Product Marketing vs. Go-to-Market Strategy: Building a Unified Revenue Engine for SaaS

In 2025, fast-scaling SaaS companies can’t afford misfires between marketing and sales. Tech CMOs are cutting bloated software stacks, and CROs are frustrated with siloed data; the status quo just isn’t cutting it.

The smartest teams are uniting product marketing and GTM strategy into one revenue engine, often swapping clunky, fragmented CRMs for nimble all-in-one platforms (hello, HubSpot).

The payoff?

A cohesive go-to-market approach that drives customer acquisition and retention in tandem, rather than stalling out in departmental silos.

This comprehensive guide will unpack product marketing vs. go-to-market strategy in plain English, specifically for B2B SaaS decision-makers.

We’ll explore why an integrated approach matters, how each stage of the proprietary ARISE GTM Methodology maps to real CMO and CRO challenges, and how you can build a dedicated revenue operating system around these principles.

By the end, you’ll see how blending product marketing expertise with a structured GTM strategy can accelerate (🔼) your revenue growth and scale your business smarter. Let’s dive in!

Product Marketing vs. Go-to-Market Strategy: What’s the Difference?

At first glance, product marketing and go-to-market (GTM) strategy sound similar, both deal with bringing products to customers. In reality, they play different (but complementary) roles in a B2B SaaS company. Here’s the gist:

• Product Marketing focuses on positioning, messaging, and launching the product. Product marketers define the product’s value proposition, target customer segments, and competitive differentiation.

  They create the narrative (e.g. crafting compelling stories, case studies, and sales enablement content) to make the product resonate in the market.

  Product marketing is typically a function within the marketing organisation, working cross-functionally to ensure the product’s story is consistent and powerful from development to launch and beyond.

• Go-to-Market Strategy is a comprehensive plan for how your company will find, win, and keep customers for the product. It encompasses more than just marketing, it’s the blueprint that connects product, marketing, sales, customer success, pricing, and distribution into a unified approach.

  GTM strategy defines who you’ll target, how you’ll reach and sell to them, how you’ll onboard and support them, and how you’ll drive growth (through channels, partnerships, campaigns, sales processes, etc.).

  In other words, if product marketing is telling the product’s story, GTM strategy is designing the entire customer journey from awareness through retention.

One way to look at it: GTM is the broader map; product marketing is a critical landmark on that map. GTM involves multiple teams aligned on a common plan, whereas product marketing is usually a team or role that leads or contributes to many parts of that plan.

As one marketing expert succinctly put it, “GTM is a long-term effort comprising every team that touches the customer – product, marketing, sales, customer success. It’s literally how your company ‘goes’ to market… Product marketing refers to the team ensuring GTM is properly calibrated, owning target audience identification and messaging.”

In practice, product marketing often owns the creation of the GTM strategy, leveraging their deep product and market insight, but successful GTM execution requires cross-functional buy-in (sales, support, etc.).

To clarify the distinction, here’s a quick comparison:

• Scope: Product marketing hones in on product-specific positioning and content (e.g. crafting a killer demo narrative or value prop). GTM strategy covers end-to-end revenue processes, from marketing campaigns and sales enablement to onboarding and expansion strategies.

• Primary Goal: Product marketing aims to articulate value, ensuring the product is understood and desired by the target market. GTM strategy aims to deliver that value efficiently at scale, ensuring your organisation can repeatedly acquire, close, and retain customers.

• Key Activities: Product marketing activities include market research, persona definition, positioning & messaging, launch planning, and sales training on product value. GTM strategy activities include defining target markets, setting pricing and packaging, choosing distribution channels, aligning marketing and sales funnels, process optimisation, metrics/KPIs, and often, enabling technologies (CRM, automation) to support these processes.

• Who’s Involved: Product marketing is primarily a marketing function (often reporting to the CMO). GTM strategy is inherently cross-functional – it involves leadership across marketing (CMO), sales (CRO or VP Sales), customer success (Head of CS), sometimes product (for product-led growth), and RevOps, all under a shared game plan.

Crucially, product marketing and GTM strategy should work hand-in-hand rather than in isolation. Product marketing provides the insights and assets (messaging, content, competitive intel) that feed into the GTM plan, while the GTM strategy provides the structure and alignment that ensures those insights are used effectively across all customer touchpoints.

For example, product marketing might discover a new pain point in customer research and adjust the messaging; the GTM strategy ensures that this new messaging is rolled out through sales scripts, website copy, and onboarding materials so the entire revenue team tells a consistent story.

Key Takeaway: Product marketing is an essential subset of go-to-market. It’s the “story and strategy around the product” itself, whereas GTM is the “orchestrated process involving multiple teams” to deliver that story to the market at scale. In modern B2B SaaS, you can’t just do one or the other, you need both a strong product marketing foundation and a holistic GTM strategy that aligns your whole revenue team.

From Silos to Synergy: Why B2B SaaS Needs an Integrated GTM Framework

If product marketing and GTM strategy are distinct, why fuss about integrating them? The answer: revenue growth and efficiency. Too often, companies treat GTM as a one-off launch plan or confine it to one department.

This siloed approach might work for an initial product debut, but it breaks down as you scale. Here’s why a unified approach matters for fast-scaling SaaS firms (up to ~500 employees):

Avoiding Costly Misalignment

Marketing and sales misalignment is more than an internal headache, it’s a revenue killer. Studies show that misalignment between these teams costs B2B companies 10% or more of revenue per year.

In fact, companies globally are estimated to burn over $1 trillion annually due to poor sales-marketing coordination. Think about that: siloed strategies literally leave money on the table. Without an integrated GTM framework, your CMO and CRO might be optimising for different goals, leading to wasted leads, inconsistent messaging, and lost deals.

