What is GTM Engineering? How ARISE OS Reengineers B2B Go-to-Market

In GTM today, CROs can't afford to have reps searching endlessly for account information. AI tools like Clay, HubSpot, and Customer.io – they're essential in a modern GTM tech stack, whether you’re PLG or ABM-focused. Here’s why the smartest teams are rethinking “time to insight” and engineering the right GTM outcomes from day one.

Product-Led Growth vs. Sales-Assisted GTM: Engineering for Both

Every B2B SaaS company leans toward one of two go-to-market motions (or a blend of both): product-led growth (PLG) or sales-led, account-based strategies. A common question is whether GTM engineering applies to both. The answer is emphatically yes, it’s about building the right engine for your model.

In a product-led growth model, the product itself is the primary driver of acquisition and expansion. Think of tools like Slack or Dropbox, where users can sign up, get value, and only then convert to paid plans or higher tiers.

The GTM challenges here revolve around user onboarding, product analytics, and automated nurture. You need to track in-app behaviour, identify which users or teams are showing signs of becoming paying customers (Product-Qualified Leads, or PQLs), and prompt them at just the right time, whether via an in-app message, an automated email campaign, or a salesperson reaching out when usage hits a threshold.

GTM engineering for PLG means instrumenting the product funnel with data and triggers. For example, you might integrate your product analytics with your CRM: when a free team hits 5 active users, it automatically creates a “PQL” task for sales.

Or use a tool like Customer.io to send behaviour-driven emails (“Notice you hit 90% of your free limit – here’s how to upgrade”). It’s about connecting product data to your go-to-market workflows. A GTM-engineered PLG system will ensure no high-potential user slips through the cracks; every usage signal is captured and acted on, often by AI or automation, before a human even gets involved.

On the other side, a sales-assisted or account-based marketing (ABM) motion focuses on targeted outreach to specific high-value accounts. The sales team (SDRs, AEs) plays a central role in engaging prospects. 

The GTM challenge here is prioritisation and personalisation: which accounts should we focus on this quarter, and how do we break through with tailored messaging? GTM engineering supercharges ABM by leveraging data and automation for scale.

For instance, using a platform like Clay to automatically enrich target account lists with fresh intel (new funding announcements, key hires, tech stack signals), then feeding that into HubSpot to trigger personalised outreach sequences.

Or setting up an AI assistant (like Arise’s own AskElephant) to scan sales call transcripts and surface new buying cues or objections so that the team can adjust in near-real time.

In an ABM context, GTM engineering might automate the identification of “surging” accounts (e.g. a target company with multiple website visits and ebook downloads in a week) and notify the account owner to reach out immediately with a relevant case study.

It could also ensure marketing and sales coordinate touches – for example, if marketing launches a LinkedIn ABM ad campaign, the system could prompt the sales rep with talking points aligned to that campaign when they call the prospect.

The key point: whether your growth is primarily self-serve or sales-driven, the principles of GTM engineering apply. You still need a unified system that captures data (product events or lead scores), surfaces insights, and triggers the next best action in a timely way.

PLG companies will lean more on product usage data and automated nurture, while sales-led companies will lean more on CRM data, external signals, and human follow-up – but both benefit from having these processes engineered and not left to chance.

In fact, many scale-ups adopt a hybrid model (product-led funnel for smaller customers, direct sales for enterprises). A robust GTM engine can handle both.

The ARISE OS, for example, is tool-agnostic; it can incorporate product analytics and Customer.io campaigns for the PLG side, while also powering HubSpot workflows, Clay data enrichment, and sales playbooks for the sales-assist side.

The end result is the same: a cohesive go-to-market execution where product and sales motions inform and reinforce each other, rather than compete.

ARISE OS: The Five Pillars of GTM Engineering

To put GTM engineering into practice, Arise GTM developed the ARISE Revenue Engine OS – a five-stage go-to-market framework that any B2B SaaS can follow.

