Breaking Down Silos: The Key to Go-to-Market (GTM) Efficiency

Does your sales team spend countless hours working on leads that marketing swore were qualified, but most fizzle out before a demo even takes place? At the same time, customer success is scrambling to onboard clients who were promised features that you don’t even offer.

All of your teams are working hard, but pulling in different directions. The result? Slower deals, burned-out reps, and revenue left on the table.

The good news is that you can fix this. With a focus on go-to-market (GTM) efficiency, you’ll break down silos and align people, processes, and technology. Let’s walk through how to improve GTM efficiency with a practical 4-part framework and self-audit.

What is Go-To-Market Efficiency and Why Does It Matter?

GTM efficiency is a metric that compares the performance of your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to your spending. When efficiency is lacking, you see duplicate work, failing marketing campaigns, and deals that drag on forever.

The goal is repeatable revenue growth. Winning by Design pegs top-performing B2B companies at a GTM Efficiency Factor below 100%, meaning they spend less than $1 in sales and marketing to earn $1 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The top 10% of companies operate at under 100%. Compare that to struggling teams hovering above 200%, and you’ll see why this is important.

To calculate your GTM efficiency, Winning by Design suggests looking at the total sales and marketing spend ratio to net new ARR.

Why GTM Teams Struggle With Efficiency

GTM inefficiency often shows up in unexplainable missed deals and wasted marketing budgets. A lack of coordination among sales, marketing, and customer success is typically the main culprit. Silo mentality leads to confusion about who owns which parts of the sales funnel, and mistakes like chasing unqualified leads or ignoring high-potential buyers waste time and money.

Below are four reasons GTM teams stumble.

Silos Between Teams

It is common for sales, marketing, and customer success to be working in silos. As a result, messages get lost, deals stall, and customers receive inconsistent information. In fact, research shows that as much as 80% of marketing content goes unused by sales due to poor alignment.

For example, a marketing team might run a campaign that fills the pipeline with great leads, but those leads never convert if sales doesn’t follow up with resources and communication. Sales complains that there are no leads, marketing says that sales isn’t following up with them, and customer success is left with little knowledge on what to work on.

When you can get all teams working in sync, sales cycle times can decrease significantly.

Lack of Defined and Unified Metrics

If marketing monitors website traffic while sales only looks at closed deals, you’re not working with shared goals. When each team uses different success measures, they end up working in silos, focusing on their own metrics instead of driving collective growth. This mismatch leads to never-ending finger-pointing.

Shared KPIs like pipeline velocity or win rate are essential for sales and marketing alignment, ensuring teams work toward the same goals.

Manual Processes

Copying and pasting data across multiple software tools or sending repetitive welcome emails wastes time, but unfortunately, it’s not uncommon. It also creates more room for human mistakes. For instance, if you rely on spreadsheets for tracking leads, you can lose opportunities when someone forgets to update information.

Gartner found that a unified process automation architecture allows organisations to scale their efforts, reduce costs, improve efficiency, and innovate faster.

Tech Stack Overload

Just like disconnected teams create business silos, disconnected platforms create data silos. If marketing automation, CRM, and customer success software do not talk to each other, you will have incomplete and inaccessible information across your customer-facing teams.

By consolidating to a single platform or integrating your revenue tech stack, you gain a single source of truth that is more likely to be accurate.

Related Resource: What a Good Revenue Software Stack Looks Like

The 4-Part Framework for GTM Efficiency

Improving GTM efficiency takes time and a repeatable plan that aligns teams and their efforts toward reliable growth. This framework helps you get there by focusing on four tactics at the root of GTM bottlenecks. Each will remove a friction point and standardise how your teams work, so deals close faster and budgets are spent wisely.

1. Define Strategic Goals

Consider the big picture: what’s your revenue target? Break it into three buckets: process (how work flows), technology (tools that help), and people (who’s doing what).

If your teams are working in silos, consider adding a revenue operations (RevOps) function. The primary function of RevOps is to centralise data, standardise reports, and keep everyone working toward a common goal.

Next, define a North Star Metric, like “new ARR per quarter,” and set OKRs that tie revenue teams to it. Be sure to clarify handoffs, too.

For example, marketing owns lead gen, sales owns deal-closing, and customer success owns retention. Improve visibility into everything these teams do with a centralised dashboard so everyone sees the same numbers.

2. Align Teams and Standardise Workflows

It’s time to get everyone on the same page. Begin with regularly scheduled stand-up meetings that include sales, customer success, and marketing team members for a 15-minute sync. Identify shared performance metrics, such as qualified leads closed, so team members stop arguing over brand building versus closed deals.

You must also standardise your entire workflow, including how you qualify leads, reach out, and move deals forward. RevOps can use their common data to sharpen your ideal customer profile (ICP) and scoring techniques so sales reps focus on the right opportunities.

Then, build a sales enablement programme with playbooks and GTM training sessions to reinforce best practices. Track who’s sticking to the process and gather frequent feedback so you can adjust anything that is not working.