On the flip side, organisations with tight sales-marketing alignment see significantly higher growth, one report found that highly aligned teams drive 208% more revenue from marketing efforts and achieve 24% faster growth rates than their misaligned peers. The business case for integration is clear.

Consistency Across the Customer Journey

A proper GTM strategy ensures that every stage of the customer journey, from the first ad click or blog read (marketing’s domain) to the sales conversation, to onboarding and post-sale follow-up, is consistent and cohesive.

Buyers today move through a nonlinear journey; they expect a seamless experience. If product marketing is saying one thing (“Our product solves X for you!”) but the sales process doesn’t reinforce that, prospects get confused or lose trust.

An integrated approach aligns messaging and processes so that, for example, the pain points highlighted in a webinar by marketing are the same ones the sales rep addresses in a demo, and the same ones the customer success manager knows to monitor after purchase. This consistency improves conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Faster, Data-Driven Adjustments

In SaaS, speed matters. An aligned GTM engine allows for quick adjustments when the market shifts or you get new feedback. For instance, if win-loss analysis (often owned by product marketing) reveals that a competitor’s new feature is winning deals, a unified GTM team can rapidly respond.

Marketing can tweak campaigns to reposition against that feature, sales can get battlecards to handle objections, and product might even adjust the roadmap. Without a cohesive framework, these responses would be slower and disjointed. Essentially, integration gives you an agile go-to-market capability.

Efficient Use of Tech and Budget

A siloed approach often leads to a bloated tech stack and duplicated efforts. You might have separate tools or data for marketing and sales, making reporting a nightmare.

A unified revenue operating system mindset encourages a single source of truth (often a CRM like HubSpot or a well-integrated Salesforce instance) where marketing, sales, and CS data live together.

This not only cuts costs (fewer redundant tools) but also enables better analytics and KPI tracking across the funnel. According to industry insights, 79% of sales professionals say their CRM improves sales-marketing alignment.

When you plan GTM in an integrated way, you naturally move toward a Revenue Operations (RevOps) model, aligning strategy + technology to support all revenue teams. As Paul Sullivan notes, doing GTM strategy comprehensively “will drive you into a revenue operations model” by necessity, meaning your tech and processes become unified to execute the plan.

In short, an integrated GTM framework turns marketing and sales from rivals into rowing mates. Instead of arguing over lead quality or MQL targets, the CMO and CRO (and their teams) work from a shared playbook with clear handoffs, joint metrics, and mutual accountability.

This is especially critical for SaaS businesses targeting complex sales (multiple stakeholders, longer cycles), as alignment ensures no stage of the funnel is neglected.

For example, marketing might excel at generating leads, but without a GTM strategy that extends through onboarding, those customers might churn after one month. A holistic plan covers acquisition and retention.

Enter the ARISE GTM Methodology

At this point, you might wonder how to actually build this unified approach. This is where frameworks like ARISE come into play.

The ARISE methodology (pioneered by Paul Sullivan of AriseGTM) provides a structured, repeatable way to integrate product marketing and GTM strategy into what is essentially a dedicated revenue operating system for your business.

It’s about mapping every step, from initial assessment to execution, in a way that marketing, sales, and success are all aligned and contributing. Let’s break down how ARISE works and how each pillar addresses both CMO and CRO challenges.

ARISE GTM: A 5-Step Revenue Operating System for B2B SaaS

ARISE is an acronym for the five stages of a complete go-to-market cycle: Assess, Research, Ideate, Strategise, Execute. Unlike a one-time launch checklist, ARISE is designed as a continuous GTM operating system, a playbook that you can run and rerun to optimise your go-to-market over time. Think of it as the backbone of your revenue engine, ensuring each cog (marketing, sales, product, customer success) is turning in sync.

What makes ARISE especially powerful for decision-makers (like CMOs and CROs) is that it explicitly links each stage to the concerns of both marketing and sales leadership. In other words, it forces alignment by design. Let’s quickly outline each ARISE stage and its purpose:

Assess

Benchmark where you are now. This is a thorough audit of your current marketing & sales performance, customer base, and market position. The goal is to uncover gaps and opportunities. (Are we targeting the right customers? Is our pipeline healthy? Where are leads falling through? How do customers perceive us today?)

Research

Deep dive into the market and customer insights. This includes researching your customers (and why they do or don’t buy), analysing competitors, and refining your segmentation, positioning, and messaging based on evidence. It’s about building a factual foundation for your strategy.

Ideate

Brainstorm and blue-sky new ideas for reaching your audience and differentiating your approach. With the data from Assess and Research in hand, this stage is a structured innovation session. It’s cross-functional, getting input from marketing, sales, product, etc., to generate creative tactics or even product tweaks that could give you an edge.

Strategise

Formulate the actual GTM plan (the strategy). Here you decide on your key plays and allocate resources. It includes defining channels, campaigns, sales processes, enablement needs, pricing changes, partnerships, and whatever levers are needed. The output is a clear roadmap or playbook that both marketing and sales sign off on.

Execute

Put the plan into action with excellence and agility. This stage involves launching campaigns, enabling the sales team, deploying technology and workflows (often in your CRM), and establishing dashboards to track progress.

Execute isn’t just “ship it and forget it”; it also means monitoring results, iterating quickly, and ensuring that marketing and sales are adjusting in tandem as data comes in.

According to AriseGTM, this 5-step framework has been proven across 100+ SaaS teams to build a “cross-functional revenue engine” fast.

In fact, by following ARISE, some companies have cut their sales ramp time by 30% and significantly accelerated their growth.

The methodology is typically implemented on a platform like HubSpot for efficiency. 

Paul Sullivan mentions that ARISE is “cloud-deployed” with pre-built objects, workflows, and dashboards, enabling teams to get up and running in days. (Translation for the CFOs: it’s not just theory, it’s operationalised in software, so you see value quickly.)