ARISE is an acronym for the pillars of this operating system: Assess, Research, Ideate, Strategise, Execute. Each stage addresses specific GTM challenges and, when repeated continuously, they form a growth flywheel (each stage informing the next in a virtuous cycle).

Here’s a quick overview of what each pillar entails:

• Assess: Benchmark everything in your revenue process to find the leaks. You audit your funnel and team capabilities end-to-end to pinpoint what’s truly holding you back.

• Research: Once you know your internal gaps, research the market and customers. Gather outside insights – from competitor moves to customer feedback – to identify opportunities and threats.

• Ideate: Armed with data from Assess and Research, brainstorm innovative plays and solutions. This is cross-functional ideation to attack the problems from all angles (marketing, sales, product, etc.).

• Strategise: Prioritise and turn the best ideas into a cohesive game plan. Develop a GTM strategy that aligns all teams – one coordinated roadmap for marketing, sales, and CS to execute.

• Execute: Launch the plan and get things done. Run campaigns, enable the sales force, tweak processes, and quickly iterate based on real results.

Unlike a one-and-done project, the ARISE OS is iterative. After Execute, you loop back to Assess with fresh data (How did our changes perform? What new bottlenecks emerged?).

In this way, the five pillars create continuous improvement rather than a static strategy document. Think of it as build-measure-learn applied to go-to-market: always assessing, learning, and refining the GTM engine.

Now, let’s delve into each pillar in detail,  including common pain points it addresses for a CMO or CRO, and how engineering your approach in that stage yields better outcomes.

Assess: Expose the Gaps in Your Revenue Funnel

The first pillar, Assess, is all about truth-finding. You can’t fix what you haven’t measured. In this stage, you take a deep, honest look at your entire revenue process,  from marketing lead generation to sales pipeline to customer retention, to diagnose where the bottlenecks and breakpoints are.

For many leadership teams, this is a reality check. It often reveals hard truths that were masked by siloed views or anecdotal optimism. Some common pain points that Assess uncovers:

• CMO pain points before Assess: Flying blind on which campaigns truly drive revenue, lots of vanity metrics, but unclear attribution to sales; leads disappearing into a “black hole” after marketing hands off to sales; difficulty justifying budget without baseline benchmarks.

• CRO pain points before Assess: Lack of visibility into funnel conversion rates (forecasting feels like guesswork); an inefficient sales process, but unclear where deals stall most; constant surprises (e.g. too few SQLs, low win rates) with no data-driven explanation.

During Assess, we gather the hard data to illuminate these issues. That means auditing metrics at every stage (MQL → SQL → proposal → close), looking at conversion ratios, pipeline velocity, churn rates, customer satisfaction scores, the works.

We also evaluate team capabilities and tech usage: are your tools properly utilised, or are there gaps (e.g. paying for a CRM feature nobody uses)?

The outcome of Assess is a detailed map of where your revenue engine is healthy and where it’s leaking oil. It creates a single source of truth that aligns everyone. When a CMO and CRO sit down to review an unbiased assessment report, suddenly the conversation shifts from finger-pointing to problem-solving: “Alright, here’s where we actually stand – now how do we improve it?”

“When we first map out the entire funnel in Assess, clients often have an ‘aha’ moment, finally seeing how each team’s outputs affect the others. It’s like viewing the blueprint of a house you’ve been living in blindly. Only with that clarity can we start fixing leaks.” – Paul Sullivan, Founder & GTM Strategist, ARISE GTM

By the end of Assess, you’ll have a data-backed baseline. For example, you might discover that out of 1,000 leads last quarter, 100 became SQLs and only 20 converted to customers, a huge drop-off indicating an issue in lead quality or nurturing.

Or that your average sales cycle is 60 days, but for enterprise deals it’s 90+ (so your forecasting needs adjusting). These insights become the foundation for everything that follows. Assess effectively hands you a prioritised list of “here’s what’s broken or underperforming.” Now it’s time to find out why those gaps exist – that’s where Research comes in.