3. Scale GTM Efficiency with AI and Technology

Use technology to help wherever you can. According to McKinsey, more than 30% of sales tasks and processes are estimated to be automatable, from sales planning to lead management, quotations, order management, and even post-sale activities.

• Consider using CRM automation to send follow-ups, a sales enablement platform to keep reps informed, and marketing automation to nurture leads.
• AI is available in most tools to help process large volumes of data across repositories. Sales reps can use this to provide more personalised pitches or spot at-risk deals before they fall through the cracks, ultimately increasing GTM performance.
• Remember to consolidate your tech stack. Too many disconnected tools make daily operations impossible to manage, especially when solving for team collaboration.
• Digital sales rooms (DSR), where buyers can access the resources they need in one place, can also help boost engagement and demonstrate a cohesive business to customers. Learn more about DSR best practices to transform your GTM strategies in this guide.

4. Iterate and Enhance GTM Execution

GTM efficiency continuously evolves. Look into where deals stall. Maybe it’s a clunky demo, siloed systems, or a slow handoff. Once you spot the problem, you can tackle it head-on.

Next, refine your messaging and content by monitoring campaigns that work and don’t. Adjust all demand gen strategies based on hard numbers, not hunches.

You can also analyse the silo effect in your processes. Are teams working in isolation, or are they collaborating? For example, if sales and marketing operate using one tool, but customer success is left out, explore ways to integrate them and unify your revenue tech stack.

Beyond internal processes, consider how industry trends, new tech, including AI, and feedback from the front lines impact your team’s effectiveness. Expect that shifting customer needs, roadblocks in the buyer journey, and market changes will contribute to GTM success.

You should schedule these review activities regularly and add in extra monitoring when new products launch, sales process changes, markets expand, or if there is a significant change in any performance metric.

Related Resource: Take the Guesswork Out of Go-To-Market Performance

The GTM Efficiency Self-Audit

Use this GTM audit to see where you are performing efficiently and where you can adjust for better results. Rate yourself on a scale of 1 (barely started) to 10 (perfectly efficient) for each question, tally your score, and use the guide below to identify your next move.

For example, if you score 45 initially because you have disconnected handoffs, defining clear ownership may give you a quick jump in the score and simultaneously cut deal cycle time.

	Question	Score (1-10)	What a 10 looks like
Define Strategic Goals	– Do we have a clear revenue goal everyone’s chasing together? – Are handoffs between teams smooth and defined? – Can we see real-time GTM performance across teams?		– A shared North Star Metric (e.g., ARR growth) is set, and all teams know their role in hitting it. – Leads flow seamlessly, and no one’s guessing who owns what or dropping the ball. – A centralised dashboard shows progress instantly without digging through spreadsheets.
Align Teams	– Do teams meet regularly to sync up? – Do we use shared metrics to measure success? – Are our workflows consistent and followed by everyone?		– Weekly stand-ups keep everyone on the same page. – One KPI (like “qualified leads closed”) unites teams. – Lead scoring, outreach, and handoffs are standardised.
Scale with Tech	– Are we using tech to automate repetitive tasks? – Is our tech stack streamlined and connected? – Are we using AI to prioritise high-quality opportunities?		– CRM and automation handle follow-ups and nurturing. – Tools talk to each other. – AI flags hot deals and forecasts accurately.
Iterate and Enhance	– Do we analyse data to spot and fix problem areas? – Are we refining messaging depending on what buyers engage with? – Do we use closed-loop reporting to make GTM strategy adjustments?		– We know where deals stall (e.g., slow demos) and tweak fast. – Content that works gets amplified; if it doesn’t, it gets cut. – We are not guessing. What drives wins (e.g., a great campaign) gets doubled down on.

After completing the self-audit, use your total score (out of 120) to assess your current GTM efficiency and identify the next steps. Below are the GTM performance tiers, their implications, and recommendations to guide your improvement efforts.

• 90-120: Your go-to-market operations are highly effective, demonstrating strong alignment, quality processes, and optimal use of technology. To maintain this competitive edge, focus on continuous refinement.
• 60-89: You’ve built a solid GTM foundation, with key elements in place but room to improve. Now is the time to address specific weaknesses. Look at your lowest-scoring category from the audit and work with team members to develop a solution.
• 30-59: Your GTM processes show promise and a clear direction, but you have more to do to accelerate progress. Prioritising one area at a time can help manage improvements. Consider a weekly team stand-up to build alignment across teams.
• 0-29: You are likely just starting your go-to-market strategy, offering a valuable opportunity to build from the ground up. Start with the four-part framework above to your objective that spurs collective effort.

Build a More Efficient, Scalable GTM Engine With Highspot

A efficient GTM engine depends on the right tools, clear goals, unified metrics, and collaborative processes that break down silos. It takes time, but minor improvements can have an enormous impact. The best thing you can do as a leader is to start assessing with a self-audit to spot gaps and opportunities.

Highspot helps your teams improve GTM efficiency by streamlining enablement, unifying your tech stack, and delivering real-time insights that drive revenue. With stronger alignment, you’ll build a leaner, faster, and more scalable GTM machine.