Why Your Go-to-Market Strategy Keeps Drifting | Sapphire Reels, Atlassian

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Hey, Adam.

Sorry I missed your call.

Don't know how that happened, but it's really great to hear from you, and I really wanted to make sure I followed up on GTM's strategy.

I think it's pretty interesting right now because a lot of people are treating this as an alignment problem, and I do think it is.

I just think a lot of teams are solving for maybe the wrong kind of alignment right now.

And I think for many people, there's alignment as an event, right? Where you have the meeting, everyone's nodding, everyone's super in on it.

And then I think of, I don't know, I'm a marketer.

I like to use marketing terms, alignment as infrastructure, you could say, where I really think of that as how do you build consistency in from the start instead of like checking once, hoping and praying, and then it's good.

And I think that one thing with alignment we need to be really upfront about is drift.

You know, drift is going to happen, right? And it's not carelessness.

Your GTM strategy and how it's presented to the market is going to drift.

Sales is going to optimize for what closes.

Customer success is going to optimize for what keeps renewal going.

And a product team is going to optimize for whatever looks best on their roadmap for their product.

core persona.

I think it's really interesting because when we talk about go to market strategy, how does someone experience go to market strategy? Well, what they're actually judging is you have these touch points.

So does this feel like one company or does it feel like five different people who are guessing? Feeling like one company is a very specific thing.

It's not just vibes these days.

It's a pricing page, right? Where someone's presented with something based on what sales told them.

It's not having to continually really explain themselves meeting over meeting.

And in six months, when they have their meeting with their customer success manager and they want to renew, well, everything that they were kind of promised in the I think it's just really, really important to, again, emphasize the idea that there's different teams pulling towards different legitimate goals, different pressures each day.

And if your plan doesn't assume any drift, you're not being rigorous.

I think you're being a little bit naive and you'll probably be the last person who's going to find out what happened.