Research: Listen to the Market and Your Customers

Once you’ve illuminated the internal gaps, the next step is Research – looking outward to understand your buyers and market landscape. This stage injects the voice of the customer and competitive intelligence directly into your strategy.

Too often, teams operate on assumptions or stale knowledge (“we think customers care about X” or “our competitor can’t do Y”). Research replaces those guesses with evidence.

Pain points when Research is lacking include:

• CMO pain points without research: Messaging is based on internal hunches rather than real buyer language (leading to campaigns that fall flat); uncertainty about whether you’re targeting the most profitable segments (you might be missing a lucrative niche or chasing a low-yield audience); relying on outdated buyer personas that no longer reflect reality.

• CRO pain points without research: Selling a product with blind spots about competition – reps get blindsided by competitor features or pricing and struggle to address objections; losing deals for “mysterious” reasons because there’s no formal win/loss analysis to spot patterns; sales teams getting hit with surprise customer concerns (e.g. a competitor spreading FUD – fear, uncertainty, doubt – that you didn’t prepare counterpoints for).

During ARISE Research, we tackle these issues head-on. The team gathers fresh market intel: updating buyer personas via customer interviews, conducting win-loss interviews with recent prospects, analysing competitor offerings, and mapping the customer’s decision journey.

We want to know how your buyers discover solutions, what criteria they use to evaluate, and why they ultimately choose or reject a vendor.

For example, research might reveal that prospects heavily rely on peer review sites and word-of-mouth in the awareness stage, but your company has little presence on those channels (a visibility gap to fix).

Or we might learn that a “secondary” industry you’ve been ignoring is actually showing high interest in your type of product, suggesting a new segment to target.

A win-loss analysis could uncover, say, that you often lose to Competitor X not on features, but because they offer more flexible month-to-month contracts, insight that could inform your pricing or sales negotiation strategy.

The insights from Research can be eye-opening. As one executive described it, doing this deep dive “was like putting new batteries in our radar – suddenly we could see what our customers really cared about and how competitors were influencing them.” Instead of flying blind, you gain hard facts about customer needs, perceptions, and market dynamics.

Just as importantly, we make sure these findings are shared across the organisation, not filed away in a marketing report no one reads.

Often, we’ll hold a workshop to present the research to marketing, sales, CS, and product leaders together. It’s a unifying moment: decisions start being made based on “According to our customers, ___” rather than personal opinions.

By the end of Research, you’ll have a trove of actionable insights: updated personas, clarity on why you win and lose, competitor intel, and perhaps ideas about new opportunities.

In short, you now understand the playing field. This sets the stage for the next step, using that knowledge to brainstorm game-changing moves.

Ideate: Turning Insights into Bold Ideas

Now comes the fun part – Ideate. With internal gaps diagnosed and fresh market insight in hand, the question becomes: What are we going to do about it?

This stage is about creative problem-solving and innovation. It’s where you propose new campaigns, programs, or tactics that could move the needle.

Crucially, ARISE approaches ideation in a cross-functional way; we get people from marketing, sales, CS, product, and RevOps brainstorming together, so we break out of the siloed thinking that often limits new ideas.

Consider what happens without a structured ideation phase:

• CMO pain points pre-Ideate: Campaign planning often defaults to “let’s do what we did last year (or copy what others are doing)” because there’s uncertainty on how to confidently try something new.

• CRO pain points pre-Ideate: Sales initiatives tend to be reactive, for example, scrambling with end-of-quarter discount fire-drills, instead of proactive strategic plays that systematically improve win rates.

In the Ideate stage, we deliberately shake things up. We take the findings from Assess and Research as our springboard (“Here’s where we are, and here’s what the market is telling us”).

Then, we facilitate brainstorming that encourages big-picture thinking from everyone, not just the highest-paid person’s opinion.

