Let me start with a confession. Five years ago, I walked into a meeting where the head of sales and the head of marketing were sitting at opposite ends of the table, literally looking in different directions. The body language alone told me everything I needed to know about the state of our alignment.
Sound familiar?
Today, I want to share how we transformed that dysfunction into a unified revenue-generating machine at FIS, a global fintech company.
This journey took us from scattered teams working in silos to a cohesive unit that drives $150 million in incremental revenue through cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
And yes, the same two leaders who couldn't look at each other now co-present at our quarterly business reviews.
The reality of misalignment in complex organizations
When I joined FIS as head of go-to-market, we faced a challenge that plagues many growing companies. We had over 300 disparate solutions spanning everything from treasury systems for airlines to payment processing for banks.
Our product marketers were distributed across these solutions like islands in an archipelago, each creating content in isolation.
The result? Chaos.
Picture this: A sales rep in London needs to pitch our treasury solution to Santander Bank.
They're searching through seventeen different SharePoint sites, three email threads, and a folder mysteriously named "Final_Final_v3_ACTUALLY_FINAL" just to find the right battle card.
Meanwhile, product marketing has created beautiful new messaging that sits untouched because nobody knows it exists.
This wasn't just inefficient. It was expensive. Every minute our sellers spent hunting for content was a minute not spent with prospects. Every inconsistent message diluted our brand. Every missed cross-sell opportunity was revenue left on the table.
Understanding what alignment actually means
I did something that might seem trivial, but it changed everything. I looked up "alignment" in the Oxford dictionary. The definition struck me: "sharing common goals and vision to form an alliance."
Alliance. Not just cooperation. Not just communication. An actual alliance where teams unite around shared objectives.
This definition became our North Star. We weren't trying to get marketing and sales to tolerate each other. We were building an alliance with a common enemy: inefficiency, missed opportunities, and poor customer experiences.
Tanwistha Gope
The first step: defining go-to-market beyond buzzwords
Everyone talks about a go-to-market strategy. CEOs love it. CFOs demand it. But ask five people what it means, and you'll get seven different answers.
In our organization, go-to-market had become a catch-all term for anything remotely related to selling. We had a win-loss analysis team that didn't talk to the RFP support team.
Sales enablement created training materials without consulting product marketing. Product marketing crafted messaging without understanding what sellers actually needed.
Our first move was radical simplicity. We created a single go-to-market function that brought together all these disparate teams under one umbrella. No more silos. No more finger-pointing. One team, one mission: get the right content to the right people at the right time to drive revenue.
Building bridges through shared principles
Once we had our unified team structure, we faced the harder challenge: getting people to actually work together. Remember those two leaders who wouldn't look at each other? They represented a deeper cultural divide between "those creative marketing people" and "those pushy salespeople."
We locked ourselves in a room (metaphorically speaking, though there were some long workshop days) and hammered out core principles that would guide our collaboration:
Time to market equals speed to revenue. Every day we spent perfecting that battle card was a day of lost sales opportunities. We shifted from pursuing perfection to embracing "good enough to sell, with room to improve."
Impact over activity. We stopped measuring success by the number of brochures produced or emails sent. Instead, we tracked which content actually influenced deals. If sellers weren't using it, we killed it.
Co-creation beats creation. No more product marketing creating content in a vacuum and throwing it over the wall to sales. We brought sellers into the content creation process from day one. When people help build something, they actually use it.
The game-changing shift: from static to dynamic
Here's a truth that might sting: Nobody reads your PDFs anymore. Not your buyers. Not your sellers. Nobody.
I tested this theory by asking a client if they'd received our latest brochure. Their response? "I'm sorry, I didn't even open that two-page PDF." Two pages. That's all we were asking for, and it was still too much.
Attention has become the scarcest currency in business. People want answers, not documents. They want insights, not information dumps. They want conversations, not content libraries.
So we killed the static battle card. Instead, we built what we call digital sales playbooks. Imagine this: A seller is in a London taxi heading to meet with Santander Bank.
They pull up our solution on their phone, and AI immediately suggests relevant battle cards, pricing information, and customer success stories. It's like having a product marketing expert riding shotgun.
But here's what made it actually work: We didn't just digitize our existing content. We reimagined it entirely. Instead of dense paragraphs about features, we created interactive guides that walked sellers through discovery questions. Instead of static competitive comparisons, we built dynamic tools that updated based on the latest market intelligence.
Creating a culture of commercial awareness
One of our biggest revelations came during a workshop with product marketers. I asked a simple question: "What's our sales target for this quarter?"
Blank stares.
These brilliant people were creating messaging and content every day, but they had no idea how their work connected to revenue. They didn't understand pipeline targets, conversion rates, or sales cycles. They were artists working without knowing what painting they were trying to create.
