rev.space Group blog

Why Sales and Marketing Alignment Isn’t Enough | by Chris Bayliss | How to Build a Growth System | Medium

chris@enquirylab.com (Chris Bayliss) — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:15:00 GMT

Executive Summary

Alignment is fragile by design. 90% of marketing and sales executives admit their functional priorities conflict, and only 15% of B2B companies achieve alignment sufficient to drive profitable growth [1][2].
Most alignment initiatives regress under pressure. When quarterly targets loom, teams revert to siloed behaviors, chasing short-term wins that undermine long-term strategy [5].
ABM adoption illustrates the gap. 96% of B2B marketers call ABM vital, yet only 17% have embedded it into their core GTM system, and 88% report no significant results [3].
Systemization delivers measurable outperformance. Companies with structurally aligned teams grow revenue 24–58% faster and profits 27–72% faster than misaligned peers [13][14].
The decision for leaders: Stop treating alignment as an initiative. Build it into your organizational architecture, incentives, and operating rhythms.

So what? Alignment is a state you achieve. Systemization is an infrastructure you build. One collapses under pressure. The other absorbs it.

The Alignment Illusion

Every revenue leader has lived this story. After months of workshops, joint planning sessions, and cross-functional offsites, sales and marketing finally get on the same page. Handoffs improve. Pipeline quality rises. The executive team celebrates.

Within weeks, the alignment unravels. Sales reverts to chasing whatever closes fastest. Marketing floods the funnel with volume over quality. The carefully negotiated SLAs become suggestions, then memories.

This pattern repeats because alignment, as typically practiced, is inherently unstable. It depends on goodwill, shared goals, shared circumstances, and consistent leadership. Remove any of these, and the equilibrium breaks.

The research confirms what practitioners already suspect. A 2024 Gartner survey found that 90% of marketing and sales executives admit their functional priorities conflict with each other, and 80% of key go-to-market activities lack contributions from one of the two teams [1]. This is not a failure of effort. It is a structural condition.

Research spanning 410 companies across eight industries revealed an even starker finding: only 15% had sufficient sales and marketing alignment to consistently drive profitable growth [2]. The vast majority of organizations never achieve more than a temporary alignment, and those that do struggle to maintain it.

Why Alignment Fractures Under Pressure

Alignment fails not because teams lack commitment, but because the forces working against it are structural while the mechanisms supporting it are behavioral.

Consider what happens when quarterly pressure mounts. As one analysis observed, sales “defaults to muscle memory,” chasing quick deals with heavy discounts or legacy products that boost the current quarter but hurt the next [5]. Marketing, facing its own pressure to demonstrate contribution, reverts to pumping leads regardless of quality.

These are not failures of character. They are rational responses to misaligned incentives. When marketing is measured on MQL volume and sales is measured on closed revenue, the conditions for sustained collaboration disappear the moment targets are at risk.

Alignment is a truce between competing incentive structures. Systemization is the removal of the competition itself.

The ABM paradox illustrates this perfectly. Account-based marketing is explicitly designed to align sales and marketing around shared accounts. The industry has embraced it enthusiastically: 96% of B2B marketers say ABM is vital to their strategy, and 57% employ it for top-of-funnel efforts [3].

Yet the results lag dramatically. Only 17% have fully embedded ABM into their core go-to-market system, and up to 88% report no significant results yet [3]. The gap between adoption and impact reveals that enthusiasm for alignment does not translate into sustainable performance without structural embedding.

The Cost of the Alignment Cycle

The business impact of this fragility is not abstract. Poor sales and marketing alignment costs businesses 10% or more of annual revenue [4]. These losses accumulate through duplicate efforts, wasted leads, and inconsistent messaging, particularly damaging in high-value B2B sales cycles where coordination is critical.

Nearly 48% of enterprises still struggle to align these teams in the first place [4]. For these organizations, the alignment cycle is not occasional friction but a persistent drag on performance.

