I've asked a lot of founders to walk me through their GTM strategy. Very often, what I get back is a recap of the last 90 days: channels tried, campaigns run, outreach sent. That's not a strategy. That's a retrospective.

A real GTM strategy is a causal model. If we reach this type of customer, in this context, with this message, they buy for this reason. It's a hypothesis about cause and effect, not a list of things you did.

Alignment between sales and marketing often fails at the handoff.

Both teams can leave a planning meeting with the same slide deck and still operate from different pictures of the customer by Friday. Marketing builds campaigns around one set of signals while sales works from another. The gap is rarely about motivation it's usually the absence of a shared workspace where the reasoning stays visible to everyone.

When context lives in separate tools, small differences compound into conflicting outreach and mixed messaging. I've been testing whether keeping strategy, targeting, and execution in one connected view reduces that drift over time. The early signal is that shared visibility matters more than perfect process documents.

What has actually helped you keep both teams working from the same understanding?

I've been on both sides of this lately, and I'm honestly not sure what to think anymore.

On the sending side, I've used AI to build outreach sequences. The copy was tighter, the personalization tokens were in place, and open rates looked fine. Replies, though, were thin. When I looked at who we were actually sending to, I realized the targeting logic mirrored the same blunt pattern-matching the AI used to write the message: job title, industry, company size, done. Technically personalized. Strategically random.