Why the C-Suite Must Work Together to Solve GTM Failure: The Critical Role of Unified Reporting
Translating the languages of each C-Suite member into one strategy and set of metrics
It doesn’t matter if you’ve built a world-class product, if your engineering team is running smoothly, if your tech is stable. Eventually, your company could hit the ceiling. Growth will flatten, margins will slip, and the people who feel it all? The C-suite. Not just the CEO, but the COO, CFO, CMO, CTO, CHRO, and CIO. GTM failures affect everyone, and the only way to solve them is through executives joining forces.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: According to GTM Partners’ latest State of GTM benchmark, 51% of companies missed their sales and revenue targets in H1 2025, and 54% fell short of their pipeline goals. Even more telling, 68% of GTM leaders say that if their executive team had clarity, alignment, and trust (C.A.T.), they would be confident in hitting their revenue goals.
The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of unified visibility.
The Hidden Crisis: When Executives Speak Different Languages
It’s critical to discuss and recognize challenges of the GTM system at the executive level, because each executive is forced to deal with different components of this breakdown—often without seeing the full picture.
GTM often breaks down due to misalignment and siloed incentives across company sectors. Marketing, sales, product, and customer success chase local metrics and struggle to reach a unified objective. This leads to customer miscommunications, duplicated effort, and wasted budget.
The C-suite is the backbone of any company’s go-to-market (GTM) system, but one of the biggest challenges lies in the fact that each executive speaks a different language. The CFO focuses on ARR/MRR, CAC, LTV, and margin, ensuring financial health; marketing leaders think in funnel stages, conversions, and MQLs-SQLs; sales executives zero in on quota attainment and pipeline velocity; product leaders (like the CTO or CPO) measure success through feature velocity, sprints and innovation; and the COO prioritizes efficiency, scalability, and operational execution. Each perspective is essential, yet without a unified reporting framework that translates these metrics into a single source of truth, misalignment can slow growth and cloud decision-making. A strong GTM system depends on the C-suite’s ability to bridge these perspectives - turning diverse insights into cohesive strategy, shared accountability, and data-driven execution that keeps the entire organization moving in the same direction.
The MOVE Framework: From Chaos to Clarity
This is where the MOVE framework becomes essential—not just as a strategy tool, but as a reporting and alignment system. The framework forces executive teams to answer four critical questions while maintaining visibility across the entire GTM engine:
M - MARKET: Where Should You Focus?
Without unified market reporting, companies chase TAM (Total Addressable Market) instead of TRM (Total Relevant Market). GTM Partners research shows companies with clear ICP definitions and TRM focus achieve 20% better pipeline performance than those still chasing broad TAM numbers.
Key Reporting Question: Do all executives agree on who your ideal customer is—and can everyone see the same customer data across systems?
O - OPERATIONS: How Efficiently Are You Operating?
In early-stage companies, founders often lead demand, manage early sales, and make those one-off deals. But as companies scale, they must shift to repeatable motions, playbooks, metrics, and processes. Without that discipline and unified operational reporting, you rely too heavily on star performers and lose predictability.
The “sales enablement gap”—operations, toolsets, training, onboarding, enablement infrastructure—shows up here. Many GTM failures happen because companies scale sales but neglect to invest in the infrastructure and feedback loops that allow scaling to succeed.
Key Reporting Question: Can every executive see the same conversion metrics, sales cycle data, and efficiency ratios in real-time?
V - VELOCITY: How Fast Are Deals Moving?
Without unified metrics, a clear funnel, and reliable data, forecasting becomes guesswork. Many businesses still rely on “hope deals” to hit quota. That’s not sustainable.
The ability to project revenue 2-3 quarters ahead is critical for allocating resources, hiring, investment, and planning. GTM breakdowns often show up first as forecasting errors—and according to GTM Partners, only 46% of companies report expected or better-than-expected sales cycle lengths.
Key Reporting Question: Does your entire C-suite see the same pipeline data, and do you trust it?
E - EXPAND: How Are You Growing Existing Customers?
Customer expansion and retention don’t happen in a vacuum. Customer Success (CS) should have a built-in voice to influence product, marketing, and sales. They see what customers succeed with (or struggle with). But without unified customer health scoring and expansion metrics, these insights never feed prioritization.
Key Reporting Question: Can your entire executive team see Net Revenue Retention (NRR), expansion opportunities, and churn risks in one unified view?
