sales is not part of the GTM team, pricing strategy gets set without the people who will actually defend it in front of a procurement team. That is a design flaw, not a coordination gap.

For a broader view of how GTM connects to commercial growth architecture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full framework, including how different functions fit together across the planning and execution cycle.

The Handoff Model and Why It Fails

Most companies run what I would call the handoff model. Marketing generates awareness and leads. At some defined point, usually MQL status, the lead gets handed to sales. Sales works the opportunity. Closed revenue flows back into marketing’s attribution report as proof the model works.

The problem is not that handoffs are inherently wrong. The problem is that the handoff model encourages both functions to optimise for their side of the line rather than the outcome the customer actually experiences. Marketing optimises for MQL volume. Sales optimises for close rate on the leads they receive. Neither is optimising for the full conversion funnel or the quality of the customer relationship that emerges at the end of it.

I ran a performance marketing agency for several years where we managed significant ad spend across multiple clients. Early in my career I was firmly in the lower-funnel camp. If it converted, it worked. What I came to understand over time was that a lot of what we were attributing to performance marketing was demand that already existed. We were capturing intent, not creating it. The sales teams at those clients were often doing the harder work of actually building commercial relationships, and they were not in the room when the GTM plan was made.

Vidyard’s research into GTM team structures found that untapped pipeline potential often sits in the gap between marketing-generated leads and sales-ready conversations, which is precisely the gap that poor GTM alignment creates. The leads exist. The conversations do not happen effectively because the two teams built their approaches independently.

What Shared GTM Accountability Actually Looks Like

Shared GTM accountability does not mean marketing and sales attend each other’s meetings. It means they are measured against the same commercial outcomes and they plan together from the start.

In practice, that means a few things. First, the ICP (ideal customer profile) is built jointly. Marketing cannot define who to target without understanding who sales can actually close and retain. Sales cannot build an effective outreach motion without understanding what the market positioning is and what content exists to support it. When I have seen this done well, the ICP is a living document that both teams update as they learn, not a slide that gets presented at the annual planning offsite and never revisited.

Second, pipeline metrics are shared. Marketing should own a view of pipeline velocity and deal stage conversion, not just lead volume. If marketing is generating leads that stall at stage two consistently, that is a targeting or messaging problem, not purely a sales problem. Equally, if sales is not progressing qualified opportunities, that is partly a sales enablement problem that marketing should be involved in solving.

Third, content and collateral are built around the sales conversation, not the campaign calendar. I have seen marketing teams produce beautifully designed asset libraries that sales teams never use because the content does not map to the objections that come up in real buyer conversations. That is a coordination failure. Sales knows what questions buyers ask in the room. Marketing should be building answers to those questions, not producing content that reflects what the brand team wants to say.

The Creator and Channel Dimension

GTM is increasingly a multi-channel problem, and the channel mix decision has direct implications for how sales operates. If your GTM motion includes creator-led distribution, for example, the sales team needs to understand how those leads are arriving, what they have been told, and what expectations have been set before a sales conversation begins. Later’s work on creator-led GTM campaigns illustrates how the top-of-funnel content shapes the buyer’s frame of reference before any sales interaction happens. If sales is not aware of that frame, the conversation starts at a mismatch.

This is not a new problem. It is the same problem that existed when the channel was TV advertising rather than creator content. The buyer arrives having seen a message. The salesperson needs to know what that message was. The difference now is that the number of channels and messages has multiplied, which makes the coordination requirement more demanding, not less.

The agile scaling frameworks that Forrester has explored for commercial teams point to the same conclusion: cross-functional alignment becomes the critical variable as organisations scale, and the teams that build operating rhythms around shared data and shared goals outperform those that coordinate through occasional check-ins.

Growth Requires More Than Capturing Existing Demand

One of the cleaner ways to understand why sales must be inside the GTM team is to think about what growth actually requires. Capturing existing demand, people who are already looking for what you sell, is relatively straightforward. You show up where they are searching, you present a credible offer, and a proportion of them convert. Performance marketing does this reasonably well.