The costs extend beyond direct revenue leakage. Misalignment creates forecasting uncertainty, extends sales cycles, and degrades customer experience. When marketing and sales operate from different data, tell different stories, and optimize for different outcomes, buyers experience the dissonance. In complex B2B purchases involving multiple stakeholders over extended timeframes, this friction compounds.

STRATEGIC INSIGHT

Only 15% of B2B companies achieve alignment sufficient to drive profitable growth.

Source: Organizational alignment research across 410 companies, 8 industries [2]

From Alignment to Systemization

The alternative to perpetual alignment initiatives is not better alignment. It is systemization: embedding coordination into organizational structure, operating rhythms, shared data infrastructure, and incentive architecture.

Systemization differs from alignment in a fundamental way. Alignment is a state that must be continuously maintained through effort and goodwill. Systemization is an infrastructure that produces coordination as its default output.

Leading organizations are making this shift through several structural mechanisms.

Cross-functional mission teams and Centers of Excellence.

Rather than relying on ad-hoc coordination, companies are formalizing alignment through dedicated structures. Creating a cross-functional ABM Center of Excellence with shared goals, joint incentives, and a unified cadence transforms siloed functions into one mission-focused team [6].

This CoE model establishes what practitioners call a “scalable operating backbone,” a central hub for strategy, governance, shared data standards, and playbooks. This structure ensures consistency across regions and reduces dependence on “heroic individuals” driving alignment [7]. When alignment is the default state of work rather than an initiative that can lapse, it survives leadership transitions and market shifts.

Multi-disciplinary account pods.

Companies are reorganizing how teams work by forming “mission-based” account teams that blend Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Ops, and even Product around specific account goals [8]. These small, focused teams operate with clear ownership (“this group advances these accounts”) and guidance from the CoE.

By having all roles needed to win an account working as one unit, organizations enable faster decision-making and adaptive problem-solving in long sales cycles [8]. This structural shift hard-wires alignment into daily operations, making it resilient even as market conditions change.

Revenue Operations as organizational infrastructure.

As of 2023, 72% of companies have adopted a Revenue Operations model to better integrate marketing, sales, and customer success processes [9]. RevOps centralizes data, tools, and analytics across functions.

However, only 39% of practitioners consider their RevOps strategy fully mature [10]. This gap between adoption and maturity suggests many firms are still building the foundation. The prevalence of RevOps signals that B2B organizations recognize pure alignment efforts are insufficient; they are investing in organizational systems with shared processes and technology to sustain alignment.

STRATEGIC INSIGHT

Companies with tightly aligned sales and marketing grew revenue 24% faster and profits 27% faster over three years.

Source: SiriusDecisions/Forrester study [13]

The Data Infrastructure Requirement

Systemization requires more than org chart changes. It requires a unified data foundation.

Disparate tech stacks and metrics can quietly unravel alignment. Demandbase discovered that separate marketing and sales ops teams were “manipulating data to tell whatever story” their function wanted [11]. When each team controls its own data, alignment becomes a negotiation over competing narratives rather than a shared response to shared reality.

The solution was structural: they merged into one RevOps group reporting to finance to create a neutral approach to data [11]. With unified dashboards and buyer-centric KPIs, teams trust the numbers and stay focused on common outcomes.

This points to a critical insight. Systemization means building feedback loops and trigger-based orchestration, not just periodic reports, so that all parties act on the same signals in tandem. When marketing sees the same account engagement data that sales sees, and both see it in real time, coordination becomes a natural response rather than a mandated behavior.

Incentive Architecture

The final pillar of systemization is how performance is measured and rewarded. Traditional setups often reward siloed goals (MQL volume, quarterly sales quotas) that can pit teams against each other even when they are nominally aligned.

A systemized GTM model implements incentive structures that reward collective success toward shared revenue targets [12]. Leaders still celebrate individual achievements, but they make it clear that a win only counts when all parts of the process work together toward the overall goal [12].

This might include compensation plans where marketing and sales both get credit for growth in strategic accounts, or governance committees that jointly approve account plans. Such baked-in alignment mechanisms ensure collaboration is part of the organizational design rather than dependent on individual goodwill.

