Series Overview
As companies grow, GTM breakdowns rarely show up as sudden failures. They emerge as friction. Progress slows, pipelines become less predictable, and confidence in forecasts declines, even as teams work harder and act with good intent. Written from both the marketing and sales lens, this six-part series, Building a Unified GTM Operating Model, explores why scale exposes weaknesses in informal GTM systems and how an intentional operating model restores clarity, alignment, and scalable growth.
| Executive Takeaways |
|
CEO-led, informal GTM models break predictably as scale introduces complexity. |
By Kelley Marko (CMO) and Neil Isford (CSO), Chief Outsiders
Part 1 of a Six-Part Series on Building a Unified GTM Operating Model to Unlock Scalable Growth
The scene plays out in boardrooms all the time: A founder or CEO who once knew every deal and every customer now sits before the board, struggling to explain why growth has stalled. The metrics are confusing. Marketing and sales are pointing fingers. And the forecast is unreliable. What happened?
The answer is both simple and painful: The informal, founder-driven growth model that got them where they are is breaking under the complexity of scale.
As companies grow, the CEO led approach and unstructured collaboration that once worked begin to fracture under increasing complexity. This isn't a failure of leadership, effort, or talent. It's a predictable operating model design problem that emerges as organizations grow. Failure to address it is one of the leading contributors to stalled growth and to compressed or declining company value.
It's a cruel irony of scaling a business: The very success you create introduces the complexity that undermines the informal systems that generated that success in the first place. In the early days, you might have two salespeople, one marketing person, and the CEO acting as the connective go-to-market (GTM) tissue. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Communication happens organically. Course corrections are immediate. The founder translates strategy, resolves conflicts, and ensures alignment, often without anyone noticing.
But informal systems slow down as a business scales, while complexity keeps compounding. Double your revenue and you might triple your team size. Add new products, enter new markets, introduce channel partners, and suddenly you've increased organizational complexity by an order of magnitude. The "founder translator" becomes a bottleneck as they lead a much larger organization and can no longer operate as the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. Tribal knowledge becomes an organizational vulnerability. Decision velocity slows as consensus requirements increase.
The model that got you to $5 million won't get you to $10 million. And the model that got you to $10 million definitely won't get you to $50 million or more.
Through our work with hundreds of growth-stage companies, we've observed that GTM breakdowns follow a fairly predictable pattern based on revenue scale:
$5M-$10M - The Heroic Effort Phase: In this phase, the CEO is still deeply involved in major deals and marketing decisions. Heroic individual efforts mask emerging system gaps. What looks like "scrappy startup culture" is unsustainable dependence on a few key people. Early stress shows up in subtle ways. The same customer questions keep coming up, prospects and customers try to escalate everything directly to the CEO, new sales hires struggle to ramp, and marketing can't explain what's working (or not) or why.
$10M-$50M - The Functional Silo Phase: Sales and marketing have now grown into distinct departments with their own leaders, goals, and rhythms. The CEO doesn’t have the cycles to be in on every decision or big sales call. Cross-functional friction builds. Sales complains that leads are low in volume or quality, while marketing insists the breakage is due to sales not following up on leads. Processes exist, but they’re loosely documented and unevenly followed. Forecasts become less reliable and the CEO can't personally validate every opportunity. CEO frustration grows as marketing and sales tell different stories about what’s working and what’s not.
$50M-$100M and Beyond - The Compounding Failure Phase: The organization has scaled, and the CEO has stepped out of the day-to-day, but the GTM operating model hasn't evolved to ensure alignment. Sales and marketing organizations manage to different priorities and metrics. Handoff failures compound. Pipeline integrity erodes. Attribution gets murky at best. No one can definitively say which investments drive results. Blame quietly replaces collaboration. Board meetings become exercises in explaining variances rather than celebrating and driving momentum. Growth stalls and valuation multiples compress or decline.
The breakdown doesn't announce itself with a crisis. It shows up as friction. Small, persistent patterns that seem manageable until they're not.
In Sales:
Misses on quarterly forecasts emerge, with no early warning
Reps spend more time arguing about lead quality than working leads
Sales teams pay lip service to marketing campaigns and begin running their own marketing motions (e.g. BDRs get redirected to outbound, reps attend events not part of the marketing calendar, etc.)
Win/loss analysis becomes anecdotal war stories rather than structured insight
Sales cycles lengthen without clear explanation
The CEO get pulled in to rescue stuck deals
In Marketing:
Campaigns are launched based on opinion instead of data-driven insights
Marketing executes initiatives despite lack of sales alignment
Content exists in silos, and no one knows what is available or what works (e.g. marketing is producing top-of-funnel thought leadership while sales needs case studies)
Lead volume replaces pipeline quality and revenue contribution in performance conversations
Marketing can't articulate its ROI and becomes a cost center to cut
"Sales doesn't work the leads we produce" becomes the reflexive defense
In Leadership:
Strategic GTM meetings devolve into post mortems and tactical firefighting
The same issues appear on every agenda without resolution
Forecast reviews become focused on solving the gap in the current quarter, losing focus on sustainable growth planning
Cross-functional meetings require the CEO to host, mediate, and translate
Decisions get made, then quietly ignored in execution
If this sounds familiar, it isn’t a sign of bad intent, a talent gap, or poor execution by your team. These are natural symptoms of a GTM operating model that has outgrown its original design.
If a company has hidden gaps in its GTM operating model each quarter, it leaves growth on the table. Based on our experience, companies typically sacrifice:
Rate of revenue growth – due to misalignment, inefficiency, and missed opportunities
Forecasting accuracy - eroding board confidence and complicating fundraising or exit timing
Talent retention - as top sales performers leave for environments with clearer direction and higher earning opportunity
Valuation multiples - compressed by unpredictable revenue engines and key-person risk
The most damaging cost is often the hit to the CEO’s time and attention. The company's most valuable strategic resource gets consumed by tactical firefighting and internal translation rather than identifying market opportunities, driving product innovation, and building the business.
The solution isn't to work harder, hire more people or host more alignment meetings. The solution is evolving from an informal, CEO-dependent growth model to a unified GTM operating model. One that provides enough structure, shared clarity, and simple governance to scale effectively while freeing the CEO to focus on what they're meant to do – work on the business, not in it.
It isn't about bureaucracy or losing agility. It's about designing an intentional GTM operating model that provides strategic clarity, aligns objectives across the full revenue function so collaboration doesn’t depend on heroics, and creates shared accountability without micromanagement. It's about building a model that allows revenue teams to execute with confidence and consistency, with or without the CEO in the room.
In the next article in this series, we’ll explore one of the most misunderstood dynamics in scaling organizations: how sales and marketing experience the market differently, and how a unified GTM operating model can capture those differences as an advantage rather than a source of friction.
|
Kelley Marko Kelley Marko is a CMO at Chief Outsiders, where she helps growth-stage companies build unified go-to-market operating models and scalable marketing functions. |
Neil Isford Neil Isford is a CSO at Chief Outsiders, specializing in building high-performance sales teams for PE-backed and founder-led organizations. |