But growth beyond a certain point requires reaching people who are not yet in-market. It requires changing how a category is understood, or creating a reason to buy that did not previously exist. That is a different motion entirely, and it requires sales to be involved because the sales conversation is often where the market education happens. A salesperson talking to a prospect who has never considered this category of solution is doing GTM work, not just sales work. They are shaping how the buyer thinks about the problem.

I spent time working with clients across more than 30 industries, and the pattern I saw repeatedly was that companies with strong GTM alignment between marketing and sales grew more sustainably than those with strong individual functions operating in parallel. The marketing might be excellent. The sales team might be excellent. But if they are running separate plays, the customer experience is disjointed and the commercial output is lower than it should be.

There is also a product dimension here. Growth frameworks that treat acquisition as a series of isolated experiments tend to underweight the role of the sales conversation in revealing what the product needs to be. Sales hears objections that marketing never sees. Those objections contain product intelligence. A GTM team that includes sales brings that intelligence back into the planning loop.

The Customer Experience Argument

There is a version of this argument that goes beyond commercial efficiency and into customer experience. When marketing and sales are misaligned, the customer experiences that misalignment directly. The ad promised one thing. The website said something slightly different. The sales conversation introduced a third framing. The proposal used language from a fourth. By the time the customer signs, they have been through four different versions of what the company is and what it offers.

That is not a brand problem or a sales problem. It is a GTM problem. And it is solved by having the people responsible for each of those touchpoints in the same planning conversation from the beginning.

The companies I have seen genuinely delight customers tend to have one coherent story that runs from the first ad impression through to the renewal conversation. That coherence does not happen by accident. It happens because someone insisted that marketing, sales, and product were building from the same foundation. That insistence is what GTM alignment means in practice.

If you want to think more carefully about how GTM strategy connects to broader commercial growth, the articles in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section cover the planning, execution, and measurement dimensions in more depth.

How to Structure the GTM Team in Practice

There is no single org chart that works for every business, but there are some structural principles that hold across most contexts.

The GTM team should include, at minimum, a senior marketing leader, a senior sales leader, and someone who owns the revenue operations or commercial data function. In smaller businesses, these might be the same person wearing different hats. In larger organisations, they should have a standing forum, a shared set of metrics, and joint accountability for pipeline and revenue outcomes.

The planning cadence matters. Quarterly GTM reviews that look at what is working across the full funnel, from awareness through to close, are more valuable than monthly marketing reviews and monthly sales reviews that never compare notes. The data needs to be in the same room at the same time, and the people responsible for each part of the funnel need to hear each other’s read on what it means.

Sales enablement is a GTM function, not a sales function. The content, training, and tools that help salespeople have better conversations are GTM investments. When I grew an agency from 20 to 100 people, one of the clearest lessons was that the quality of the sales conversation was directly linked to how well the marketing team had equipped the sales team to talk about what we did and why it mattered. That is not a sales problem to solve in isolation. It is a GTM problem to solve together.

Tools and data infrastructure should serve the whole GTM team, not just one function. Growth tooling that sits only in the marketing stack creates visibility gaps for sales, and vice versa. A shared view of the customer, from first touch through to close and renewal, is a basic requirement for GTM alignment, and it requires deliberate investment in how data flows between systems and teams.

The Commercial Case for Getting This Right

None of this is abstract. When GTM alignment is poor, you see it in the numbers. Lead-to-opportunity conversion rates are lower than they should be because the leads arriving in the sales queue do not match the profile that sales can close. Sales cycles are longer because the buyer has not been adequately prepared by the marketing motion before the sales conversation begins. Average contract values are lower because sales is discounting to close deals that were not positioned at the right price point from the start.

When GTM alignment is strong, those metrics move in the right direction. Not because anyone did anything dramatically different, but because the same activities are better coordinated. The marketing spend reaches the right audience with the right message. The sales team follows up with a conversation that continues the story rather than starting a new one. The customer arrives at a decision point with enough confidence to move forward without a discount.

That is what GTM alignment produces. Not a better strategy document. A better commercial outcome from the same inputs.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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