The GTM Debrief: What I Learned From Running Q2 Alignment Across Marketing, Sales, and Product

Read time: 3 minutes.

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Every company talks about alignment.
Very few actually do the work to make it real.

We just completed our Q2 GTM strategy with the Marketing, Sales, CS and Product teams.
Four departments. Four agendas. One revenue goal.

What I’ll share here isn’t theory. It’s what happens when you have to make real tradeoffs between CAC, NRR, product backlog, and sales targets all under time pressure.

The Setup

We started with one principle:

This forced each team to answer:

• What’s working now that scales?

• What’s not working and needs to be cut?

• What bets can we afford to place and how fast will they pay off?

And most importantly:
Where does our next $1 of growth actually come from?

Marketing: From Volume to Velocity

What we changed:

• Cut deadweight traffic channels (low-converting pages, unqualified paid clicks)

• Doubled down on high-intent pages, retargeting, and AI-powered content expansion

• Change narrative and focused content creation on bottom-of-funnel use cases and comparison pages

What we learned:

• Not all traffic is good traffic. We had to get brutal about CAC payback.

• Fastest wins came from optimizing conversion, not chasing more clicks.

• The best leads came through product-led pages (not marketing-led ones).

Sales: From Pipeline to Seat Expansion

What we changed:

• Refined ICP: focused on accounts with seat expansion potential

• Focus on bundles/DWY (SF + Clay playbook), Expand deals in negotiation to increase ACV

• Reduced no-shows by tightening demo flows and pre-qualifiers

What we learned:

• ACV isn’t just about closing, it’s about expansion potential at the point of sale

• We were not mixing pricing and volume efficiently to increase AOV and ACV

• SMs and AEs needed to pitch the feature value and use cases upfront, not wait for an aha moment.

Product: From Building Features to Shipping Revenue

What we changed:

• Prioritized features tied to activation and retention: Inbox v2, onboarding, and new reporting

• Cut roadmap items that didn’t directly affect NRR or trial-to-paid conversion

• Focused on stickiness and value realization, especially during the first 7 days

What we learned:

• Product backlog can’t grow just because it’s “important.” It needs to tie to a financial outcome

• The best feature we shipped was better onboarding and reduced junk demos

• We didn’t need more features - we needed the right ones, delivered faster

What Alignment Actually Looks Like

It’s not everyone doing the same thing.
It’s every team knowing what the other team needs in order to hit shared KPIs.

We didn’t align around deliverables.
We aligned around outcomes.

Final Takeaways

1. Alignment starts with revenue. Everything else is downstream.

2. If a roadmap, campaign, or playbook doesn’t impact CAC, ACV, or NRR, it’s a distraction.

3. GTM isn’t about departments moving in sync. It’s about solving each other’s bottlenecks.

4. Real alignment happens in tension, not in silence. That’s where the signal lives.

That's it for today's article! I hope you found this essay insightful.

Wishing you a productive week ahead!

I always appreciate you reading.

Thanks,
Chintankumar Maisuria