Sales and marketing teams usually say they’re data driven. But if they’re honest they spend a ton of time flying blind. They launch campaigns without clear attribution data. They look at sales forecasts that are unreliable. They can’t reallytell what’s working and what’s not.

It’s not a communication issue as much as an orchestration one. Teams collect data differently. That data is spread across dozens of platforms for list building or cold emailing or running ads or tracking site analytics. It takes too much work to get that stuff pulled together. And even when you do, it can still be hard to tell a cohesive story.

A Connected GTM Engine can solve this. By taking these disparate signals and stitching them into a continuous signal loop, you can inform your team, get everyone on the same page, and help power the next stage of organizational growth. And in this article we’ll walk through how exactly to do that.

‍Why Do GTM Teams Fall Out of Sync?

There are a few primary reasons this is such an issue for GTM teams:

Lack of alignment on terms.

A HBR study of 500 execs found that that while most were familiar with the concept of Revenue Operations, there were nearly as many definitions as there were people. If we aren’t even in agreement on what we’re talking about, it’s hard to move in the same direction.

Siloed systems.

This one you already know. But that HBR study cited this as the most dominant and persistent problem. Sales, marketing, customer service, finance, and IT all have different systems that manage data differently. This leads to inconsistent metrics and an incomplete picture of reality.

One example that demonstrates this situation perfectly: LinkedIn research found that the audiences targeted by marketing and sales only overlap by 16%. Each group is effectively working their own funnel.

The nature of the sales cycle.

Modern B2b purchases involve an average of 13 decision makers, and take 11.5 months to complete. It can be hard to coordinate messaging and timing over so many touch points at different levels of fidelity over such a long time-frame.

What Would a Connected GTM Engine Look Like?

Ideal state, we want a system that brings sales, marketing and operations data into a single view. It would be able to link the right data to the right customers, and provide the right insights at the right time to your team.

That requires three things to make happen:

Connected Data

A single unified view of the customer is absolutely essential. Every marketing engagement, every sales call, every contract, every support ticket should all be fed into a unified data foundation and attached to a customer record.

Workflows & Automation

When a lead shows buying intent, that should trigger updates in other systems. Account status should be updated. Sales should be alerted. Prompts should be created to allow tailored and timely outreach.

Signals in one system should be able to trigger actions in another.

Real-Time Measurement

Data must be accessible, and packaged so it can be acted on. Dashboards that have real-time (or near real-time) data can help leaders make smarter decisions when leads are hot.

5 Steps to Start Building Your Own Connected GTM Engine

So how can you start this process? A few suggestions:

1. Run a data audit. Figure out where your stuff lives right now. What’s in the CRM? What’s in your marketing automation platform? What’s in support tickets? Find everything, and figure out where any duplication or gaps exist.
2. Create a unified foundation. Invest in a data architecture that can bring all this together. You don’t need to replace those systems, but there needs to be a single source of truth that spans them.
3. Decide on some shared metrics. Your teams can continue to have their own KPIs. But you also need a set of common metrics that track the entire revenue cycle. Everyone should know what they are, and ideally their metrics should roll up to these.
4. Make your data queryable with natural language. You want your team to use data more often to make decisions. And while your dashboards will show them some of it, they likely will have additional questions. Make it easy for them, by giving them access to a LLM-backed interface (like Gemini Enterprise) and letting them ask away.
5. Automate the hand-offs. Identify manual steps in your current state workflows (or that are now unlocked by having the above set up). Use triggers and automation to pass things between marketing, sales, and operations without humans in the loop.

A Connected GTM Engine is Possible

When sales, marketing, and operations can run on a shared view of reality, decisions become faster and more thoughtful. Customers begin to have a more consistent and thoughtful experience. And growth becomes measurable rather than accidental.

Data is key. Instead of being the stuff that comes out at the end, you can make it the organizing principle to make faster, higher quality decisions.

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