The Performance Gap

The business case for systemization over alignment is not theoretical. Multiple data sources converge on a consistent pattern: structural alignment dramatically outperforms behavioral alignment.

A SiriusDecisions/Forrester study found that B2B companies with tightly aligned sales and marketing grew revenue 24% faster over three years and grew profits 27% faster compared to their less aligned peers [13].

A cross-industry analysis found even larger effects: highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable than misaligned companies [14]. The same research noted that misaligned firms suffer substantial performance drags, including 18% less EBITDA [14].

When alignment is operationalized in account-based programs, the gains become more specific. In Momentum ITSMA’s 2023 benchmark, the majority of ABM practitioners reported measurable improvements: 84% saw pipeline growth and 77% saw revenue growth in their target accounts [15]. Furthermore, 72% said ABM delivers higher ROI than other marketing efforts [15].

The conversion impact is particularly striking. Gartner reports that organizations where sales and marketing share buyer journey data see 2.3x higher conversion rates on average [18]. These companies are also 1.6x more likely to exceed their revenue growth targets [18].

STRATEGIC INSIGHT

Organizations sharing buyer-journey data between sales and marketing see 2.3x higher conversion rates.

Source: Gartner 2024 B2B Commercial Strategy Survey [18]

Case Evidence: ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides a compelling case of systemization payoff. They stood up a global ABM Centre of Excellence and cross-functional account teams (47 staff from various departments) targeting 200 strategic accounts, effectively institutionalizing sales-marketing coordination [16].

The results after one year were tangible: $12 million in new revenue, $132 million in qualified pipeline, and a 73:1 ROI on the ABM program, with average deal sizes 4.7x larger than typical [17].

These outcomes were achieved in a long-cycle, high-value context where random acts of alignment would likely have faltered. The sustained performance came from structural changes: a centralized playbook, executive-level buy-in, and a team whose entire job was orchestrating around account needs.

The Decision for Leadership

The evidence points to a clear conclusion. Alignment as a one-time initiative is brittle. Alignment as an integrated system is resilient.

The firms that treat sales and marketing coordination as an ongoing system, complete with shared goals, joint infrastructure, and co-owned outcomes, are achieving superior and more reliable performance. In high-value B2B contexts where long-term collaboration is essential to nurture deals, this shift from alignment to systemization is increasingly a competitive necessity.

For C-suite leaders, the question is not whether to pursue alignment. It is whether to keep pursuing alignment as a behavioral objective or to build it as an organizational capability.

The former requires constant maintenance and fails under pressure. The latter absorbs pressure and scales with the business.

The next step is diagnostic. Examine your current GTM coordination. Ask where it depends on individual relationships versus structural mechanisms. Identify where incentives pull teams apart even when strategy pulls them together. Map where data fragmentation allows competing narratives.

Then build the system. Because the next market shift, leadership change, or quarterly pressure test is coming. And alignment without systemization will not survive it.

Sources

[1] Gartner Survey Reveals Marketing and Sales Functions Collaborate on Only Three Out of 15 Commercial Activities, Gartner, 2024.

[2] Why Misalignment Is Silently Killing Your Revenue Acceleration Strategies, Selling Power, 2024.

[3] Building an ABM System Webinar, Momentum ITSMA, December 2025.

[4] The Cost of Misalignment: Why Sales & Marketing Need to Get on the Same Page, Demand Gen Report, 2024.

[5] The Strategy-Sales Mismatch: Why Growth Without Alignment Backfires, LinkedIn, 2024.

[6] Building an ABM System Webinar (CoE model), Momentum ITSMA, December 2025.

[7] Building an ABM System Webinar (Scalable operating backbone), Momentum ITSMA, December 2025.

[8] Building an ABM System Webinar (Mission-based teams), Momentum ITSMA, December 2025.

[9] 2023 State of RevOps: Curating Tech Stacks & Teams That Promote Efficiency & Alignment, Demand Gen Report, 2023.

