Building GTM Teams: Marketing + Sales + Customer Success - Empowered by RevOps

Most go-to-market teams still operate like a relay race. Marketing runs the first leg, passing leads to Sales, who hopefully convert them before tossing the baton to Customer Success. Somewhere along the handoff, momentum is lost, context disappears, and the customer experience takes the hit.

But the best B2B companies are moving away from that model. They are building cross-functional GTM squads, dedicated pods that unite Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and RevOps around shared goals, data, and rhythms. Instead of optimizing each department in isolation, they align every motion to the customer journey.

This is not about new org charts or trendy frameworks. It is about changing how go-to-market teams think, communicate, and make decisions together.

Why Traditional Silos Fail

When Sales and Marketing do not share definitions for something as basic as an MQL or SQL, everything downstream suffers. Capacity plans get skewed, forecasts miss, and customer acquisition costs balloon. Customer Success often gets looped in only after a deal closes, forced to manage expectations that were never set in the first place.

RevOps leaders at Domestique often describe this as “playing telephone with spreadsheets.” Each team has its own view of the funnel, its own KPIs, and its own version of truth. The result is constant firefighting, finger-pointing, and lost revenue.

True cross-functional alignment begins when you treat the entire customer journey, from first touch to renewal, as one continuous system.

The Case for GTM Squads

A GTM squad is a small, cross-functional unit that owns a defined slice of your market, such as a specific ICP segment, region, or product line. Each squad includes:

• Marketing: Responsible for generating awareness and demand within that segment.
  
  

• Sales: Focused on converting demand into revenue.
  
  

• Customer Success: Ensures retention and expansion within the same accounts.
  
  

• RevOps: Acts as the connective tissue, bringing data, systems, and process alignment across the group.
  
  

This model changes accountability. Instead of Sales blaming Marketing for bad leads or Marketing blaming Sales for low conversion, the entire squad shares ownership of the full funnel, from pipeline creation to customer retention.

It also speeds up execution. When everyone who touches the customer journey sits in the same room or Slack channel, issues get resolved in days instead of quarters.

What Makes GTM Squads Work

1. Shared Definitions and Data
Start with the basics: life cycle stage definitions, stage advancement criteria, and source-of-truth dashboards. If your Marketing, Sales, and CS teams cannot agree on what qualifies as a sales-ready lead or a healthy account, alignment will never take hold.

RevOps plays the central role here. They codify definitions, automate data flows, and build unified dashboards that everyone trusts. This allows the squad to make decisions based on facts rather than feelings.

2. A Unified Planning Cadence
Borrow from capacity planning principles and align top-down targets with bottoms-up reality. Each squad should meet regularly to review pipeline, forecast, and retention health. Compare leading indicators like MQL-to-SQL conversion to lagging outcomes like revenue and churn.

Domestique recommends a “demand council” or “revenue council” cadence, where squad leads from each function meet weekly to check progress and make adjustments before small issues become big ones.

3. Clear Roles, Not Duplicates
Cross-functional does not mean chaotic. Each role in the squad should be distinct but complementary. Marketing drives volume and engagement. Sales converts. Customer Success nurtures and expands. RevOps ensures the engine runs cleanly. The key is mutual visibility into one another’s work.

4. Consistent Enablement and Feedback Loops
Enablement should be ongoing. Each squad should use shared playbooks and feedback loops to continuously refine tactics. Customer Success can surface insights on customer friction that inform future campaigns. Marketing can share which messages resonate best at the top of the funnel. RevOps can identify where deals stall and why.

This creates a continuous cycle of learning that makes each go-to-market motion smarter over time.

The Role of RevOps as the Backbone

RevOps does not own the squad, it empowers it. Think of RevOps as the systems engineer for the GTM machine. Their job is to align strategy, process, tooling, data, and enablement so the team can operate in sync.

Without that backbone, squads risk becoming mini-silos. With it, they become agile, accountable units that can test, learn, and scale faster than traditional departmental models.

The Future of GTM Is Cross-Functional

As buying journeys become more complex and customer expectations rise, companies that operate in silos will continue to fall behind. Cross-functional GTM squads are not just a tactical shift, they represent a mindset change.

The best teams do not think in terms of handoffs; they think in terms of shared outcomes. They understand that every conversion, renewal, and expansion is the result of connected effort.

If you want to build a durable go-to-market engine, start by breaking down the walls. Align your people, your process, and your data around the customer, not the department.

That is how modern GTM teams win, together.