Many B2B companies today recognize that a well thought out “Go-to-Market” (GTM) strategy and process, along with the supporting execution, measurement and optimization of business impact are critical to their overall growth and success. GTM alignment across their customer-facing teams (marketing, sales, success) is crucial  in both growing and recessionary markets, in ensuring  positive business outcomes, and delivering significant financial benefits. GTM  processes include defining and sourcing  target audiences, getting them engaged with the brand, and communicating the brand’s benefits so they speak to the specific business drivers relevant to each audience in your product or solution. Through this audience engagement, using both 1st and 3rd party data,  proper GTM alignment in advance  delivers the following: 

1. Informed Decision-Making - Improved alignment results in better decision-making across your organization. The more your revenue operations data is aligned across all customer facing departments, the more confidence you can have in your decisions. Good data reduces risk and results in tangible results.
   
   
2. Better Targeting Data - Quality data on accounts and audiences is essential to achieving improved targeting. Without alignment, marketers operate in a silo, which is not efficient. Worse, they may  guess as to who their target audience should be. When you have aligned across all customer facing departments, you can more accurately determine your target audiences while creating alignment across all revenue generating teams. You can do so by collecting data about your current audience and then finding potential new customers using third party data sources that track intent . You can use this knowledge to more accurately target advertising campaigns and develop products or content that appeal to the right people and deliver it at the right time in the right channel.
   
   
3. Drive Campaign & Content to Persona and Buying Group Alignment - In addition to improving targeting, you will also improve your content through better alignment. The more you know about your audience, the more reliably you can create content or ads that appeal to them. For instance, if your ideal customer works in marketing or sales operations, you can dynamically assign a persona value to each page on your site and every asset. This assignment can then segment site traffic or categorize your engagement allowing you to roll that engagement to a product or topic of interest.
   
   
4. Optimize Customer Success - High-quality data can also help you improve your relationships with customers, which is crucial for success in any industry. Gathering data about your customers helps you understand them better. You can use information about your customers’ engagement, consumption intent and budgets to provide them with relevant content that anticipates their needs or their potential to attrition. Build a stronger competitive position by leveraging customer usage and consumption data, this data is proprietary and leads to everything from product improvements to data-driven and enabled learning.
   
   
5. Simplify the analysis and activation of Data – Properly aligned data is also much easier to use than poor-quality data. Having quality data at your fingertips increases your company’s efficiency as well. If your information is not complete or consistent, you have to spend significant amounts of time fixing that data to make it useable. This takes time away from other activities and means it takes longer for you to implement the insights your data uncovered. Aligned data also helps to keep your company’s various departments on the same page so that they can work together more effectively.
   
   
6. Competitive Advantage - Data is the most valuable resource a company has, as long as it’s high-quality. Better aligned data means higher quality which in turn means that you can discover opportunities before your competitors do. You can better anticipate prospects’ needs and, therefore, beat competitors to sales. A lack of good data means missed opportunities and falling behind the competition.
   
   
7. Increased efficiency –The efficiencies associated with end-to-end GTM data alignment & quality are becoming far more apparent, from higher connect or click through rates to improved business impact on both revenue and operations. We are seeing increased pipeline and pipeline velocity.  Given the growing overlap in data usage across all customer facing departments and the rise in newly available data sources, the investment in GTM alignment reduces the operational risks associated with siloed data management.