Now, let’s dive into each stage of ARISE in detail. For each stage, we’ll examine the CMO perspective vs. the CRO perspective, i.e., how that stage addresses marketing challenges and sales challenges, and how a dedicated RevOps approach (your “ARISE OS”) keeps both sides aligned.

1. Assess: Benchmarking Your Current GTM Health (CMO & CRO Priorities)

Every successful journey starts with a candid assessment of the starting point. In the Assess phase, the goal is to take a 360° snapshot of your business’s go-to-market current state.

This is where you answer, “Where are we right now, and what’s holding us back?” For both CMOs and CROs, Assess provides the data and insight to ground the strategy in reality.

What “Assess” Involves

This stage is essentially a comprehensive audit. Paul Sullivan recommends reviewing everything from your content and website performance to your team’s skillsets and tech stack. Concretely, a good Assess phase will include:

Marketing Audit (CMO’s view)

How effective are our current marketing efforts? This includes analysing website traffic and SEO, content engagement, lead generation metrics, email performance, social media presence, and brand metrics.

• Are we generating enough demand?
• Are we reaching the right audience?
• Also, review messaging, does our current positioning resonate, or is it stale?
• Importantly, assess the tools and data: is our marketing tech stack (MA platform, analytics, CRM) giving us the visibility we need?

For example, a CMO might discover that website conversion rates are low or that certain buyer personas aren’t engaging, signals that messaging or targeting need refinement.

Sales Audit (CRO’s view)

How is our sales process performing? Look at pipeline metrics (conversion rates at each stage, deal velocity, average deal size), win/loss analysis, and sales rep productivity.

• Are there enough qualified leads coming in?
• Where do deals stall?
• Also, examine team capabilities and coverage: do we have the right sales structure for our target market (e.g., enterprise vs. SMB)?

A CRO will also scrutinise customer metrics like retention and attrition rates. If churn is high, that’s a GTM issue as much as a product issue. Part of the sales audit is checking alignment with marketing: e.g., are the leads from marketing actually being followed up, and are they converting?

(It’s not uncommon to find that only a fraction of marketing leads turn into opportunities, which could indicate a misalignment in lead quality definitions.)

Product & Market Fit Check

Both CMO and CRO should jointly assess market conditions and provide feedback. This means doing a SWOT analysis of your competitive position, Porter’s Five Forces, etc., and (crucially) interviewing customers and prospects.

The Assess stage often involves 7-10 interviews with customers or recent lost deals to hear directly what’s working and what’s not. This qualitative insight helps both marketing and sales leaders understand external perceptions versus internal assumptions.

By the end of Assess, you should have a clear list of key findings. For instance, you might discover that your ICP (ideal customer profile) has shifted and your messaging hasn’t caught up, a CMO concern. Or perhaps you find that sales is spending 40% of their time on unqualified leads, a CRO pain point.

Maybe your churn analysis reveals onboarding gaps, which is a customer success issue feeding back into sales/marketing promises. The Assess phase brings these issues to the surface so they can be tackled head-on in the strategy.

How Assess Aligns CMO & CRO

This stage is inherently cross-functional. By auditing together, the CMO and CRO get on the same page. It’s no longer “Marketing says the problem is X, Sales says it’s Y”; the data will highlight the real choke points.

For example, if the audit shows that a particular customer segment has low Lifetime Value and high churn, both leaders can agree to deemphasise that segment moving forward.

Or if the top of the funnel is strong (lots of MQLs) but conversion to deals is low, it flags a quality or enablement issue that both sides must solve collaboratively.

Assess creates a shared understanding of the business’s strengths and weaknesses.

It replaces gut feeling or finger-pointing with evidence. (Fun fact: In practice, companies that regularly assess and align on metrics have far better communication. It’s been noted that 90% of sales and marketing professionals still report disconnects across strategy, process, or content, so even doing this step puts you ahead of many.)

From a RevOps (revenue operations) perspective, the Assess stage is where you might also evaluate your data infrastructure. Are marketing and sales looking at the same dashboard or siloed reports?

One quick win here: establish a joint GTM scorecard, a set of KPIs that both the CMO and CRO track (e.g., SQL volume, pipeline velocity, CAC, CLV, retention rate). This scorecard becomes a unifying tool as you progress through ARISE.

In summary, Assess sets the foundation. It answers the CMO’s burning question, “What messaging, channels or campaigns aren’t pulling their weight?” and the CRO’s big question, “Where are we leaking revenue or missing targets?”

By addressing both, it paves the way for a GTM plan rooted in facts, not hunches. As the saying goes, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” Assess is all about measuring the right things to improve them together.

2. Research: Listening to Customers and the Market (Fuel for CMO & CRO Strategies)

After taking stock of your internal situation, the next ARISE stage is Research. This is where you go outward, deeply investigating your customers, prospects, and competitors to gather fresh insights.

If Assess was about what’s happening, Research is about why it’s happening and how we can do better.

For both product marketing and sales, a robust research phase is invaluable: it ensures your GTM strategy will be grounded in reality, not assumptions.

Key Activities in Research

According to the ARISE methodology, Research involves a thorough business, market, and competitive analysis. Let’s break it down:

Customer & Prospect Research (Voice-of-Customer)

This is gold for product marketing. It can include customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, or mining feedback from sales calls and support tickets.

The aim is to truly understand the customer’s world: their pain points, buying criteria, use cases, and what they value about your solution (or a competitor’s).

• For CMOs, this insight will shape more precise messaging and positioning.
• For CROs, it helps refine sales tactics – e.g., knowing the typical objections or the outcomes customers expect makes for a sharper sales pitch.

ARISE emphasises interviewing current and former clients in this stage, which means also talking to lost deals or churned customers to learn where things went wrong.

These insights can be humbling but are incredibly instructive. For instance, you might learn that prospects found your pricing confusing, or that customers love a feature your marketing barely mentions. It’s real-world intel to adjust your approach.

Market & Competitive Intelligence

Both marketing and sales need to be tuned into the competitive landscape. Research should cover identifying your top competitors (including new entrants) and analysing their positioning, product offerings, pricing, and go-to-market tactics.

A CMO might do a SWOT analysis here (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats in the market) and gather third-party reports or industry trends that influence demand.

A CRO might focus on how competitors structure their sales process or where they’re beating you (e.g., feature gaps, regional strength).

Paul Sullivan specifically notes doing competitive intelligence assessments and even Porter’s Five Forces during Research. The idea is to understand how you fit into today’s market and identify openings for differentiation.

Persona and Segmentation Refinement

Often, research leads to updating your buyer personas and target segments. You might discover a new segment that is highly profitable or realise that your ideal customer profile needs tweaking (maybe mid-market healthcare companies respond far better to your product than enterprise financial services, time to adjust focus).

For the CMO, this is critical input to fine-tune marketing campaigns and content strategy. For the CRO, it could inform territory planning, which leads to prioritisation.

Aligning on the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) for each persona is useful here. What “job” is the customer hiring your product to do? Knowing this helps both marketing messages and sales conversations hit the mark.

Messaging and Value Proposition Testing

Research is also a time to test your current messaging against reality. Through surveys or interviews, you can gauge if your value propositions resonate. ARISE includes “positioning, messaging, storytelling, value proposition analysis” as part of this stage.

For example, you might present a customer with two versions of a value statement and ask which resonates more. Or test if they even understand your tagline.

If gaps are found (e.g., customers don’t understand a key part of your offering), it’s a signal to simplify or clarify in your product marketing.

By the end of Research, you should be bursting with insights. It’s common to identify some “aha” findings like: a particular feature that customers adore but you under-market; or a use case that is very compelling in a niche vertical; or maybe that your competitor’s latest product isn’t actually satisfying customers (an opportunity to pounce).

Importantly, you’ll likely spot low-hanging fruit, opportunities to improve that are relatively easy. For instance, the research might reveal that customers are confused about pricing, so an immediate fix might be to simplify pricing tiers or provide better ROI calculators on the website. These findings directly inform the Ideate and Strategise stages next.

Aligning the CMO & CRO in Research

This stage is another where collaboration is key. Marketing might lead things like surveys and market research reports, while sales is on the front lines hearing objections and competitor mentions from prospects daily.

It’s vital to feed sales’ on-the-ground observations into the research and vice versa. One effective practice is to hold a “research readout” workshop where the product marketing team presents key findings to sales and gets their reactions.

Sales might say, “Yes, we hear that competitor issue all the time,” or, “Interesting that customers value X; we should emphasize that in our demos.” This ensures buy-in and shared understanding of customer needs. It’s been noted that 41.6% of sales professionals say sharing customer feedback is one of the most important factors for aligning with marketing.

The Research stage, done right, is literally sharing customer feedback; it creates empathy on both sides for the customer’s perspective.

From a RevOps lens, the Research stage might also highlight data needs. For example, maybe you discover you haven’t been capturing a certain data point in CRM that would be useful (like industry or use-case information).

You can plan to fix that in the Execute phase. Or maybe the research shows that marketing and sales teams need a better way to share insights continuously (perhaps setting up a Slack channel or regular huddle for “Voice of Customer” updates).

Essentially, Research not only produces insights but often improves the feedback loops in your org.

In summary, Research fuels the strategy with market truth. It gives the CMO confidence that the new marketing plan will hit the mark with buyers, and it gives the CRO confidence that the sales approach is tailored to what customers actually need.

As ARISE puts it, this stage is about “determining how you can better listen to your customers, outperform competitors, and reinvent your GTM strategy”.

With Assess and Research in hand, you’re ready to get creative and design the new GTM game plan.

3. Ideate: Co-Creating Innovative GTM Plays (Marketing & Sales Unite)

With a solid grounding in data and insight, it’s time to get creative. The Ideate stage of ARISE is all about “blue-sky thinking”, generating fresh ideas for how to win in the market, but doing it in a structured, cross-functional way. This is where your team steps back and asks,

• “What could we do differently to achieve our goals?
• How can we address the issues found in Assess/Research in novel ways?”

For CMOs and CROs, Ideate is a chance to break out of the daily grind and collaborate on innovative solutions that span marketing and sales.

What Ideate Looks Like

In practice, Ideate often takes the form of workshops or brainstorming sessions involving key stakeholders (marketing, sales, product, customer success, even engineering or finance if relevant).

The mantra is that no idea is too crazy at first, encourage open thinking, then filter down to the most impactful ideas. Some focal points during Ideation:

New Positioning or Campaign Ideas (CMO focus)

Given what you learned in Research, are there creative ways to reposition the product or craft a campaign that will strongly resonate?

For instance, if research unveiled a new pain point your audience cares about, could you build a campaign or content series around solving that pain? Product marketing might pitch a bold new tagline or a provocative theme for content that sets you apart.

This could also include brainstorming content offers, events, or thought leadership angles that grab attention. The key is to incorporate the data-backed insights, e.g., “Customers kept mentioning X challenge; what if we ran a campaign directly addressing X with a webinar + ebook + targeted ads?”

Sales Strategies & Plays (CRO focus)

Sales leaders will ideate on tactics to improve conversion and win rates. That could be new sales plays (e.g., targeting a new segment identified, or a different approach to demoing the product based on what resonates).

Maybe the team considers a pilot of a land-and-expand strategy: offer a smaller entry-level deal to get a foot in the door of big clients (if research showed price is a barrier). Or brainstorm a referral program to leverage happy customers for growth.

In Ideate, sales might also suggest product or packaging changes that could make selling easier, for example, “What if we offered a 1-month free implementation package? Many prospects seem worried about onboarding.” These ideas can feed into both marketing promotions and product decisions.

Collaboration & Process Improvements (Joint)

Often, the act of ideation surfaces internal improvements, too. Marketing and sales might brainstorm how to work together more effectively. For example: creating a shared content calendar so sales knows what marketing is producing, or vice versa, developing a better lead handoff process.

In a healthy Ideate session, the group might say, “We always struggle to follow up with webinar leads quickly; what if we set up an automated sequence for that, and sales calls within 24 hours?”, that’s an idea impacting process.

Crazy (But Grounded) Ideas

It’s called blue-sky for a reason. Encourage a few out-of-the-box thoughts.

Perhaps it’s considering a new distribution channel (e.g., partner with a big consultancy for co-marketing), or a bold pricing experiment (like a limited-time performance-based pricing offer), or integrating an AI tool to personalise outreach.

Some ideas may not make the final cut, but sometimes a wild idea can spark a realistic one. “Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, but in a structured way, based on data,” as ARISE describes it.

The data from previous stages acts as guardrails, you’re not ideating in a vacuum, you’re solving the real problems identified.

CMO & CRO: Together in the Creative Process

A powerful aspect of Ideate is that it breaks down the wall between teams. When the CMO, CRO, and others brainstorm side by side, empathy and understanding flourish.

The CMO might hear a sales rep’s idea and gain insight into daily sales challenges; the CRO might realise why marketing asks for certain content or customer stories.

By co-creating the ideas, both marketing and sales leadership are more likely to support them because they had a hand in shaping them. It’s no longer “marketing’s plan” or “sales’ idea”, it’s our plan. This buy-in is crucial when it comes to execution.

Additionally, joint ideation ensures that ideas are multi-dimensional. For example, marketing might propose a new content series, sales can chime in on how that could be used in the sales cycle (or even suggest tweaks to make it more useful for sales conversations).

Or sales might suggest a new angle for outreach, marketing can build on it with supporting assets or automation. This interplay makes ideas more robust and implementation-ready. It also guards against the common pitfall of great ideas dying due to a lack of cross-team support.

Filtering and Selecting Ideas

After free-form brainstorming, the team should evaluate and prioritise ideas. Criteria might include: potential impact on revenue, alignment with company vision, feasibility (resources/time/cost), and timing (quick win vs. long-term play).

A good practice is to score ideas on impact and effort, and perhaps choose a mix of quick wins and “big bets.” The outcome of Ideate is usually a set of initiatives or themes that will form the core of the new GTM strategy.

For example, coming out of Ideate, you might decide:

• Marketing big idea: Launch a bold thought leadership campaign around “The Future of [Industry] Without [Painpoint]” targeting the CMO persona, because you found competitors aren’t addressing this content gap.

• Sales big idea: Develop a new consultative ROI workshop in the sales process for CFOs (since research showed CFOs often stall deals wanting financial justification).

• Product/packaging idea: Introduce a usage-based pricing tier, since some smaller customers hesitated at flat pricing.

• Process idea: Implement a formal SLA (service level agreement) between marketing and sales (e.g., marketing delivers X qualified leads, sales follow up within Y hours, with a feedback loop meeting every week).

All these are just examples, but notice they touch multiple aspects – that’s a sign of a well-rounded GTM ideation.

By the end of the Ideate stage, energy is usually high. Teams feel excited because they can see solutions to the problems that were weighing them down. There’s also a shared sense of ownership. The CMO and CRO should both have a smile on their face, seeing a collaborative vision formed.

And importantly, this stage lays the cultural groundwork: it signals to both teams that marketing and sales will be working together on this journey.

Next, it’s time to turn these ideas into an actionable plan – that happens in Strategise.

4. Strategise: Crafting the Unified GTM Plan (Aligning Decisions with CMO & CRO)

The Strategise stage is where all the insights and ideas come together into a concrete, executable plan. If we liken ARISE to building a machine: Assess and Research gathered the raw materials, Ideate sketched the design, and now Strategise is assembling the blueprint and instructions for the machine.

This is a pivotal stage, as it produces the Go-to-Market Strategy document or playbook that will guide the company’s actions. For both the CMO and CRO (and frankly, the whole leadership team), Strategise is about making key decisions and trade-offs together, and agreeing on the path forward.

What happens in Strategise: In this stage, you will formalise the GTM strategy, typically covering these elements (many of which map to what GTM Alliance or others call the “5 Ps” or similar):

Target Segments & Personas

Reconfirm which customer segments and buyer personas you’re going after (based on research). Strategise means focus, you might decide to double down on two industries and pause efforts in others, for example.

Both marketing and sales must agree here because it affects lead targeting, budget allocation, and sales territory. (e.g., “We will focus on mid-market fintech companies in North America, targeting CMOs and CROs as primary buyers.”)

Value Proposition & Messaging Framework

Product marketing will finalise the core messaging: the elevator pitch, value points, and key differentiators, tailored to each target persona. This may include tagline changes or new messaging pillars.

These should be documented and approved by both marketing and sales leadership (so everyone evangelises the same story). It often results in an internal messaging guide or playbook for consistency.

Product & Pricing Strategy

Any changes to packaging or pricing decided in Ideate get firmed up now. For instance, “Introduce a new Starter tier at $X/month” or “Bundle feature A and B for vertical Y.”

This likely involves the product team too, but it’s crucial for GTM, pricing affects sales pitches and market positioning. The CRO will want to ensure the pricing is sellable, and the CMO will ensure it’s competitive and aligns with how you’re positioning the value.

