--- title: "The 45-Point Gap in Your Go-to-Market Strategy" id: "44689" type: "post" slug: "gtm-execution-gap-strategy" published_at: "2026-05-09T00:23:06+00:00" modified_at: "2026-05-11T23:46:26+00:00" url: "https://www.leandata.com/blog/gtm-execution-gap-strategy/" markdown_url: "https://www.leandata.com/blog/gtm-execution-gap-strategy.md" excerpt: "83% of B2B leaders say GTM strategy is critical, but only 38% execute it well. New HBR research reveals why the gap persists and what to do about it." taxonomy_category: - "Go-To-Market" - "Intelligent GTM Orchestration" taxonomy_post_tag: - "Buyer Journey automation" - "Buying Groups" - "enterprise GTM execution" - "lead management strategy" --- May 09 2026 # The 45-Point Gap in Your Go-to-Market Strategy Go-To-MarketBuyer Journey automation ##### *Summary* New research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reveals a significant GTM execution gap: 83% of B2B organizations say go-to-market strategy is very important, but only 38% describe their execution as very effective. This article examines why the gap persists, what internal and structural forces make it worse, and what high-performing organizations do differently. ### What You’ll Learn - Why the distance between GTM strategy and GTM execution is wider than most leaders realize - The structural barriers, including fragmented systems and siloed data, that keep execution from catching up to strategy - Why adding more headcount or budget alone does not close the gap - How the gap plays out differently across leaders, followers, and laggards - What high-performing B2B organizations do to align teams and improve execution outcomes - ## The 45-Point Gap in Your GTM Strategy If you work in on a revenue team or in GTM operations at a B2B company, this number will feel familiar: 83% of organizations say their go-to-market strategy is very important. Only 38% say their execution of that strategy is very effective. That 45-point spread is not a rounding error. It is a structural problem that shows up in every missed handoff, every slow response to a buyer signal, every pipeline review where no one can explain what happened after the qualified lead was created. This gap is the central finding of a [September 2025 survey](https://www.leandata.com/harvard-business-review-aligning-go-to-market-execution-with-strategy/) conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. The research, sponsored by LeanData, gathered responses from 522 B2B professionals and paints a clear picture: organizations across industries have invested heavily in their GTM strategy. Where they are falling short is in executing it. ## More Resources Won’t Fix It One of the sharpest observations in the HBR Analytic Services report comes from Chris Dent, a partner in the B2B Commercial Excellence group at Bain & Company. “When companies aren’t set up to do [GTM execution] well, they can pour in resourcing, whether that’s money or extra head count, and they don’t see any change in outcomes.” That quote is worth sitting with. The instinct when execution lags is to throw more at the problem: more SDRs, more marketing budget, more tooling. But if the underlying coordination model is broken, additional resources just accelerate the chaos. The research backs this up. Only 32% of survey respondents say their sales, marketing, and customer teams are very aligned. And 78% agree their organization needs better coordination across GTM systems. These are not capacity problems. They are structural ones. ## What is Actually Getting in the Way When respondents described their challenges in designing and executing their GTM strategy, two patterns emerged clearly: disconnected systems and siloed data. CHALLENGE Systems or data sources aren’t well integrated Difficulty creating a cohesive buying experience across channels Ineffective coordination between GTM teams Internal teams have misaligned or conflicting goals Siloed data that doesn’t provide a holistic buyer view Reaction time isn’t fast enough to address buyer signals % OF RESPONDENTS 48% 44% 43% 42% 43% 38% These numbers describe organizations where marketing, sales, and customer success are each operating from a partial picture. No single team owns the full buyer journey end to end. As Dent put it, *“There isn’t a function within the organization that owns the entire journey of the customer end to end. So there are a lot of handoff and coordination challenges that you encounter, with lots of issues in big, complex sales motions especially.”* Ryan Schwartz, VP of Marketing Systems and Intelligence at Samsara, echoed this at a recent [LeanData webinar](https://www.leandata.com/resources/gtm-strategy-execution-gap/) on the research findings. “If you’re not staying well aligned, all of a sudden you could very quickly become disjointed and work in a different direction.” Schwartz added that cross-functional collaboration has never been more critical, especially given how fast AI is changing the pace of GTM execution. Bob Yang, who leads global go-to-market for Adobe’s AI platform, described the shift his team made from a linear demand gen model to something more collaborative. “We purposefully made it more collaborative so that even within pipeline progression, where traditionally it was purely a sales responsibility, we realigned it so that marketing and sales drove that hand in hand.” That shared ownership, he said, transformed the us-versus-them mentality into a how-do-we-work-together mindset. ## The Gap is Not Evenly Distributed The HBR Analytic Services research classifies organizations into three groups based on their reported effectiveness: leaders (38% of respondents), followers (42%), and laggards (20%). The differences between these groups are striking: - Among leaders, 63% report strong team alignment. Among laggards, only a fraction do. - Leaders are significantly more likely