A sales rep’s on-the-ground insight might spark a marketing idea, or a customer success manager’s experience might inspire a product tweak; the key is that all ideas are welcome.

To keep it focused, we use prompts or “how might we” questions based on the challenges identified.

For example: “How might we improve lead-to-opportunity conversion given what we learned about our lead quality?” or “What bold campaign could we run to target that new segment showing interest?”

This ensures ideation is not just random, but aimed at the high-impact areas.

The output of Ideate is typically a range of ideas, some incremental, some more moonshot. For illustration, in one session, we might generate ideas like:

• Marketing suggests a personalised ABM campaign for a niche vertical that research showed is underserved.

• Sales proposes a new free trial offer or a pilot program to reduce friction in big enterprise deals.

• Customer Success pitches, creating an online user community, or hosting quarterly customer roundtables to boost retention.

• RevOps volunteers to automate a clunky manual process (e.g. auto-enriching new leads or simplifying data entry) that was dragging down response times.

• Product team member recommends highlighting an overlooked feature that customers actually love (per research) in the next marketing campaign.

No idea is immediately shot down. We capture all and then usually do a quick vetting – grouping similar concepts, debating impact vs. effort, and so on. The beauty of this structured ideation is that it brings novel solutions to the surface that a single team brainstorming alone might never consider.

By the end of Ideate, you have a brainstorm “backlog” of potential plays and improvements. The next challenge is deciding which ones to pursue and how to orchestrate them coherently. That prioritisation and planning happen in the Strategise stage.

Strategise: Crafting the Unified GTM Game Plan

Having a pile of good ideas is great, but execution requires focus. The Strategise stage turns those ideas into a clear, cohesive action plan.

Here, we decide what to do, what not to do, and how it all fits together across teams. Think of Strategise as the bridge between brainstorming and doing, it’s where raw ideas become a coordinated go-to-market strategy.

Before this step, companies often struggle with strategy coherence:

• CMO pain points pre-Strategise: Marketing, sales, and CS each create their own plans in isolation, resulting in disjointed initiatives and no single narrative or “north star” for the company’s GTM. It feels like three separate mini-strategies rather than one unified approach.

• CRO pain points pre-Strategise: Many initiatives are not tied to an overarching goal, the company ends up chasing random opportunities or quick wins (a webinar here, a discount there, a new feature push elsewhere) without a unifying strategy. It’s hard to tell what’s moving the needle and what’s noise.

In the Strategise stage, we synthesise the learnings and ideas into a focused game plan. This means prioritising ruthlessly. We evaluate the ideas from Ideate against criteria like expected impact, alignment with our vision, resource capacity, and timing.

The top ideas (say, a new ABM campaign targeting that promising segment, a revamped sales playbook for the upcoming quarter, and a customer marketing initiative to drive upsells) are then woven into one strategy document or roadmap.

During ARISE Strategise, we define concrete plays and projects, assign owners (e.g. marketing will lead the ABM campaign with sales support, sales enablement team will develop the new playbook, etc.), set timelines, and establish success metrics for each.

For example, if one strategy element is a targeted ABM campaign, the plan will specify which accounts, what outreach sequence, what content, and what KPI (e.g. X% increase in engagement or Y pipeline from those accounts) we aim for.

An important outcome of this phase is a single unifying GTM narrative that everyone buys into. It becomes clear how marketing and sales efforts complement each other: maybe the strategy for the quarter is “Upsell our new module to mid-market customers while land-enterprise logos in fintech.”

Every team’s actions ladder up to those goals. Marketing’s campaigns, sales’ outreach, CS’s customer touches – all are aligned around the strategy, not working at cross-purposes.

We also ensure that measurement is baked in. Part of strategising is deciding how we’ll track success. This could mean setting up a simple KPI dashboard or defining a KPI tree linking each initiative to top-level revenue goals. The CFO in the room will appreciate this; it shows which levers are expected to drive revenue and how you’ll monitor them.

