At software company Capsule, go-to-market alignment goes beyond high-level goals. For their prospect dinners, the sales, marketing, and CS teams collaborate to build a specific seating chart and game plan. This ensures every interaction is strategic, maximizing the opportunity to convert attendees into pipeline.

When different departments push their own projects onto the sales team, reps get overloaded. To solve this, enablement leaders must shift the focus of every initiative away from departmental priorities and toward a shared customer outcome. This unified goal minimizes internal friction and clarifies what's truly important.

To get a CEO to champion a unified go-to-market strategy, don't pitch its importance. Ask them to answer core strategic questions, then ask if they believe their leadership team would provide the same answers. This highlights potential misalignment and positions the CEO as the leader to solve it.

To keep growth aligned with product, foster a shared culture where everyone loves the product and customer. This isn't about formal meetings, but a baseline agreement that makes collaboration inherent. When this culture exists, the product team actively seeks marketing's input, creating a unified engine.

The "Marketing" in ABM creates resistance from non-marketing teams, pigeonholing the initiative. Using broader terms like "Account-Based Strategy" or "Account-Based Engagement" repositions it as a company-wide GTM motion, dramatically improving adoption across sales, customer success, and leadership.

Go-to-market success isn't just about high-performing marketing, sales, and CS teams. The true differentiator is the 'connective tissue'—shared ICP definitions, terminology, and smooth handoffs. This alignment across functions, where one team's actions directly impact the next, is where most organizations break down.

Some CEOs encourage tension between sales and marketing. A more effective model is for the CRO and CMO to build enough trust to handle all disagreements—like lead quality or follow-up—behind closed doors. This prevents a culture of finger-pointing and presents a united front to leadership.

To achieve true alignment with sales, product, and finance, marketing leaders should avoid marketing jargon and subjective opinions. Instead, they should ground conversations in objective data about performance, customer experience gaps, or internal capabilities to create a shared, fact-based understanding of challenges.

The first step in aligning brand and ABX is not tactical planning but narrative alignment. Bring sales, marketing, and brand leaders together and ask: 'If a buying group engages with us, will they hear one story or three?' Only when the answer is 'one story' are you ready to integrate efforts.