We embarked on what I call "commercial education." Not turning marketers into sellers, but helping them understand the commercial context of their work. We showed them dashboards. We explained how the pipeline converts to revenue. We traced the journey from a piece of content to a closed deal.
The transformation was remarkable. Suddenly, product marketers weren't just creating content. They were asking questions like: "Which stage of the sales cycle does this address?" and "How will this help move deals forward?"
Aleksandra Mitroshkina
The vertical revolution
As we grew more sophisticated, we recognized another gap. We had plenty of generalist content but lacked the specialized messaging needed to penetrate specific industries. The challenges facing a bank CIO are vastly different from those keeping an airline executive up at night.
We launched an initiative to create vertical marketing toolkits. But instead of guessing what each industry needed, we brought in the experts: our sales engineers who lived and breathed these verticals every day. They became our co-authors, helping craft messaging that resonated with specific industry pain points.
This wasn't just about customization. It was about credibility. When you're selling to a bank in Thailand or a manufacturer in Kuwait, generic messaging won't cut it. You need to speak their language, understand their regulations, and address their unique challenges.
Measuring what matters: the three Es
You can't improve what you don't measure. But measuring the wrong things is worse than not measuring at all. We developed what I call the "Three Es" framework:
Execution: Are we delivering what we promised? This isn't about perfection. It's about consistency and reliability.
Excellence: Is our content actually good? Not just pretty or well-written, but genuinely useful for sellers and compelling for buyers.
Exceeding expectations: Are we driving commercial outcomes? This is where the rubber meets the road. Every piece of content should have a clear line of sight to revenue.
We mapped every piece of content to specific deal stages in our CRM. We tracked which materials sellers actually accessed and which ones gathered digital dust. Most importantly, we identified which content appeared most frequently in won deals.
The insights were sometimes painful. That beautiful 40-page solution guide we spent months perfecting? Used in exactly zero deals. The simple one-page value prop we threw together in an afternoon? Present in 73% of successful opportunities.
The human side of transformation
Technology and process are important, but transformation happens through people. We recognized that asking product marketers and go-to-market teams to work differently required more than mandates and metrics. It required career paths and success stories.
We created rotation programs where product marketers could join go-to-market teams and vice versa. This wasn't just about skill development. It was about building empathy and understanding.
When a product marketer spends time in the field with sellers, they return with invaluable insights about what actually works in customer conversations.
One of our success stories is Anna, who joined as a product marketer but discovered a passion for go-to-market execution. She moved into a client-facing role, bringing her deep product knowledge to customer engagements.
Today, she manages a team and credits her product marketing background for her ability to craft compelling customer narratives.
GTM Alliance
The AI amplifier
As we look to the future, AI isn't just a buzzword for us. It's a practical tool for scaling our impact. But we're not using AI to replace human judgment. We're using it to amplify human capabilities.
Grammarly helps ensure consistent messaging across hundreds of documents. Seismic intelligently serves up the right content at the right moment. Various AI tools help us analyze which messages resonate and which fall flat.
The key is integration. These tools need to talk to each other and, more importantly, fit seamlessly into seller workflows. The best technology is invisible technology. Sellers shouldn't have to think about the tools. They should just have what they need when they need it.
The simplify, unify, amplify framework
Looking back on our journey, I've distilled our approach into three phases:
Simplify: We stripped away complexity, consolidated redundant teams, and created clear processes. This wasn't about dumbing things down. It was about making the complex accessible.
Unify: We brought teams together not just organizationally but culturally. We aligned around common goals, shared metrics, and mutual success.
Amplify: With a solid foundation, we could scale our impact through technology, best practices, and continuous improvement.
This framework transformed us from a collection of talented individuals into a revenue-generating machine. But more than that, it created a culture where product marketing and go-to-market truly function as one team.
The journey continues
Five years later, those two leaders who couldn't stand to be in the same room? They're now co-champions of our integrated approach. They present together at industry conferences, sharing how alignment drove tangible business results.
But we're not done. The market evolves, buyer expectations shift, and new technologies emerge. What remains constant is our commitment to alignment, our focus on commercial outcomes, and our belief that when product marketing and go-to-market work as true allies, magic happens.
The $150 million in incremental revenue? That's just the beginning. Because when you align teams around shared goals, remove friction from processes, and put the right tools in people's hands, you don't just improve efficiency. You unlock potential that was always there, waiting to be discovered.
Remember that definition of alignment I mentioned? Sharing common goals and vision to form an alliance. It sounds simple, but achieving it requires commitment, patience, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. The payoff, however, is worth every difficult conversation and every process change.
Your journey might look different from ours. Your challenges might be unique. But the principles remain the same: simplify complexity, unify teams, and amplify impact. Because at the end of the day, we're all trying to do the same thing: help our companies grow by serving customers better.
And that's an alliance worth building.
