Every company I've worked with can tell you who owns marketing, who owns sales, and who owns customer success. Almost none of them can clearly tell you who owns what happens between them.

That's not a small gap. It's where a lot of revenue leaks out.

The org chart is boxes. The customer lives in the lines between them.

Draw your go-to-market organization and you get a set of clear boxes. Marketing here, sales there, customer success somewhere else. Each function has a leader, a budget, a number, and a clear sense of what it owns.

Now look at the business from the customer's side. They might see an ad, read some content, talk to a salesperson, go through discovery, evaluate the product, run a POC, sign a contract, get onboarded, and eventually either expand or leave. To them, it's one experience and one relationship with one company.

Internally, that same journey crosses multiple teams, systems, and people, and every time the customer moves from one team to another, they cross a seam.

The seams are the handoffs, and handoffs are usually where things start to break down. The team passing something along has already moved on to the next priority, while the team receiving it wasn't part of everything that came before. Important context ends up living in someone's head, a CRM field nobody updates, or a Slack thread that disappeared three weeks ago.

Everyone owns their box. Nobody owns the seam.

This is probably the most argued-over handoff in B2B. Marketing generates a lead and passes it to sales, sales works it, the conversation goes nowhere, and the familiar fight starts. Marketing says sales didn't follow up fast enough. Sales says the lead was never qualified in the first place. Both sides are looking at the same outcome and blaming the other team.

But the problem is usually the handoff itself. There was never a definition of "qualified" that both teams actually agreed to and used. The context marketing had about why the account engaged never made it to the rep, and the rep's read on why the deal stalled never made it back to marketing. Two teams are joined by one of the most important transitions in the customer journey, yet nobody is explicitly accountable for whether that transition works.

You can hire better marketers and better salespeople and still have the same problem, because the issue isn't the people in the boxes. It's what happens between them.

If the first seam is the most visible, this one can be the most expensive.

A deal gets sold. During the sales process, expectations get set about what the product will do, what problem it solves, how fast the customer sees value, and what success should look like. Then the deal closes, the account moves to onboarding and customer success, and too often the customer arrives with expectations that didn't make the transition with them.

Customer success inherits the account without knowing everything that was discussed during the sale. The customer references something they were promised, and the team responsible for delivering it is hearing about it for the first time. The gap between what was sold and what gets delivered may not show up right away. It tends to surface months later at renewal, when the customer decides the experience didn't match what they thought they were buying and everyone's scrambling to work out what went wrong.

Again, it's usually not that sales was bad or customer success was bad. The handoff was the problem.

This one barely gets treated as a handoff at all, which is exactly why so much valuable information gets lost.

Customer success sits on some of the best market intelligence in the company. They know which customers get value quickly and which ones struggle, what separates the accounts that expand from the ones that churn, and the actual language customers use to describe their problems and explain why they bought.

That's not just retention information. It's some of the best targeting, positioning, and ICP information marketing could ask for, yet in a lot of companies it never consistently makes its way back. Marketing keeps building campaigns on assumptions made months or years earlier, while the people closest to the customer have a far clearer view of who succeeds, why, and what actually matters to them.

The loop stays open because closing it isn't clearly anyone's job.

This usually isn't a people problem. It's structural.

Every leader is measured on their own box. The CMO has pipeline targets, the sales leader has bookings, and the customer success leader has retention and expansion. Each one is doing exactly what they're supposed to do. But customers don't experience those metrics or the boundaries between them. They experience the company as one continuous journey, and if nobody is measured on whether the handoffs between functions work, those handoffs usually only get attention after something has already gone wrong.

Marketing assumes sales owns the lead once it's passed. Sales assumes customer success owns the customer once the contract is signed. Customer success assumes marketing owns the market. Everyone is right about where their own responsibility begins and ends, but the problem is everything in between.

Seams are also hard to spot because they rarely show up cleanly in a dashboard. A bad campaign is visible. A missed quota is visible. Churn is visible. A broken handoff tends to look like something else, whether that's a marketing problem because conversion is down, a sales problem because opportunities aren't progressing, or a product problem because customers aren't adopting. Sometimes the problem isn't inside any single function at all. It's the connection between them.

You don't fix this by telling people to communicate better. Good intentions don't survive a busy quarter.

You fix seams by making them explicit. Every important handoff needs three things: an owner, a shared definition of success, and a feedback loop.

Someone has to be accountable for whether the handoff works, not just whether their own team finished its part. Both sides need to agree on what a good transition actually looks like, what information moves with the customer, what the receiving team needs to know, and what happens when it isn't working. There also has to be a way for what's learned downstream to travel back upstream.

Marketing should know what happens to the accounts it sends to sales. Sales should know what happens to the customers it hands to CS. Marketing should regularly hear what CS is learning about the customers who thrive, expand, struggle, and churn.

The point isn't more meetings. It's making sure information travels with the customer instead of getting lost every time they cross an internal boundary.

Most of all, someone senior enough to see the whole revenue engine has to own the connections between the functions, not just preside over the functions themselves. Someone has to own the customer's journey across the org chart, including not just the boxes, but the lines between them.

That's what good go-to-market leadership actually looks like: not running marketing, sales, and customer success as three strong but separate machines, but making sure they work like one.

Most companies spend their time trying to strengthen the boxes through better marketing, better sales, and better customer success. All of that matters.

But some of the biggest gains are sitting in the seams nobody owns, the handoffs where context disappears, expectations drift, and revenue leaks out of the system. You can strengthen every individual function and still have a broken customer journey, because the customer doesn't experience your org chart. They experience everything that happens between the boxes.

Where's the leakiest seam in your go-to-market right now?

Most GTM teams watch two numbers:

1. Pipeline created

2. Closed-won

But they miss everything happening in between.

That gap is where revenue leaks out. The no-decision losses, the stalled deals, the discounting nobody tracks, that's where the number slips.

On September 22, Eric Gruber (Personal ABM) and I are kicking off Beyond the Pipeline, a 3 part LinkedIn Live series digging into where revenue actually gets stuck once opportunities enter the pipeline.

In Part 1, we'll walk through the early findings from the GTM research MarketingHQ and Personal ABM have been running, and the numbers are sobering.

Come with your questions. We'd rather this be a real conversation than another webinar.

📅 Tuesday, September 22, 11:00 AM ET

We're sending all attendees the full findings report after the session!

These are the kinds of conversations happening every day inside MarketingHQ. Less about running another campaign, more about how the whole go-to-market system actually fits together: the handoffs, the sequencing, and the parts that fall between functions nobody owns.

If that's the kind of conversation you're looking for, come join us. Inside the community, you'll get:

Chief Marketing Officer (TNF) at VF Corporation

Chief Marketing Officer at Gratwick

Chief Marketing Officer at NxT Level

Chief Marketing Officer at District 901 LLC (From $100,000)

VP of Sales & Marketing at Arlo NoMad ($230,000 - $260,000)

VP Digital Marketing at SS&C Technologies

VP, Marketing, Niche at PUIG ($200,000 - $225,000)

Director of Marketing at Kushner

Head of Marketing, Life Sciences at Mason Harding

Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Opus Training

Senior Demand Generation Strategist at Directive ($80,000 - $85,000)

Sr. Manager, Marketing Analytics at Aptive Environmental

Social Media Strategist at Hearst

Marketing Operations Coordinator at Southern States

Market Research Analyst at Cyber Chasse

Events Manager at Y Combinator ($200,000 - $230,000)

Find many more roles on our MarketingHQ Job Board

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