Channels & Tactics (Marketing Plan)

The CMO outlines which marketing channels and campaigns will be used to generate demand in this new strategy. That could include content marketing, webinars, events, ABM (account-based marketing) for strategic accounts, partnerships, etc. The plan details how to reach the target segments.

For example, if your focus is CROs at mid-market fintechs, LinkedIn ads and industry podcasts might be key channels. The CRO provides input to ensure these efforts align with sales (e.g., timing of campaigns with sales sequences, etc.). A good plan also maps content to stages of the buyer journey, discovered (top, middle, bottom funnel content).

Sales Plan & Process

The CRO, in tandem with marketing, defines how the sales team will engage leads and convert them. This includes the sales process steps, any new plays, outreach sequences, and enablement needs. For instance, if part of the strategy is a new ROI workshop, then Strategise will set when and how that is introduced in the sales cycle.

It also might outline changes like using MEDDICC or another sales methodology more rigorously (note: MEDDICC is a sales qualification framework; ARISE’s pillars even mention using MEDDPICC in sales enablement).

Additionally, sales enablement content required (case studies for a new segment, updated demo decks reflecting new messaging, etc.) will be listed for marketing to produce. The strategising ensures marketing knows what to deliver to sales and sales knows how to use it.

Customer Success & Onboarding Plan

Because GTM doesn’t stop at the sale, include plans for onboarding and retention. If, say, you identified onboarding improvements needed, the strategy might include a new Customer Success play or periodic business reviews with clients.

This ensures the CRO (who often oversees renewal revenue) has what they need to keep customers engaged, and the CMO can plan any advocacy or upsell marketing around it.

Metrics & Goals

Very importantly, Strategise sets the quantitative goals and KPIs for the GTM plan. This could be specific targets: e.g., generate 500 MQLs per quarter, achieve 20% conversion from SQL to closed deal, hit $XM new ARR in the fintech segment in H1, improve gross retention to 90%, etc.

Also define the KPIs each team will track. Setting these collaboratively is key to avoiding conflicts later. For example, if marketing’s goal is just leads but sales cares about revenue, you’d misalign; instead, perhaps both commit to a revenue target with leading indicators.

Organisations with a shared marketing/sales SLA (service level agreement) tend to perform better, one stat is 85% of marketers with an SLA think their strategy is effective.

So here’s where you craft that SLA: e.g., “Marketing will deliver X SQLs/month, Sales will follow up 100% within 24 hours, both aim for Y% win rate,” etc.

Budget and Resources

The plan should outline how resources (budget, headcount, tools) will be allocated across marketing and sales initiatives. For the CFO in the audience: this is where the rubber meets the road in terms of ROI.

Ideally, the strategy includes a simplified projection, “with this investment in campaigns and sales hires, we anticipate Z pipeline and revenue.”

Marketing and sales leadership will agree on how to use the budget for maximal impact (maybe shifting some spend from events to digital if that fits the new approach, or reallocating sales headcount to customer success if retention is a priority, for example).

All these elements get documented, typically in a GTM strategy slide deck or document. Everything is laid out clearly, so that execution can be straightforward.

Paul Sullivan notes that in ARISE’s Strategise phase, “everything you need to move forward will be documented, laid out, and signed off for execution.” This is critical = signed off.

That means the CMO, CRO, and likely the CEO, and other execs literally give a thumbs up to the plan. It’s a checkpoint: are we all committed to this GTM strategy?

Alignment and Buy-In

By this stage, marketing and sales should feel a strong sense of shared purpose. Any disagreements should be ironed out through lively discussion, backed by the data and ideas previously surfaced.

For example, maybe sales wanted to target an additional segment, marketing might show that would dilute focus, and the data doesn’t support that segment right now.

Or marketing wanted to push a certain message, sales might argue it’s not resonating, and they adjust it together. 

Strategise is the stage to debate and resolve these, not later, when in execution (when changes are costlier). The output is one unified strategy that both CMO and CRO champion to their teams.

Sometimes, companies at this stage will package the GTM plan into an internal “playbook”, a shareable guide or even a mini handbook for all revenue teams. It might have sections like “Our Target Market”, “Our Value Proposition”, “Key Sales Plays”, “Marketing Campaign Calendar”, “Metrics Dashboard”, etc. 

This playbook ensures everyone, from a content writer to a BDR to an account executive to a customer success manager, understands the strategy and their role in it.

From a RevOps perspective, the Strategise phase is also where you confirm any tooling or process changes needed to support the plan. For instance, if you’re going to do account-based marketing, maybe you need to set up account-level tracking in CRM or acquire a tool like Demandbase.

Or if you’re implementing MEDDICC in sales, perhaps your CRM deal fields need updating to capture MEDDICC info. Strategise should list these requirements so they can be implemented in the next stage.

To wrap this up: Strategise is about decision-making and agreement. It turns brainstorms into clear directives. By the end, there’s a comforting sense of “This is the plan. We know what we’re doing. Let’s go make it happen.”

As ARISE puts it, you’ll have a “new GTM devised, with tactics, processes, and business decisions documented and ready to execute.” Both CMO and CRO can now confidently lead their teams into action, knowing they’re driving toward the same north star.

5. Execute: Aligning Teams and Systems to Drive Revenue (Making It Happen)

Now it’s show time: Execute.

The best strategy means nothing if not executed well. In this final ARISE stage, the meticulously crafted GTM plan is put into action. Execution in a GTM context isn’t just a marketing launch or a sales push, it’s a coordinated effort across all revenue functions. The objective here is to generate real results (pipeline, deals, growth) and to do it in a way that’s measurable and adjustable.

