Revenue Leaks Between Handoffs — Not From Bad Hiring

I've never walked into a company where the problem was that people didn't care.

Marketing cares. They're working hard to generate leads.
Sales cares. They're working hard to close them.
Customer success cares. They're working hard to retain the customers they inherited.

The right pieces are there, but the puzzle is still a mess. Everyone is trying. And somehow, revenue still leaks.

It leaks in the handoff from marketing to sales — when a "qualified lead" means something different to each team and nobody has ever written down the definition.

It leaks in the handoff from sales to CS — when the customer was sold something slightly different from what gets delivered, and the first renewal conversation starts from a deficit.

It leaks in the gap between what CS knows about a customer and what sales knows about the expansion opportunity.

None of that is a hiring problem. It's a systems problem.

Here's what I look for when I come into a company and GTM alignment is broken:

First — do marketing, sales, and CS share definitions? Not the same goals. The same definitions. What's a lead? What makes it qualified? When does the handoff happen and who owns what after it does?

Second — is there a handoff process that exists in writing anywhere — or does it live in someone's head?

Third — is the CRM capturing the information that each team needs to do their job, or just the information that's easy to enter?

When those three things are broken, the teams aren't misaligned. They're just operating on different sets of information with no shared map.

Fix the map. The alignment follows.

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash