Revenue leaders have rewritten their go-to-market playbooks multiple times in just a few years. From the remote-first scramble of the pandemic to the efficiency mandates that followed, and now to the AI-driven growth explosion, many are navigating constant, jarring shifts.
In a recent discussion, two GTM experts identified a deeper challenge lurking beneath the market chaos: the organizational friction inherent in traditional, siloed structures.
According to Amy Osmond Cook, Co-Founder & CMO at Fullcast, and Roee Hartuv, Senior Pricing Advisor & Head of GTM Expertise at WillingnessToPay.com, the classic tensions between marketing, sales, and customer success are no longer an acceptable inefficiency. They are a critical roadblock to growth.
The solution they propose is a fundamental shift in revenue operations strategy. It requires adopting systems thinking to create a unified customer journey, guided by a strategic RevOps team.
Traditional, siloed GTM structures create organizational friction that actively sabotages growth. This article explores their blueprint for fixing that friction and building a truly unified GTM motion.
Why Traditional GTM Models Are Breaking Down
The GTM landscape has been defined by a relentless cycle of change. As Roee Hartuv notes, the pandemic first forced a remote-first scramble. Then, contrary to expectations, markets went “on steroids,” fueling a period of hyper-growth.
A sharp correction quickly followed, making cost-cutting and layoffs the norm. Now, we are in the midst of an AI explosion.
“We all heard of those successful companies that are growing like crazy,” Hartuv says, pointing to businesses that scaled from zero to $100 million ARR in 18 months “with four people in the go-to-market team.”
This extreme volatility makes rigid departmental structures a significant liability. The old model of annual planning cannot keep pace. Agility is now paramount, which is why organizations must adopt a continuous GTM planning motion to survive. To navigate this landscape, teams need to build a clear and adaptable framework for their go-to-market (GTM) plan.
How Handoffs Sabotage the Customer Journey
The deeper problem, according to Hartuv, is a fundamental flaw in how most GTM teams are designed. “Companies are built on different departments,” he explains. “We’ve got the marketing team… the sales team… and then a customer success team.” While organizations see distinct functions, the customer experiences one continuous, and often non-linear, journey.
Each handover between these departments, from marketing to sales, sales to onboarding, and onboarding to CS, creates points of failure. “That handover creates friction, both for the customer… and also internally,” Hartuv warns.
It is like a relay race where clumsy baton passes lose the competition, regardless of how fast each individual runner is. Every dropped baton erodes customer trust and introduces inefficiency into the revenue engine.
Quantifying the Impact of Sales and Marketing Misalignment
This internal friction manifests in familiar, costly ways. Hartuv points to the “constant beef that happens” between departments. Marketing leaders complain that sales does not follow up on leads fast enough. In response, sales leaders claim the leads are poor quality.
Meanwhile, customer success teams feel they are handed customers who were over-promised a solution, making retention a constant struggle.
These are not just internal disputes; they have a direct and damaging impact on the bottom line. This friction leads to wasted marketing spend, lower lead conversion rates, increased churn, and missed revenue targets. This systemic misalignment is a key reason why so many companies struggle.
Our own 2025 Benchmarks Report shows nearly 77% of sellers miss quota even after goals were lowered. The problem is not just planning, it is a fundamental gap in execution created by internal silos.
Applying Systems Thinking to Your GTM Motion
To solve this systemic issue, Hartuv argues for looking outside the typical GTM playbook and toward principles from manufacturing. “We should adapt principles from system thinking,” he advises.
Systems thinking treats a complex process as a series of interconnected parts. The goal is not to optimize each component in isolation but to optimize the flow and efficiency of the entire end-to-end process. By applying this to a GTM motion, leaders shift their focus from departmental KPIs to the health and velocity of the overall customer journey.
Applying systems thinking to the GTM motion transforms it from a series of disjointed handoffs into a single, optimized revenue engine.
Defining Inputs and Outputs for Each GTM Stage
In practice, this means treating each stage of the GTM motion as a subsystem with a clearly defined input and a desired output.
