Cross the “GTM vs. Product” Chasm

And how does “data” fit in here?

The GTM vs. product chasm is nothing new.

It’s been embedded into the structure of SaaS companies.

On one side, Go-To-Market teams: sales, marketing, CS primarily.

On the other side, product teams: product management, engineering, and data.

There is a gigantic fissure between GTM teams and product teams:

Data from GTM and data from product need to be unified, but they aren’t.

There is a ton of data from product activity, so it typically is stored in a warehouse with custom and flexible data models.

There is a ton of variety of both systems and entities in GTM systems. It is typically not unified, at least until it gets pushed to that product data warehouse.

But the customer doesn’t care about this divide. Your GTM and product data needs to be unified.

This is not novel - software leaders have long been trying to connect sales, marketing, CS and finance data to product activity.

There is a graveyard of attempts to cross this chasm.

Reverse ETL has failed to cross it, in a way that meets the needs of the GTM side.

The Modern Data Stack (MDS) as a whole doesn’t cross this chasm - it reinforces it. It puts the center of gravity on the product side.

But the MDS / DIY approach leads to deeply inefficient GTM teams, suffering from disunified data. And the vendors see it too, which is why they’re now pitching a more honest category: Composable CDP. In other words, “you need a CDP, but now you can build one with several tools instead of buying one tool.”

But CDP doesn't cross this chasm. They can't unify with warehouses and are really just for marketing use cases anyways.

iPaaS doesn’t even touch this problem. Warehouses are too complex.

What does it take to bridge the GTM/product divide?

Some of the most innovative attempts we’ve seen have been a special kind of RevOps team: Andy Mowat of last week’s podcast episode, and Toni Hohlbein of this week’s, both deployed data teams within their RevOps teams.?

Toni Hohlbein credits the success of this model to a global data model that is shared between RevOps, product and data, but both acknowledge this approach requires partnership from the product and data teams.

But?the solution cannot only be one of process and organizational setup. The tech graveyard above begs the question:?

If the limitations of tools are part of the problem, why can’t a new integrated platform, with new abilities to unify data, be a critical part of the solution?

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New: The Customer Data Automation community is live and growing. Come join the conversation at the intersection of GTM, RevOps and data strategy. We’ve already got an excellent mix of 100+ data, CRO, RevOps, IT and marketing leaders.

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New on The Distributed Truth podcast: Episode 4 “From RevOps to CRO with Toni Hohlbein” is out. Toni is a twice exited SaaS CRO who has built data resources onto his RevOps teams. We recorded this a day or two after the news about RevOps becoming the fastest growing title came out.

Cheers,

Evan Dunn

Director, Growth Marketing