[10] 2023 State of RevOps (RevOps maturity), Demand Gen Report, 2023.

[11] The Cost of Misalignment (Demandbase example), Demand Gen Report, 2024.

[12] How Shared Goals and Incentives Improve Marketing Results, MarTech, 2024.

[13] 17 ABM Stats That Will Make You Rethink Your 2026 B2B Marketing Strategy, AdRoll, 2024.

[14] Why Misalignment Is Silently Killing Your Revenue Acceleration Strategies (performance data), Selling Power, 2024.

[15] Momentum ITSMA’s Annual ABM Benchmarking Study Shows No Signs of Slow Down for Account-Based Marketing, PRNewswire, 2023.

[16] Awards Case Study: How Building an ABM Programme Won Gemma Davies the B2B Marketer of the Year Award (team structure), B2B Marketing, 2024.

[17] Awards Case Study: How Building an ABM Programme (results), B2B Marketing, 2024.

[18] Gartner Survey (buyer-journey data sharing), Gartner, 2024.

[19] Gartner Survey (digital and human channels), Gartner, 2024.

Coming Back Into Sales, One Thing Was Clear: The System Matters More Than Ever | by Hannah Bailey | How to Build a Growth System | Medium

Hannah — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:45:00 GMT

The first thing that hit me wasn’t the technology.

It was the acronyms.

I’d been out of a formal sales role for a few years. Two children, then COVID landing just as I was trying to find my way back in, then Brexit quietly closing doors in hospitality that I’d assumed would still be open. When I finally got back into a commercial role in hospitality tech, I sat across from someone who asked me, very casually, how I’d approached MEDDPICC in my last role.

I smiled and said something non-committal. Then I went home and Googled it.

That moment is probably the most honest version of what returning to sales actually feels like after a proper gap. It’s not that you’ve forgotten how to sell. It’s that the frame around selling has been rebuilt while you were looking the other way.

What’s genuinely changed

What’s changed most meaningfully is what’s expected before the first conversation even happens.

AI has made deep account research accessible to every rep, not just the top closers. You can walk into an outreach knowing a target’s tech stack, their recent leadership changes, the integration headaches their property type typically has. That used to be the hallmark of your one or two best people. Now it’s the entry requirement, because buyers in hospitality tech, such as operations directors, revenue managers, CTOs at hotel groups, are getting more outbound than ever and responding to less of it.

AI raised the floor for everyone. Which means generic outreach gets filtered faster. Specific, evidently researched contact stands out more, not because people are more receptive, but because the noise is louder.

The question isn’t whether your reps have access to better tools. It’s whether your system is set up for them to actually use that capability or whether they’re stitching it together in their own time, on top of everything else.

What hasn’t changed and what should

Here’s what hasn’t kept up.

The fundamentals of great B2B selling haven’t shifted. Proper qualification. Real relationships. The patience that enterprise hospitality demands. The craft of a conversation that makes a prospect feel understood rather than processed. The way you navigate a buying committee spread across brand level, regional ops, revenue, procurement, and a GM somewhere who has more influence than the org chart suggests.

None of that is different.

What also hasn’t changed, and this surprised me most on re-entry, is how many GTM teams are still operating in genuinely fractured systems. The CRM that marketing doesn’t really use. The handoff between sales and customer success that lives in an email thread. The dashboard that tells you activity but not insight. The rep pulling data from three places to build a picture that should already exist.

The tools are often fine. The data exists. The problem is that nobody designed how it all connects, so it doesn’t. And the people in the middle compensate with effort.

That’s not a people problem. That’s a system design problem.

Why it compounds in hospitality tech specifically

Long cycles. Wide buying committees. Integration-heavy products. Budget conversations happening against post-COVID recovery, margin pressure, and operational complexity that most SaaS playbooks were never built for.

In that environment, every crack in your GTM system gets wider. A lead that slips through a broken handoff isn’t just a lost opportunity, it’s months of relationship-building that nobody can account for. A rep manually stitching their workflow is a rep spending less time in front of the people who matter.

