How GTM Is Unifying Sales and Marketing

Ask sales and marketing who sourced the last big deal, and you’ll often get two different answers, each with a report to back it up.

The old model built that fight in. Marketing is measured on MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and sales on SQLs (sales qualified leads), so each team defends its own number. The CRM (customer relationship management system) usually credits the last touch, and the event that warmed the buyer up months earlier gets nothing.

That handoff was designed for one buyer filling in a form. Today, a buying decision involves a whole group of people inside and outside the company, and they move in and out of the process over months.

The best revenue teams have stopped splitting credit. They run a unified GTM (go-to-market) strategy, where sales and marketing share one pipeline target, one set of definitions and one view of each account.

What a Unified Go-to-Market Sales and Marketing Model Looks Like

I asked Chris Muldoon, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, what he sees in teams that make this work.

"The best teams I know have a shared revenue goal and shared target, which they're both working towards."

That means marketing gets measured on pipeline.

A marketer paid on MQLs will happily run a gated ebook that pulls in 900 students, job seekers and competitors. A marketer measured on pipeline won't touch it. (I've run that ebook. The download count looked amazing in the board pack, but the pipeline it made would fit on a Post-it.)

Sales and marketing aren't the only ones who should share that number. Customer success knows why people renew and why they leave, and partnerships see deals that never touch your website. Their pipeline counts toward the same target.

Then RevOps (revenue operations) sits across all of it. It owns the shared definitions, dashboards and processes, so every team reports from the same numbers.

Jacco van der Kooij at Winning by Design has made this case for years with his Bowtie model, where the revenue journey carries on well past the signed contract into adoption and expansion.

Why Attribution Keeps Sales and Marketing Teams Apart

Chris sees the same story play out all the time. A buyer comes to an event and downloads a piece of content months later. Later still, an SDR books them, and the CRM credits the SDR, even though the event built the awareness that made the call land.

Single-touch attribution was built for a world with one buyer and one path to purchase. In a buying group that size, the touch that "gets credit" belongs to whoever happened to be last in line.

Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put forward the 95:5 rule in research with LinkedIn's B2B Institute, and Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, then at the Institute, laid it out in Marketing Week. Only about 5% of B2B buyers are in-market in a given quarter. The other 95% won't buy for months, or even years.

So most of what marketing does lands with people who aren't ready yet. By the time they are, the SDR gets the glory and last spring's webinar gets nothing.

Account-level reporting helps here. Track influenced pipeline per account, meaning every opportunity where marketing reached someone in the buying group, and review it alongside the shared pipeline target.

Plenty of outbound programmes end up measuring activity instead of impact, and attribution fights are the same habit in a nicer suit.

Shared Data and the Martech and Salestech Convergence

When Scott Brinker first mapped the marketing technology landscape in 2011, it had 150 products on it. The 2026 edition has 15,505, and growth has slowed to 0.79%, which Brinker calls effectively flat. Buying tool number 15,506 won't fix a sales and marketing split.

Along the way, the line between marketing tech and sales tech blurred. Your marketing automation knows who read the pricing page twice on Tuesday. Your sales engagement tool knows who picked up the phone on Thursday. Too often, those two facts live in separate tabs owned by people who sit on different floors.

"A good SDR should take all this data that marketing provides and run with it," says Chris.

That means website visits, content engagement, event attendance and webinar questions. An SDR who knows the vice president of finance asked about integration costs in a webinar Q&A has a better opening line than any template in Outreach or Salesloft.

Then add external signals. We build these for clients with HotSauce, Punch!'s Unique-to-You (U2U) Signal Intelligence platform. HotSauce creates buying signals specific to each client's market, instead of the generic intent data everyone with the same subscription can see. Put that next to your own first-party CRM data and you can reach out to accounts with a real reason to talk.

The first problem is signals with no rules attached. More signals only help when you know what each one triggers. A surge in category research might start an account campaign, while a pricing page visit goes straight to an SDR. When three people from one account turn up at your event, a buying process has probably started, so both teams move together. Those rules are the core of GTM orchestration, and they're what make signal-based selling work for an SDR.

Messy data is the other problem. All of this only works if both teams agree what an account, a contact, an opportunity and a buying group are. Agree who owns which fields, who creates records and who keeps them clean. Skip that conversation and every new tool, including the shiny artificial intelligence (AI) ones, adds noise faster than it adds insight.

