There is a particular kind of leadership meeting that should feel reassuring, but never does.
- Sales reports are up.
- Marketing activity looks strong.
- Product milestones are being hit.
Everyone has data. Everyone has explanations. Everyone appears to be doing the right things.
And yet growth feels stubbornly flat.
No single function is obviously underperforming. No one is acting irresponsibly. But the organisation is not moving forward with the momentum leadership expected.
This is where alignment gets discussed.
And this is usually where things start going wrong.
The alignment conversation leaders keep having
When growth stalls, the diagnosis is familiar.
- Sales says lead quality has dropped.
- Marketing says volume and engagement are healthy.
- Sales asks for better leads.
- Marketing asks for clearer follow-up.
Leadership responds with good intentions.
More meetings.
Shared dashboards.
Joint KPIs.
Alignment becomes a recurring agenda item.
Yet months later, the same conversations repeat, often with more frustration and less patience. At this point, alignment starts to feel like a behavioural problem. People begin to question incentives, attitudes or collaboration.
In reality, the problem sits somewhere else entirely.
Why alignment is treated as a people problem
Alignment is often framed as an issue of communication or culture.
- If only teams talked more.
- If only expectations were clearer.
- If only everyone pulled in the same direction.
This framing is comforting because it avoids a harder truth. People are rarely the root cause.
In most organisations, sales and marketing are acting rationally, based on the system they are operating within.
And that system is usually broken.
Everyone is acting rationally within their own system
Sales teams are incentivised to close deals. Predictability matters. Late-stage certainty matters. Sales leaders are judged on revenue outcomes, not early-stage experimentation.
Marketing teams are incentivised to create demand. Volume, reach and engagement are rewarded. Attribution models encourage early-stage influence rather than downstream certainty.
Product teams are incentivised to deliver against roadmaps. Stability, prioritisation and feasibility matter more than shifting narratives.
Each function is behaving logically.
The failure occurs because these local systems are not anchored to a shared go-to-market logic.
Instead of one system with multiple roles, you have multiple systems competing for legitimacy.
When alignment becomes theatre
This is where alignment turns performative.
Teams attend the same meetings but operate from different assumptions.
They agree on high-level goals but disagree on what progress actually looks like.
They use the same words but mean different things by them.
Terms like “quality lead”, “buying intent” and “pipeline health” sound shared, but are rarely defined in the same way.
So alignment efforts focus on surface-level coordination rather than structural clarity.
- Dashboards get combined.
- Processes get tweaked.
- Workshops get run.
None of this resolves the underlying issue, because the system itself remains implicit.
Alignment without a shared model of how growth works is theatre. It looks active, but it does not change outcomes.
The missing layer most teams never address
What is missing is not effort or goodwill. It is shared GTM logic.
This logic answers a small number of foundational questions.
How does demand actually emerge in our market.
What signals indicate genuine buying intent.
How does value get recognised by the customer over time.
Where does trust get built or lost.
When sales, marketing and product answer these questions differently, alignment is impossible, no matter how often they meet.
Without shared answers, teams optimise locally and hope coordination happens magically.
It rarely does.
Why leaders struggle to fix this
Leaders often sense the problem but struggle to address it directly.
- Partly because GTM sits uncomfortably between functions.
- Partly because redesigning GTM feels disruptive.
- Partly because the organisation has already invested heavily in the current setup.
So instead, leaders ask for better collaboration.
But collaboration cannot substitute for clarity.
You cannot align people around a system that has never been made explicit.
What real alignment actually looks like
Real alignment starts upstream of tactics.
It begins with leadership agreeing on a single, coherent view of how growth happens in their business.
- Not a funnel diagram.
- Not a channel list.
- But a shared understanding of cause and effect.
When teams agree on the logic of growth, alignment becomes easier, almost boring.
- Marketing knows which signals matter.
- Sales knows what context those signals carry.
- Product knows which problems genuinely move the needle.
Disagreements still happen, but they are grounded in evidence rather than opinion.
Alignment shifts from negotiation to execution.
Why this matters more in today’s market
In cautious markets, misalignment is expensive.
Longer buying cycles amplify friction.
Buyers are less forgiving of inconsistency.
Internal confusion leaks into external experience.
When GTM is fragmented, customers feel it.
Messages shift. Sales conversations jar with marketing promises. Product stories do not quite land. Trust erodes quietly.
In contrast, aligned GTM systems reduce cognitive load for buyers as much as for teams.
They feel coherent. Predictable. Reassuring.
That coherence is increasingly a competitive advantage.
Alignment is a design problem, not a behavioural one
The most important reframing is this.
Sales and marketing alignment does not fail because people are doing the wrong things.
It fails because leadership has not designed a system that allows the right things to add up.
Alignment is not something you ask for.
It is something you build into the GTM model itself.
When that model is clear, alignment emerges naturally.
When it is not, no amount of meetings will save you.