The teams winning right now aren’t working harder than everyone else. They’re operating inside systems where less falls through the cracks and more compounds over time. That’s the difference. Not talent, not effort. Design.

Where I’ve landed

When I re-entered and did the honest audit; tools, methodologies, AI literacy, the hardest part wasn’t learning new things. It was working out which ones actually mattered.

I’d have benefited from structured support on that. Companies like Ivee, who focus on upskilling returners on AI and modern tools, understand that re-entry without a bridge isn’t just hard, it’s slow and demoralising. The industry loses good people that way. People with real hospitality depth and commercial instinct who just need the gap closed.

Getting up to speed wasn’t easy. But doing that work, rebuilding the frameworks, learning the tools, getting properly across AI, forced me to look hard at how commercial teams actually function. And the more I looked, the more the same pattern kept surfacing. Not broken people. Broken systems.

That’s what led me to rev.space. It wasn’t just a good role. It felt like the natural extension of that realisation. A company built on the conviction that GTM systems need to be deliberately designed, not assembled by accident.

I started in delivery, project managing RevOps engagements, seeing first-hand how those gaps show up when you’re working to fix them. My sales and operational background pulled me into Growth System Design work too, and into account management for our ABM retainer clients. That breadth turned out to matter.

More recently I’ve moved into business operations, owning how we grow, how we position and sell our programmes, how we make them more productised and scalable. I’m leading on client onboarding, particularly for the Growth System Sprint: the six-week engagement that maps a client’s full GTM, identifies exactly where growth is being constrained, and starts fixing the highest-impact issues before it’s over. Not a report. Actual progress, in six weeks. I continue to support ABM clients where Sales Enablement or RevOps work comes into the picture, through RevOpsLab too.

The through-line from that first humbling MEDDPICC moment to now is, in hindsight, quite funny. I went home and Googled it. Now it’s part of my daily vocabulary because the role demanded it, and the environment made space for me to get there. That matters more than people realise.

Because here’s the thing I’d add to every conversation about GTM system design: a well-designed system doesn’t just make your existing team more effective. It makes it possible for people to join, get up to speed, and contribute quickly without spending months learning how the chaos works. Overcomplicated, undocumented, stitched-together systems don’t just slow down revenue. They quietly exclude good people. Returners. Career-changers. People with deep hospitality experience who’ve been out of a formal sales role for a few years and are trying to find their footing again.

That’s a talent problem hiding inside a system problem.

So when I talk about system design, in the work I do at rev.space, I’m thinking about all of it. Not just conversion rates and pipeline velocity. But whether the system you’re building is one that good people can actually operate inside.

The conversation that’s missing in hospitality tech isn’t about which AI tool to adopt or whether the SDR team needs more call volume. It’s simpler and harder: was your GTM system ever actually designed or did it just accumulate?

For most teams, the honest answer is the second one. And that’s the only place worth starting if you actually want things to change.

If this resonates or you see it differently, I’d genuinely like to hear it. Drop a comment or find me on LinkedIn.

You Don’t Have a Revenue Problem — You Have a System Design Problem | by Chris Bayliss | How to Build a Growth System | Medium

chris@enquirylab.com (Chris Bayliss) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

A RevOps View for Hospitality & Leisure Tech Leaders

The Illusion of Activity

System design problems are the hardest kind to fix, because most of the time you cannot see them. Everything looks like it is working. Teams are busy. Dashboards show activity. Pipeline exists. But the results are not matching the effort, and nobody can quite explain why.

Here is a pattern I see over and over in hospitality tech companies: revenue growth slows, and the response is to add. More SDRs. More sales activity. More marketing spend. A new lead gen platform. Another sales enablement tool. Leadership reads the situation as an activity problem, so they throw capacity at it.

That response makes sense. If the engine feels slow, adding fuel seems logical. But the numbers often tell a different story. Customer acquisition costs climb. Sales cycles stretch out further. Net revenue retention flattens or declines. The team is working harder than ever, and the results are getting worse.

