1. The Problem With Most B2B GTM Planning Meetings
Marketing walks in with their sourced pipeline numbers. Sales brings their forecast. Partners have their own contributions listed separately. Everyone’s defending their slice of the pie, but no one’s baking the pie together.
This is the root issue in most go-to-market planning meetings:
- Each team signs up for their own sourcing number
- Success is defined and achieved in silos
- When the total pipeline or revenue number is missed, finger-pointing begins
This creates a toxic loop:
- Marketing says, “We hit our sourced pipeline target.”
- Sales says, “We didn’t get enough leads and we missed the overall pipeline target.”
- Partner says, “We hit our deal reg target!”
Everyone but sales is technically “hitting their goal,” but the business is still missing.
Why? Because these meetings aren’t designed to build a shared plan. They’re designed to compare and defend individual ones.
2. The Traffic Metaphor: Coordination vs. Collision
Imagine trying to navigate a busy city intersection without traffic lights or turn signals. Each driver has their own destination, their own logic, and their own sense of timing. That’s what most GTM planning meetings feel like today: everyone moving quickly with no shared direction, no agreement on right of way, and constant near-collisions. (Also known as driving in Italy.)
Now picture a roundabout or synchronized intersection: it still moves fast, but every player knows the flow, the signals, and the rules. That’s what shared pipeline planning offers: a coordinated, dynamic system where all players act together.
3. What a Good Planning Meeting Looks Like
A good GTM planning meeting starts with one shared number: pipeline.
From there, the conversation shifts from defending slices to optimizing the whole. Here’s what that looks like:
- Shared Ownership: Instead of dividing up sourcing targets, the entire GTM team signs up for the same pipeline number. The focus becomes: how do we hit this together?
- Scenario-Based: Teams explore different ways to get there. Is it more brand? Maybe more outbound? Or better conversion support? They model paths, not just recap performance.
- Cross-Functional: Marketing, sales, partners, and finance all in the room, working from the same assumptions and constraints.
- Forward-Looking: The discussion centers on what to do next, not what already happened. Forecasts are living models, not fixed decks.
- Signal-Informed: Teams bring real indicators like branded search trends, intent data, partner activity, and sales capacity to inform where bets should shift.
Examples of signal-informed decisions:
- A sudden drop in branded search leads to reallocating budget to a top-of-funnel campaign.
- An outbound SDR team reaches capacity, so budget goes to hiring more SDRs.
- Target account engagement surges, prompting additional content creation to make sure the website is providing value.
- Sales cycle length increases for mid-market deals, so sales enablement content is expanded to address new objections.
When this works, there’s less time spent debating “who owns what,” and more energy focused on solving the gap before it becomes a miss.
4. How to Structure the Meeting
To make this kind of planning session work, prep and framing matter.
Before the meeting:
- Gather recent funnel and sales performance (actuals vs. targets)
- Prepare a few “what-if” scenarios to model during the meeting
- Pull signal metrics: branded search, win rates, capacity data, etc.
- Share a pre-read that defines the current gap and potential levers
In the meeting:
- Start with the shared goal (total pipeline target)
- Review KPI trends (not sourcing trends)
- Ask: What has changed since the last plan?
- Model forward: What’s our best path to close the gap?
- Assign shared actions: not just “marketing does X” but “we do Y together”
5. Planning Cadence + Rhythm
You don’t need to wait for QBRs to do this. In fact, monthly or bi-weekly planning checkpoints can build faster alignment and more agility.
Best practices:
- Use quarterly reviews for strategy resets
- Use monthly meetings for re-forecasting and plan adjustments
- Rotate ownership: let different teams lead sections based on need
- Keep a single source of truth (forecast + signal tracker) in your BI tool
6. Final Thought: Planning Isn’t a Report. It’s a Conversation.
Planning isn’t about declaring your number and defending your turf.
It’s about building a shared number and doing whatever it takes to hit it, together.
If your current GTM planning process feels like a sourcing scoreboard, it’s time to try a new model. One shared goal. One conversation. One plan.
That’s where confidence and revenue start to build.
And if you need help turning that spreadsheet into a living plan, that’s what Align BI was built for.