What Execute entails

Execution will span a broad range of activities, essentially whatever was planned in the Strategise phase, now on a timeline with owners. Here’s how that typically unfolds, with an eye on maintaining marketing-sales alignment:

Campaign Rollout (Marketing)

The marketing team launches the campaigns defined in the strategy. This could mean publishing new content (blogs, whitepapers), running webinars or events, starting paid ad campaigns, pushing PR announcements, etc., according to the content calendar and channel strategy.

Key here is timing and coordination.

For instance, if Marketing is running a big campaign targeting CFOs in Q1, the Sales team needs to know about it, and perhaps a special follow-up sequence for inbound CFO leads is activated.

Marketing should equip Sales with a “campaign brief” for major initiatives, e.g., “Here’s the new ebook we launched, this is the pain point it addresses, here’s a one-pager you can send to prospects with it.”

This ensures sales can seamlessly piggyback on marketing efforts rather than operate in a silo.

Sales Execution & Pipeline Management (Sales)

Sales, meanwhile, executes on their end: working leads, running outreach sequences, delivering demos, negotiating deals, following the refined process. They’ll be using the new messaging and sales enablement materials from the strategy.

Perhaps they’re also executing new plays (e.g., that ROI workshop or a new trial offer). Sales leadership will keep a close eye on pipeline metrics as the new strategy unfolds.

• For example, are the new SQLs from Marketing converting better than before?
• Are deals moving faster with the changes implemented?

Enablement and Training (Ongoing)

At the start of execution, you may need to train teams on new tools or practices (e.g., BDRs trained on a new sales script, Customer Success trained on an updated onboarding checklist, etc.).

Marketing might host an internal enablement session to walk through the new messaging and content with Sales. Conversely, if a new CRM workflow or tech tool was introduced (common when implementing an OS like ARISE on HubSpot), the RevOps folks ensure everyone knows how to use it.

Paul Sullivan mentions that ARISE can be delivered either full-service or co-pilot mode, but either way, they train teams to build and execute inside HubSpot. Training turns the plan into action by empowering the people using it.

Systems and Automation (RevOps)

A huge part of execution in modern GTM is setting up the systems to scale activities. This is where your CRM and marketing automation do the heavy lifting. During "Execute", you’ll deploy workflows, sequences, dashboards, and other automations designed to support the strategy. For example:

• Marketing automation sends out that 5-part email nurture to webinar leads.

• CRM workflows score leads and route MQLs to the right sales reps, with notifications to ensure quick follow-up.

• A new custom object or pipeline might be created in the CRM to track ARISE tasks (as AriseGTM does with an “ARISE ticket pipeline” to track GTM tasks).

• Dashboards are built to monitor KPIs in real time (maybe a shared Marketing & Sales dashboard showing leads, conversion rates, pipeline, revenue vs. target).

Thanks to this, execution isn’t guesswork; it’s instrumented. Sullivan highlights that ARISE leverages HubSpot’s features like playbooks, sequences, and workflows to activate maximum ROI instantly. By automating repetitive tasks and centralising data, your team can focus on high-value work (like actually selling and engaging customers).

Monitoring and Adapting

The first few weeks or months of execution are critical to watch closely. It’s rare that a plan works perfectly out of the gate, and that’s okay. The beauty of having a unified GTM approach is that both marketing and sales are watching the same metrics and can course-correct together.

Perhaps you see that one campaign isn’t yielding as many leads as expected, marketing can adjust messaging or spend; sales provides feedback on lead quality to fine-tune targeting.

Or maybe deals are coming in faster than expected for one segment, the CRO can reallocate more reps or effort there, and the CMO can boost marketing in that area to capitalise on momentum.

This agile tweaking is only possible if you have built the feedback loops: joint meetings, shared dashboards, and open communication channels. In aligned teams, problems surface early and are solved jointly, rather than turning into end-of-quarter surprises and finger-pointing.

Results and Wins

As execution progresses, celebrate the wins that come from the new approach.

• Did the new product messaging get a shout-out from a prospect as particularly clear? Tell the team.
• Did sales close a deal in a new segment thanks to marketing’s webinar lead? High-five and share that story.

For CMOs and CROs, the Execute stage is where accountability and trust between them either strengthens or weakens. Given all the prior steps, in a successful ARISE execution, we expect it to strengthen.

They are jointly accountable for the outcomes now; it’s not “marketing did their part, now it’s on sales” or vice versa. If targets are missed, they regroup and adjust together. If targets are exceeded, they celebrate together and then raise the bar for next time.

One more aspect: Customer Success/Feedback Loop. As new customers come in via this GTM effort, ensure their feedback is looped back. Execution includes making sure those onboarding improvements are delivered, and that new customers become references or case studies (feeding back to marketing).

A true flywheel effect starts when execution yields happy customers who fuel your marketing with testimonials and your product with referrals. This creates sustainable growth, a key goal of any GTM strategy.

To tie it back to ARISE, Sullivan notes that in Execute, you can choose full-service or co-pilot mode. Full-service means an agency or team like AriseGTM might execute campaigns for you, and co-pilot means they guide your team. 

Either way, “your team will ship the roadmap within 90 days or less,”  emphasising speed and focus. The ARISE system is cloud-deployed and instantly delivered, which underlines that execution is about getting moving quickly and not losing momentum.

Key takeaway:

In the Execute stage, alignment truly becomes action. Marketing drives awareness and demand, Sales drives conversion to revenue, and both use shared systems and data to stay synchronised.

When done right, execution feels like a well-oiled machine, a revenue engine, rather than a clunky relay race. And that’s exactly what we aimed to build: a unified revenue operating system where product marketing insights and GTM strategy come together to accelerate growth.