This is not a people problem. It is not (just) a pipeline problem. It is a system design problem.

Here is what makes it so hard to spot: when you optimize at the component level, you create local improvements that often make the overall system perform worse. Marketing hits its MQL target, but Sales rejects 40% of those leads as unqualified. Sales closes a deal, but Implementation struggles to onboard because the scope was misaligned during the sales process. Customer Success keeps churn low on paper, but expansion revenue stays flat because nobody owns the growth motion post-implementation or is just myopically focused on new logo.

Each team is performing well against its own metrics. The system is failing. And because every team can point to their own scorecard and say “we hit our numbers,” the real problem stays invisible.

The instinct to add more resources is understandable. Most leadership teams I work with have been through this cycle at least once. It is also the wrong response when the underlying architecture of your revenue engine is where the friction lives. Pouring more demand into a system with structural misalignment does not produce more revenue. It produces more waste, and it burns out the good people trying to make it work.

The Hospitality Tech Complexity Trap

Every B2B sector has its quirks. Hospitality and leisure tech has compounding complexity that makes system design not just important, but existential.

Start with the buying committee. You are rarely selling to a single decision-maker. A typical deal involves the CIO or CTO evaluating technical fit, the VP of Operations assessing workflow impact, the CFO scrutinizing ROI models, and often a brand or guest experience leader weighing in on how the product affects the end customer. Each stakeholder has different success criteria, different objection patterns, and different timelines. Your revenue system needs to engage all of them, in sequence and sometimes in parallel, without dropping context.

Then there is the integration landscape. Hospitality tech does not exist in isolation. Your product has to work alongside property management systems, central reservation systems, point-of-sale platforms, loyalty engines, business intelligence tools, and increasingly, a web of IoT devices and third-party data feeds. Every integration adds technical risk to the sale and lengthens procurement cycles. Prospects are not just buying your product. They are buying the disruption your product introduces into their existing stack.

The post-sale burden compounds this further. Implementation in hospitality tech is rarely a simple onboarding flow. It involves property-level configuration, staff training, data migration, and often multi-phase rollouts across portfolios of hotels, restaurants, or venues. The time and effort between a signed contract and a fully live customer can stretch for months. During that window, revenue is at risk.

This complexity is precisely why RevOps maturity matters more in this sector than in most. When you have long sales cycles, multi-stakeholder alignment requirements, deep integration dependencies, and heavy post-sale delivery, you cannot afford a revenue engine that operates as a collection of disconnected teams running their own playbooks. The cost of misalignment multiplies at every stage.

The 5 Revenue System Failure Patterns

After working across dozens of hospitality and leisure tech companies at different stages of growth, We have seen the same failure patterns surface again and again. These are not edge cases. They are structural defaults, the predictable result of building a revenue organization without a system-level blueprint.

1. Marketing Optimized for MQL Volume. Sales Optimized for Short-Term Bookings.

Marketing builds campaigns to fill the top of the funnel. Sales works the deals most likely to close this quarter. These two objectives sound aligned but are often in direct conflict. Marketing floods the pipeline with leads that match demographic criteria but show no real buying intent. Sales cherry-picks the warmest opportunities and ignores the rest. The result is a high volume of activity on both sides and a persistent gap in conversion.

The deeper problem: there is no shared definition of a qualified opportunity, no agreed-upon lifecycle model, and no feedback loop between pipeline quality and demand generation strategy. Marketing and Sales are optimizing for their own metrics, not for system throughput.

2. Product Launches Not Integrated into GTM Systems.

A new feature ships, or a new module launches, and the go-to-market plan is a press release and a slide deck. Pricing is unclear. Sales does not know how to position the new capability against competitor alternatives. Customer Success has no playbook for introducing it to the install base. The launch generates a spike of interest and then fades because the revenue system was never configured to convert that interest into pipeline and revenue.

Product and GTM are coupled in reality but decoupled in operations. That gap costs you revenue on every launch.

