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GTM is broken at the handoffs — invest in a single owner of the prospect-to-renewal journey

By Shali Rana Reed · COO @ The Reeder | VC | Advisor · 2026-04-10 · thread · Day 1 of Drive 2025 takeaways — Shali Rana Reed

Tier C · TL;DR
GTM is broken at the handoffs — invest in a single owner of the prospect-to-renewal journey

Claim

After listening to marketing leaders at Drive 2025, the diagnosis is that nothing has changed in corporate pain points. Marketing teams are still talking about the same broken handoffs to other departments that hurt customer experience. Sangram Vaze's argument about the GTM officer being more critical than ever is right — orgs need to invest in a single team that streamlines and optimizes the entire prospect-to-client journey, from cold lead through renewal motion. Comp plans, leadership roles, and team structures all have to support that one journey.

Mechanism

Functional silos optimize for local KPIs, which produces handoff failures at every junction (MQL→SQL, SQL→won, won→onboarded, onboarded→renewed). A single GTM officer with cross-functional authority can redesign incentives across that whole journey, which is the only way the seams actually disappear. Without that role, every offsite produces a memo and the handoffs stay broken.

Conditions

Holds for B2B companies large enough to have functional silos but not so large that a GTM officer can't span them. Fails in early-stage where one person already does the whole journey.

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