to report shortened sales cycles and increased revenue as outcomes of their GTM improvements. - Laggards struggle with fragmented handoffs, misaligned goals, and slow response to buyer signals. What separates leaders from the rest is not a bigger budget or a more sophisticated tech stack. **It is process clarity and coordination discipline**. - Leaders continually refine how their teams work together. - They define shared metrics and KPIs. - They align on a common view of the buyer journey and treat it as the organizing principle for how teams collaborate, not just a slide in a QBR deck. Jen Allen-Knuth, founder of DemandJen and a frequent trainer for enterprise B2B sales teams, highlighted a root cause that often goes unexamined. “One of the biggest misalignment areas comes from different groups, both horizontally across products, marketing, and sales, but also from top down, not agreeing on a very basic question: when we lose, why do we lose?” When teams are tracking different things to prove different points, the data that is supposed to improve execution ends up reinforcing silos instead. ## Why the Linear Funnel Made This Worse The execution gap did not appear overnight. It is partly the product of how go-to-market teams were organized for years: marketing owns top of funnel, sales owns pipeline progression, customer success owns post-sale. Each team built its own systems, its own metrics, its own view of the customer. Jim Bell, CMO of LeanData, noted at the webinar that “the siloed version of the world, as modeled by the linear buyer journey and the linear sales funnel, has created entire populations of technology stacks and datasets that have been kept separate.” As [buying groups](https://www.leandata.com/blog/b2b-buying-groups/) have grown more complex and buyer behavior has shifted to non-linear journeys, that structure has become a liability. The research reflects this: **92% of respondents agree that B2B organizations should align their GTM strategy with the buyer journey. But only 29% say they actually understand that buyer journey well.** The intent is there. The follow-through is not. ## This is a Coordination Problem, Not a People Problem It is tempting to frame the execution gap as a talent issue or a leadership issue. The data suggests otherwise. When nearly half of all respondents cite poorly integrated systems as a top challenge, and when 78% say they need better coordination across their GTM systems, the problem is structural. The organizations making progress are not doing so by hiring differently or working harder. They are rethinking how their processes and systems are connected. They are building shared views of buying groups, creating common ownership of pipeline stages, and making it easier for AI-generated signals and human-driven actions to flow through one coordinated layer, rather than sitting in disconnected tools. Schwartz described the approach at Samsara: find an existing process where you can improve coordination or leverage AI to drive higher outcomes, and scale from there. > “The go-to-market process is mission critical for revenue. Finding an existing process where you can take a particular node, a particular role, a particular sub-process, and make that much more efficient, I think is exactly the way to do it.” > > Ryan Schwartz > > VP, Marketing Systems & Intelligence ## The Stakes Are Rising AI is adding urgency to a problem that already existed. As AI tools multiply across the revenue engine, generating leads, scoring intent, triggering outreach, the organizations that cannot coordinate what happens next will just produce more noise. The gap between strategy and execution will widen, not narrow. Organizations that are improving [AI GTM execution](https://www.leandata.com/blog/ai-gtm-lead-routing-use-cases/) are building the coordination layer first, one that connects signals across teams, enforces process consistency, and makes every buyer interaction trigger the right action, regardless of whether that action was initiated by a rep, a system, or an AI agent. The 45-point gap is real. The good news is that the organizations closing it have done it by fixing coordination, not by adding more resources to a broken process. ## FAQ ### What is the GTM execution gap? The GTM execution gap refers to the distance between how much B2B organizations prioritize their go-to-market strategy and how effectively they actually carry it out. HBR Analytic Services research found that 83% of B2B professionals say GTM strategy is very important, but only 38% describe their execution as very effective, a 45-point difference. ### Why is GTM execution so difficult for enterprise B2B companies? The most common barriers are poorly integrated systems (cited by 48% of survey respondents), siloed data (43%), and ineffective coordination between teams (43%). Because no single team owns the entire buyer journey end to end, handoffs between marketing, sales, and customer success are frequent sources of breakdown, especially at scale. ### What do high-performing GTM organizations do differently? Organizations classified as leaders in the HBR Analytic Services research are significantly more likely to have strong team alignment, shared metrics, and clear role ownership across GTM functions. They treat process improvement as a continuous discipline, not a one-time project, and they organize their teams around the buyer journey rather than around internal departmental boundaries. ### Will adding more AI tools improve GTM execution? Not on their own. The research suggests that without coordination across systems and teams, more AI tools create more signals and more activity without improving outcomes. The organizations seeing results from AI are using it within a connected orchestration layer that governs what happens after the signal, not as a standalone addition to an already fragmented stack.