The Reporting Pillar: Your Single Source of Truth
The eighth pillar of the GTM Operating System is Leadership & Management: Clarity, Alignment, Trust - and at its core lies the C.A.T. Score, which measures whether your team understands the strategy, agrees on what success looks like, and trusts each other to deliver.
Here’s what happens without unified reporting:
Finance can’t trust sales forecasts or operating budgets
Marketing can’t prove pipeline contribution
Product doesn’t know which features drive retention
Sales operates on gut feel instead of data
The CEO makes decisions with incomplete information
Research from Mural’s 2025 Global GTM Alignment Gap Index revealed that 85% of GTM teams report regular misalignment in goals, and 89% recognize direct revenue-related impacts from these collaboration breakdowns.
Six Ways to Transform C-Suite Alignment Through Better Reporting
1. Define & Align on Shared GTM Metrics
Choose a small set of shared metrics that represent commercial truth (e.g., pipeline coverage, win rates, net revenue retention, LTV/CAC, ARPC). Tie each functional metric (marketing, sales, CS, product) to those shared goals. Use these as your “single source of truth.”
2. Build Cross-Functional Governance & Cadence
Establish a GTM operating rhythm: joint planning sessions, quarterly reviews, cross-functional stand-ups, shared dashboards, and DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) accountability. Make reporting a team sport, not a department silo.
3. Design Repeatable GTM Systems & Playbooks
You need scalable motions, not one-off heroics. That includes:
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) definition & validation
Messaging & positioning playbooks
Sales enablement and onboarding flows
Funnel metrics & conversion analytics accessible to all executives
Feedback loops from CS ↔ Sales ↔ Product
4. Invest in Integrated Tools & Infrastructure
Without a shared stack (CRM, data warehouse, customer health scoring, analytics), each team will have their own version of truth. GTM success requires unified infrastructure where all teams see shared customer data.
According to research, only 33% of SaaS companies report full visibility into CAC by channel or segment. That’s not a data problem - it’s a systems problem.
5. Close the Feedback Loops
CS should have a built-in voice to influence product, marketing, and sales. These insights should feed prioritization - but only if everyone can see the same customer success metrics, health scores, and expansion opportunities. Every team should have a mutually aligned “top 10” issues they are working and improving.
6. Create Executive-Level Reporting Dashboards
Don’t just track departmental metrics. Create a three-layer reporting scorecard that every executive reviews together, for example:
Outcome Metrics: Net New ARR, NRR, CAC Payback, Gross Margin
Efficiency Metrics: Pipeline velocity, win rates, conversion rates, sales cycle length
Process Metrics: Lead qualification consistency, deal stage progression, customer onboarding completion
It’s Q4: Time to Build Your 2026 GTM Foundation
As you head into Q4 and begin planning for 2026, ask yourself: Does your entire executive team see the same numbers when you talk about pipeline, forecasts, and growth?
If not, you’re not alone. But you don’t have to figure this out alone.
The role of saving the GTM doesn’t rely solely on the CEO - it’s the role of the C-suite working together with unified visibility.
Ready to Transform Your GTM Alignment?
Clark Growth Partners specializes in helping B2B SaaS and tech companies ($25M-$1B+ ARR) fix these challenges through implementing the MOVE framework and building a unified reporting infrastructure that drives C-suite alignment.
Here’s what we offer:
Free GTM Assessment: Get immediate diagnostic insights across all 8 GTM OS pillars, including your reporting and alignment gaps. Take the assessment on LinkedIn
MOVE Framework Workshop: In an intensive 1-day workshop with your leadership team, we’ll diagnose exactly which GTM OS pillars need attention and create a strategic roadmap for 2025 and provide specific areas that need attention.
Pillar intensives to work your most challenged pillars into executable plans to fix them.
Implementation Consulting: Ongoing strategic guidance to build and execute your unified GTM strategy, with monthly strategic sessions where we build the strategy together - and your team executes.
As 2026 planning season continues, don’t let another year go by with executives speaking different languages and looking at different dashboards.
Let’s build clarity, alignment, and trust - together.
Schedule a Discovery Call | Connect on LinkedIn
About Clark Growth Partners: Founded by Caitlin Clark-Zigmond (2x CMO (Intel, Verizon Business), GTM O.S. Certified Partner), Clark Growth Partners serves as a GTM catalyst for transformational technologies, helping technical CEOs and their executive teams turn engineering brilliance into systematic revenue growth.