For example, marketing’s output is not just “leads.” It is “qualified leads that meet the specific input criteria for the sales system.” Similarly, sales’ output is not just “closed-won deals.” It is “new customers who align with the input criteria for the customer success system,” ensuring a smooth transition and setting the stage for long-term retention.
Defining these service-level agreements (SLAs) between departments creates clear accountability. It eliminates departmental finger-pointing and forces teams to work cohesively toward a shared goal: a seamless customer experience. A critical part of defining these systems is ensuring your sales team has a balanced workload and opportunity, which starts with effective territory balancing.
Ok… But Who Owns the Customer Journey?
This new model raises a critical leadership question: who is responsible for the entire system? Hartuv argues that a single owner is non-negotiable.
“Right now, we don’t have one person that is responsible for the entire system, the entire customer journey,” he says. “I don’t care if that person is a CMO, is a CRO, a Chief Customer Officer… As long as somebody oversees the entire customer journey.”
Without a single owner, departmental goals will always take precedence over the holistic customer experience, and systemic problems will never be truly solved. This leader’s primary role is to act as the chief architect of the revenue engine, ensuring the inputs and outputs between each GTM subsystem are functioning optimally.
From Tactical Tools to Strategic Ownership
While the debate over the ultimate owner of the customer journey continues, Hartuv identifies one function that is perfectly positioned to lead this transformation today: Revenue Operations.
“The only role within the current structures that sees the entire customer journey is RevOps,” he states. “RevOps, that looks at the entire customer journey.”
RevOps is not just sales support or a dashboard factory. It is the connective tissue of the revenue organization. With visibility into the data, tools, and processes across marketing, sales, and customer success, RevOps teams are the natural owners of the end-to-end revenue system. They see the friction points that others miss.
RevOps must evolve from a tactical support function into the strategic owner of the end-to-end customer journey.
Stop Talking About Tools, Start Talking Strategy
To seize this opportunity, Hartuv offers RevOps leaders direct advice: “They should stop talking about tools.”
When a RevOps leader’s conversation with their CRO centers on a new CRM or lead-routing tool, it frames the function as a technical expense. “This is where they shut off,” Hartuv explains. “They want to hear strategy. They don’t want to hear about what in their mind is costs.”
To gain strategic influence, RevOps must elevate the conversation to business outcomes. While tools are important enablers, they are the “how,” not the “why.” Strategy must come first.
For instance, focusing on strategic operational improvements is how companies like Udemy reduce planning time from months to weeks, giving them a critical speed advantage.
As the Udemy case study on operational excellence shows, this allows teams to trade internal meeting time for customer-facing time. This focus on a strong operational backbone is how other companies have also seen major improvements; read how Collibra achieved this and slashed its planning time by 30%.
Translating Operations Into Outcomes
Ultimately, RevOps must frame its contributions in terms of revenue. Hartuv urges leaders to “add numbers, dollars, revenue.”
Instead of saying, “We need to integrate Marketo and Salesforce,” frame the initiative around its impact: “By improving our lead handoff process, we can increase sales-accepted lead conversion by 15%, adding $2M to the pipeline this quarter.”
This strategic mindset is crucial when tackling consequential decisions like sales capacity planning and headcount optimization. The same applies to designing a fair and effective quota setting process that motivates reps and aligns with company goals. This is how RevOps moves from a reactive, technical function to a proactive, strategic driver of the business.
Final Thoughts
The chaos of the modern market demands a smarter, more integrated GTM system, not just better tools or harder work. The friction between sales, marketing, and customer success is a systemic problem that must be solved at its root. As experts Amy Osmond Cook and Roee Hartuv explained, clumsy handoffs and misaligned goals are no longer acceptable; they are a direct threat to efficient growth.
This is where Revenue Operations has a historic opportunity to step out of its tactical shell. By adopting a systems-thinking mindset, RevOps leaders can redesign the flow of the customer journey, eliminate friction, and become the strategic architects of sustainable growth.
The mandate is clear: Own the end-to-end system. Elevate the conversation from tools to business outcomes. Translate operational improvements into the language of revenue. This is how you stop fixing symptoms and start engineering success.