Clear Roles in a Joint Revenue Motion

Chris puts the split between the teams simply. "The data should be used by sales but scoring should be done by marketing."

Marketing owns market insight, positioning, demand creation and lead scoring, while sales runs discovery, moves deals forward and owns the forecast. The two meet on the account record, where both teams see the same history.

Every inbound lead gets a fast follow-up. In our work with Lumi, one of our clients, following up on inbound leads within the hour increased conversion rates sevenfold. If a lead isn't ready, both teams nurture the account together until the timing shifts.

At Punch! we run this through our Relationship Revenue framework. It keeps high-fit accounts warm with structured, signal-triggered contact across several stakeholders until the buying moment arrives.

Chris counts every qualified conversation as progress, including ones that don't end in a meeting. A good call that ends with "come back to us in Q2" tells marketing exactly what to say between now and then.

"Qualified" should describe the account and the buying situation. A unified team keeps checking ICP (ideal customer profile) fit, who in the buying group is engaged and whether there's a next agreed step.

Leads are a poor unit of measure when a group decides, so in each pipeline review, ask which stakeholders are still missing.

If you've got a keen internal champion and nobody in finance or procurement has heard your name, the deal is far weaker than its CRM stage suggests. Multi-threading fixes that when each message fits the role it's sent to. Done badly, multi-threading is just spam with more steps.

B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Starts on Live Calls

"Sales are on the front line, day in, day out, having conversations with prospects," Chris told me.

Those calls are full of objections, half-hidden pain, internal politics and budget freezes nobody announced. That raw material should shape your next webinar and the one-pagers your sales team sends after a call.

Conversation intelligence tools like Gong capture a lot of it at scale now. You can search a whole quarter of calls for every mention of a competitor in seconds.

Chris still wants marketers in the room, though. "I would always encourage a marketing team to join some discovery calls and SDR calls to help really understand how the proposition is landing."

At a SaaS (software-as-a-service) company I worked for, our content lead had built the entire messaging around cost savings. She sat in on eight discovery calls in one week. Cost came up once, but audit risk came up in six. She rewrote the next webinar title on her phone on the train home, and it became our best-attended session that year.

The loop should run both ways. Marketing spots intent and launches content for each role in the buying group. Sales uses that engagement history to shape outreach, then feeds back the objections it hears, and marketing adjusts the messaging and the nurture. Both teams respond to the same account signals.

AI speeds the loop up, and it amplifies whatever mess you already have. Picture an AI agent in your sales engagement tool ranking accounts by its own idea of fit while marketing's lead scoring says something else. Your SDRs end up with two priority lists and no idea which one to trust.

Brinker calls this gap Martec's Law. Technology changes exponentially, but organisations change logarithmically.

How to Run a Unified GTM Strategy Week to Week

A joint target also needs written rules, or the old arguments come back.

Write a GTM operating agreement. Keep it to two pages so people will read it. It should cover:

• ICP and target account criteria
• Definitions of a lead, an MQL, a sales-accepted lead (one sales has agreed to work), an opportunity and pipeline
• SLAs (service level agreements) for response times
• Rules for recycling and nurturing accounts that go quiet
• Required CRM fields, and who owns each one
• A process for changing scoring and routing rules

Then set a rhythm. Run a pipeline review every week or fortnight with both teams in the room. Once a month, look at conversion, velocity, win rate and deal quality together.

Replace lead volume with pipeline from target accounts and buying-group coverage. Once those are steady, add pipeline velocity, win rate, sales cycle length, forecast accuracy and CAC (customer acquisition cost) payback.

My favourite metric is time from signal to coordinated action. If HotSauce flags an account on Monday and nobody acts for ten days, your process is too slow.

A Revenue Team Alignment Checklist

Run through these with your sales and marketing leads in the same room.

• Do sales and marketing share one definition of a target account?
• Are both teams measured on the same pipeline and revenue outcomes?
• Can both teams see the account and buying-group signals that matter?
• Do your lead and opportunity definitions match across every tool?
• Does every qualified conversation feed back into messaging and scoring?
• Are customer success and RevOps part of the operating model?
• How many days does it take you to go from signal to coordinated action?
• Does your tech stack support the process, or does it create new silos?

If you answered "sort of" to more than two, you're in good company. Revenue team alignment is slow, unglamorous work, and much of it is meetings about field names.

As for that £210k deal, the two heads agreed to share one pipeline number the following quarter. Their first joint review took 20 minutes, and nobody brought a spreadsheet.

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