3. Implementation Teams Carrying Revenue Risk but Not Measured on It.

In hospitality tech, the implementation phase is where LTV lives or dies. A slow or poorly managed rollout does not just frustrate the customer. It delays time-to-value, compresses the window for expansion, and often triggers churn before the first renewal.

Yet implementation teams are typically measured on project completion timelines and support ticket volume, not on revenue outcomes like time-to-value, first-year expansion, or renewal probability. They carry enormous revenue risk without the metrics, incentives, or system integration to manage it.

4. Data Exists Everywhere. Insight Exists Nowhere.

The CRM has pipeline data. The marketing platform has engagement data. The product has usage telemetry. Finance has billing and churn data. Implementation has onboarding timelines. Customer Success has health scores. All of this data exists. Very little of it is connected.

When the CEO asks, “Why did we miss the quarter?” the answer requires stitching together fragments from six different systems, and it still comes back incomplete. Without an intelligence layer that connects revenue signals across the full customer lifecycle, leadership is making decisions based on departmental snapshots, not system-level truth.

5. Customer Success Measured on Support Tickets, Not Expansion Velocity.

Customer Success becomes a reactive support function instead of a proactive growth engine. The team is measured on response times, resolution rates, and NPS scores. None of these metrics are bad, but none of them drive revenue.

Expansion revenue, upsell velocity, and multi-property rollout acceleration are where Customer Success creates the most value in hospitality tech. When the CS team is not measured on these outcomes, not equipped with expansion playbooks, and not integrated into the revenue system, the company leaves its most capital-efficient growth lever untouched.

What a Designed Growth System Looks Like

If disconnected teams running disconnected playbooks is the failure mode, the alternative is not better coordination. It is deliberate architecture. A growth system that is designed, not assembled.

I think about the growth system in five interconnected layers or sub-systems.

The Demand System

This is how you create awareness and generate qualified interest. Not MQLs. Not raw leads. Qualified interest from accounts that match your ideal customer profile and show genuine buying signals. The Demand System includes content, campaigns, events, partnerships, and outbound, but it is measured on pipeline contribution and pipeline quality, not vanity volume.

The Conversion System

This is how qualified interest becomes committed revenue. It includes your sales process, deal qualification frameworks, multi-stakeholder engagement sequences, pricing and packaging, and proposal and negotiation workflows. The key shift: the Conversion System is designed for the buyer’s decision process, not your internal sales stages. In hospitality tech, that means accounting for technical evaluation, integration assessment, procurement review, and cross-functional sign-off.

The Delivery System

This is how signed deals become live, value-generating customers. Implementation, onboarding, configuration, training, and go-live support all sit here. The Delivery System is measured on time-to-value and first-value milestones, not project completion dates. The difference matters. A project can be “complete” while the customer is still not realizing the value they bought.

The Expansion System

This is how live customers grow. Upsell, cross-sell, multi-property rollout, deeper feature adoption, and referral all live here. The Expansion System is where the most capital-efficient revenue lives, and in hospitality tech, where portfolios of properties create natural expansion paths, it should be the fastest-growing component of the engine.

The Intelligence Layer

This is the connective tissue. The Intelligence Layer aggregates data across all four sub-systems, identifies friction, surfaces opportunities, and enables leadership to make decisions based on system-level visibility, not departmental reports. It includes unified reporting, lifecycle analytics, forecasting models, and the operational dashboards that RevOps builds and maintains.

RevOps sits across all five layers. It is not a department that owns one piece of the engine. It is the integration fabric that ensures the systems talk to each other, that handoffs are clean, that data flows end to end, and that the incentive structures across teams are aligned to system-level outcomes rather than local metrics.

This is a fundamentally different operating model from the traditional structure where Marketing, Sales, and CS each run their own tooling, their own reporting, and their own success criteria. A designed growth system treats revenue as an integrated output of an integrated process, not a sum of departmental contributions.

A Diagnostic for Leadership Teams

If any of the failure patterns above felt familiar, here is a set of diagnostic questions designed for board-level and executive team discussions. These are not operational questions. They are architectural questions, meant to surface whether your revenue engine is designed to scale or simply assembled to function.