Uniting Product Marketing and GTM Strategy: The CMO & CRO Power Move

By now, it’s clear that product marketing vs. go-to-market strategy isn’t an either/or proposition; it’s a partnership. The ARISE framework we’ve walked through demonstrates how each stage intertwines the concerns of both the CMO and CRO (as well as other revenue leaders). Let’s step back and reflect on the big picture of what this unified approach achieves and why it matters to your SaaS business leadership:

Common Vision, Different Roles

With a proper GTM operating system, the CMO and CRO (and their teams) rally around a common vision of revenue growth. They might be handling different tactics. One is building brand and leads, the other is closing deals and expanding accounts, but they’re executing the same strategy.

This dramatically reduces the friction that plagues many organisations. Instead of arguing over who is responsible for a shortfall, they problem-solve collectively. It’s the difference between two people paddling in sync versus in opposite directions.

• Every ARISE Pillar Solves Dual Challenges: Each stage addresses typical pain points:

  • Assess gave both leaders clarity and a reality check (no more “I think, you think”, it’s on paper).

  • Research ensured product marketing efforts are grounded in customer reality, and sales strategies align with what buyers want, bridging any disconnect between what we’re saying and what they’re hearing.

  • Ideate harnessed creativity across teams, producing initiatives neither silo could have come up with alone – truly leveraging the wisdom of cross-functional crowds.

  • Strategise forced alignment on key decisions (target, message, process, goals) so no one can claim “I didn’t sign up for that plan.” It tied marketing activities directly to sales outcomes and vice versa, making it everyone’s strategy.

  • Execute established joint accountability and real-time collaboration, supported by a RevOps backbone (tools and data) to keep everyone honest and informed.

Benefits to the CMO (Marketing Side)

The CMO now has confidence that their campaigns and product messaging won’t live in a vacuum. There’s a system to ensure leads are worked, and feedback comes back. They can more easily justify marketing spend because it’s connected to revenue outcomes (a CFO loves to see this!).

The product marketing team sees their work directly influencing sales success. For example, refreshed messaging leading to shorter sales cycles is a significant win. Additionally, an aligned GTM means higher-quality leads and better conversions, which often allow marketing to focus on more strategic activities rather than constantly volume-chasing to make up for leaks in the funnel.

Benefits to the CRO (Sales Side)

The CRO gains a marketing partner who is truly enabling sales rather than just tossing leads over the fence. Sales gets better leads, better tools, and content, and a clearer go-to-market focus, which typically translates to higher win rates and sales productivity.

The CRO can step into forecast meetings knowing that marketing is pulling in the same direction to fill pipeline. It also helps in coaching the sales team: with a clear GTM playbook, sales managers can reinforce best practices and new reps ramp faster (they have a handbook of what works).

Ultimately, aligned GTM often means shorter sales cycles and larger deal sizes, as buyers move smoothly from interest to decision with fewer hiccups. (Remember that stat: aligned teams are 67% better at closing dealslxahub.com – that’s what we expect to see.)

Strategic Agility

Perhaps one of the biggest advantages is agility. Markets change, new competitors, economic shifts, etc. When product marketing and GTM are unified, the company can respond to change much faster.

If a pivot is needed, you don’t have to realign disconnected teams first; you already have the communication channels and shared framework to adjust course in sync.

For fast-scaling SaaS, this agility can be the difference between capitalising on a trend or missing it. It’s like having an agile playbook;  you can run sprints, retrospectives, and iterate your GTM in near real-time because all players are in the same huddle.

Cultural Impact

On a softer side, implementing an ARISE-like system fosters a culture of collaboration and accountability. It breaks down the tribal mentality (“marketing vs sales”) and builds a unified Revenue team ethos. We’ve seen companies where once this clicks, there’s a lot more respect and understanding across departments.

A marketer can celebrate a sales win as a victory for all, and a salesperson can appreciate the lead gen effort that filled their pipeline. When the next challenge arises (it always does), people are more likely to solve it together rather than play the blame game.

This culture of alignment often trickles down into customer experience, and customers can feel when a company is aligned in serving them versus when it’s disjointed.

Finally, tying it back to the ARISE GTM Methodology by Paul Sullivan, this approach isn’t just theoretical. It’s been battle-tested with many SaaS firms, yielding tangible improvements like reduced ramp times, faster executions, and revenue growth.

By mapping each ARISE pillar to CMO/CRO challenges, we effectively create a checklist for GTM excellence:

• Are we Assessing our situation thoroughly (so we’re not flying blind)?

• Are we Researching the market deeply (so we stay customer-centric)?

• Are we Ideating cross-functionally (so we innovate and get buy-in)?

• Are we Strategising with clear documentation and agreement (so everyone knows the plan)?

• Are we Executing with proper tools, training, and feedback loops (so we actually hit our targets)?

If you can nod and say yes to each, you likely have a high-functioning go-to-market engine.

In the end, product marketing vs GTM strategy is a bit of a misnomer;  it’s not a versus, it’s a virtuous cycle. Product marketing drives GTM success by ensuring the strategy is built on a foundation of customer value, and GTM strategy amplifies product marketing’s impact by ensuring those value messages turn into revenue.

For growth-oriented SaaS companies, especially those looking to scale beyond the startup stage into a mature revenue organisation, integrating these functions is the key to breaking through plateaus.

You’ve seen how it can be done.

The question now is: Will you continue operating with siloed teams, or will you build a unified revenue operating system that propels your business forward?

In 2025 and beyond, the winners will be those who choose the latter.

Conclusion:
The difference between product marketing and GTM strategy is clear, but their power is greatest when combined under a cohesive framework like ARISE. By aligning every stage of your go-to-market motion to both marketing and sales goals, you create a revenue engine where every part accelerates the whole. No more guessing, no more gaps, just a unified team driving toward growth.

Is your SaaS company ready to break down the silos and build a GTM machine that scales? The opportunity is here to transform how you go to market, how your teams collaborate, and how your customers experience your product’s value.

Want to develop a revenue operations machine that actually scales? Begin the conversation with our team and see how we can help your business ARISE →