Why siloed GTM teams create bad campaigns

Picture the scene.

Its the company all hands meeting.

The marketing leader stands up.

“I’m really excited to announce our new campaign into the market which will launch on Monday.

We’ve worked with a leading brand agency, and this is a cross-platform campaign including paid social, web and magazine coverage.

The theme for the campaign is ‘living your best life’ “

The sellers look across at each other - “WTF?”

As the campaign sponsor continues to dive into the detail of the campaign content, the schedule and the aggressive targets for leads and revenue generated the sellers think to themselves,

“OK I’ll need to keep generating my own pipe for the foreseeable future”

The perception of the sellers is that the campaign owners have been locked in a room somewhere, disconnected from the reality of the challenges their customers are actually facing, and now the pressure is on the sellers to go and turn this ‘amazing concept’ into pipeline.

I’ve seen this happen again and again over 20 years of different tech companies.

A campaign. that linked our product to death and paying taxes - “its supposed to provoke a reaction”

A quickly removed mandate that the [company name] should always be in [square brackets], even in our own [emails], because [developers] think in code.

When I explain how these simple mistakes get made again and again I draw this graphic up.

Two of the three teams in your go to market function speak to customers every day for a living.

That is their job.

I am not suggesting marketing don’t speak to customers - but they don’t do it every day and it is not part of their daily job and how they get compensated.

Sales and Customer Success teams are hearing from customers every day about their challenges, their priorities, how they are actually using the product they bought from you, their lessons learned, and their plans for the future.

Your Sales and Customer Success teams are using a ton of templates, frameworks, questionnaires, surveys, FAQ’s, and architecture diagrams to help your customers get value out of your products.

So this isn’t a ‘one team is better than another’ post, its a ‘we’re better together’ post.

To provide truly valuable content to your potential buyers, to answer their most pain-related questions, and to launch a campaign that has your sellers leaning forward, “now this is going to work….”,

take time to lean in to your sales and customer success teams to find out what really floats your customer’s boats.