By the end of Strategise, chaos turns into clarity. The leadership team and frontline managers alike can see the roadmap: what’s happening, when, why, and who’s responsible.

This alignment is powerful; it ensures that when execution begins, everyone is rowing in the same direction with a shared game plan. Speaking of execution, it’s time to turn this strategy into action.

Execute: Accelerate and Adapt in Real Time

This final pillar, Execute, is where the rubber meets the road. Even the best strategies mean nothing if not implemented effectively. Execution in the ARISE model isn’t just about doing tasks; it’s about running the plays with discipline and learning quickly from the results.

In many organisations, execution falters due to poor coordination or follow-through:

• CMO pain points pre-Execute: Brilliant marketing campaigns are launched, but sales doesn’t follow up on the leads promptly (or at all); content gets created but isn’t used by the sales team; there’s no feedback loop, so marketing isn’t sure which efforts actually drove revenue.

• CRO pain points pre-Execute: The sales team may resist new processes or forget to use that “new playbook” announced last quarter; opportunities fall through cracks in handoffs (e.g. sales sells a deal but implementation is unprepared, leading to unhappy customers); each team measures success differently, leading to disputes over what’s working.

ARISE Execute mitigates these issues by treating execution itself as an engineered process. We ensure every initiative from the Strategise plan is clearly owned and tracked. Regular check-ins and dashboards make progress visible.

If marketing is running an ABM campaign and sales is tasked with follow-ups, we might set up an automated alert in HubSpot or Slack whenever a target account engages, so reps immediately know to act.

If a new sales outreach sequence is part of the plan, we’ll monitor its performance in real-time and make tweaks on the fly (e.g. adjust email copy or cadence if response rates are low).

A huge part of successful execution is team enablement. Change is hard – expecting people to adopt new tools or tactics by memo rarely works. That’s why GTM engineering emphasises training and even in-app guidance.

For example, we might deploy on-screen tips inside the CRM to remind reps of the new qualification criteria or offer one-click templates for the new sales sequence (so they don’t revert to old habits). By embedding the “how” right into the team’s workflow, you accelerate adoption of the new GTM motions.

Moreover, execution is not “set and forget.” We gather data as campaigns roll out and sales interactions occur. Within weeks (or sometimes days), you’ll start to see leading indicators:

• Are we getting more meetings from that play?
• Is the new pricing question coming up frequently?

This allows for agile adjustments. Perhaps a particular tactic isn’t gaining traction; instead of waiting months to find out, the team can course-correct mid-flight. On the flip side, if something is working brilliantly, double down.

One telling statistic: process-driven organisations are up to 40X more likely to increase revenue than those without a structured approach. Execute is where process meets performance.

By standardising best practices (and actually getting the team to follow them) while staying nimble to tweak things, you create a high-velocity execution engine.

Finally, the Execute stage naturally feeds back into Assess.

Every result, good or bad, becomes input for the next cycle. Maybe the Q3 plan yielded a 15% boost in pipeline but also revealed a new bottleneck in late-stage deals. That will be the focus of our next Assess.

In this way, ARISE doesn’t stop at execution; it continuously recycles lessons learned into future improvements.

With a full ARISE cycle completed, you’ve effectively engineered your GTM motion for one iteration. Many companies see quick wins even in the first 30-60 days (e.g. a few processes fixed, a campaign generating buzz), but the real power is in repeating the cycle so your GTM keeps getting sharper. It’s a lot, but the payoff is huge:  aligned teams, efficient growth, and a go-to-market strategy that actually delivers.

Ready to Accelerate Your Go-to-Market?

GTM engineering isn’t a theoretical exercise, it’s a path to real revenue results. If you’re tired of random acts of marketing and sales and ready to engineer a GTM machine that scales predictably, we can help make it happen. Want to see how ARISE GTM’s experts can help you drive this transformation? Talk to our team.

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is GTM Engineering?

A: Go-to-market engineering (GTM engineering) is the practice of treating your go-to-market strategy as an end-to-end system that can be optimised with data and automation.

Instead of relying on siloed marketing or sales tactics, GTM engineering builds a unified "revenue engine", connecting marketing, sales, and customer success processes so they work seamlessly together.

It often involves a blend of strategic planning (like a GTM strategy) and technical execution (using tools, AI, and automation to streamline workflows). The goal is to create a repeatable, efficient way to find, win, and retain customers.

Q: How is GTM Engineering different from RevOps?

A: RevOps (Revenue Operations) focuses on aligning teams and improving internal efficiency, for example, making sure your CRM is clean, your marketing and sales reports match up, and everyone follows consistent processes.

GTM engineering includes those operational fundamentals but goes further by actively designing new revenue-generating workflows and leveraging technology in creative ways.

Think of RevOps as managing the machine, while GTM engineering rebuilds and enhances the machine. They complement each other: RevOps provides stability and data hygiene, and GTM engineering experiments and innovates on top of that foundation.

Q: How does GTM Engineering improve marketing and sales alignment?

A: GTM engineering creates a single operating system for marketing, sales, and customer success, which naturally forces alignment. By sharing one set of data (e.g. a unified view of the funnel) and one strategy, it eliminates the classic disconnect where marketing optimises for MQLs while sales cares about SQLs.

Concretely, GTM engineering might implement joint dashboards, integrated workflows (e.g. instant lead follow-up alerts to sales), and cross-functional planning sessions. All of this means both teams work in lockstep on the same goals.

Aligned marketing and sales teams typically see higher revenue growth, some studies say up to 19% faster growth compared to misaligned teams, because there’s no wasted effort.

Q: Is GTM Engineering only for big companies or also for startups?

A: GTM engineering is valuable for any organisation looking to scale revenue, whether you’re a 10-person startup or a 500-person scale-up.

In fact, smaller companies can benefit greatly by establishing good GTM processes early (it can prevent growing pains later). The approach may differ based on size; a startup might implement GTM engineering in a scrappier, more flexible way (with team members wearing multiple hats), whereas a larger company might have dedicated RevOps or GTM engineers.

The key is having a mindset of systematising growth. If you have product-market fit and ambitions to grow quickly, GTM engineering can help you build a scalable engine instead of relying purely on ad-hoc efforts.

Q: How do we start implementing GTM Engineering?

A: It often starts with an honest assessment of your current GTM processes (an "Assess" phase). Identify where you’re experiencing breakdowns; is it lead quality, sales efficiency, or retention?

From there, gather data and input from customers (Research), then brainstorm solutions across teams (Ideate). It can help to use a framework like ARISE OS to go through these steps methodically.

Some companies appoint a GTM lead or RevOps lead to drive the effort; others partner with specialists (like Arise GTM) to guide the process. The important thing is to involve cross-functional stakeholders so that the end solution addresses the whole revenue funnel.

Start with a pilot project, for instance, automate one part of your process or run one cross-team growth experiment, and then iterate.

Q: What results can we expect from GTM Engineering?

A: While results vary, companies that embrace GTM engineering typically see improvements in several areas. Common outcomes include higher conversion rates (because marketing and sales are targeting and nurturing leads more effectively), faster sales cycles (due to removing friction and manual tasks), and better retention or expansion revenue (thanks to a more coordinated handoff and customer success process).

Perhaps most importantly, GTM engineering creates visibility; you can clearly see what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust in real time. Over time, that means more efficient growth.

For example, one organisation might reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC) by 20% after streamlining its funnel, or another might double its qualified pipeline by implementing an account targeting engine.

The exact ROI depends on your starting point, but aligning your go-to-market like a well-oiled machine invariably unlocks growth that’s hard to achieve with siloed teams.