Can we trace revenue friction to a specific system constraint? When a deal stalls or a customer churns, can you identify the structural bottleneck, or does the post-mortem default to blaming individual performance? If you cannot pinpoint the constraint, you are guessing at solutions.
Where does accountability break between teams? Map your customer lifecycle from first touch to renewal. Where are the handoffs? Who owns the transition between Marketing and Sales, between Sales and Implementation, between Implementation and Customer Success? If those boundaries are fuzzy, revenue leaks through them.
If we doubled demand tomorrow, where would the system break? This is a stress test for your architecture. If your Demand System suddenly produced twice the qualified pipeline, could your Conversion System handle it? Could your Delivery System onboard the resulting customers without collapsing? The first place the system breaks is your binding constraint.
What is our system’s throughput constraint? Borrowing from the Theory of Constraints: every system has a bottleneck that governs its maximum output. Do you know what yours is? Is it lead quality? Sales capacity? Implementation bandwidth? Expansion capability? Until you identify the constraint, every optimization is a guess.
Are our teams measured on system outcomes or departmental metrics? If Marketing is measured on MQLs, Sales on bookings, and CS on ticket resolution, you have three teams optimizing three different objectives. A designed system aligns incentives around shared outcomes: pipeline quality, time-to-value, net revenue retention, and expansion velocity.
Do we have a single, unified view of the customer lifecycle? Not a dashboard that aggregates departmental reports. A genuine end-to-end view that connects demand generation to conversion to delivery to expansion to renewal. If this does not exist, your leadership team is navigating with a partial map.
When did we last redesign our revenue architecture, not just reorganize the team? Reorganizations shuffle people. Redesigns change the underlying system: the processes, data flows, handoff protocols, and measurement frameworks that govern how revenue is created. If you have never done the latter, you are running an inherited system that was not designed for your current scale or market.

These questions are uncomfortable. That is the point. If your leadership team cannot answer them with specificity and confidence, you have found the starting line for the work that matters most.

Revenue is an output. System design is the lever.

Is ABM the Trick That Hospitality Tech Growth Teams Have Been Missing? | by Hannah Bailey | How to Build a Growth System | Medium

Hannah — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The best enterprise sellers in hospitality tech already run ABM. They call it something else, or they call it nothing at all. But watch how they work: they spend weeks mapping the stakeholder landscape at a target hotel group before the first outreach. They know the CIO sits at corporate but the property operations director has veto power at the asset level.

They build multi-threaded relationships slowly and deliberately. And then, eighteen months later, they close a deal worth more than some marketing teams generate in qualified pipeline across a full year.

The rest of the growth team watches this and wonders what the secret is.

There is no secret. There is a method. ABM is what happens when you stop leaving that method inside the heads of your two best closers and build it into the operating system of your entire go-to-market team.

The Hospitality Tech Sales Cycle Breaks Every Standard Playbook

If you have sold technology into enterprise hotel groups, you already know this. The buying process in hospitality technology is not a funnel. It is a committee, spread across multiple levels of an organization, operating on timelines measured in quarters, not months.

A typical enterprise B2B purchase now involves 13 stakeholders, according to Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying report. For a property management system or revenue management platform rolling out across a major hotel brand, the committee is often larger. You are navigating brand-level technology leadership, regional operations, revenue management, procurement, legal, ownership groups, and sometimes individual general managers who have genuine influence over whether a pilot converts into a full rollout.

Gartner’s research on the B2B buying journey adds an uncomfortable data point: buyers spend only 17% of their total purchasing time meeting with potential vendors. That time is split across every supplier they are evaluating. The relationship and reputation you have built before the formal evaluation process begins matters more than anything that happens in the demo room.

This is the environment. MQL-driven funnels, lead scoring built around form fills and webinar attendance, spray-and-pray outbound — these are not just ineffective here, they actively damage your position. They signal that you do not understand how enterprise hospitality decisions actually get made.

What Top Performers Already Know

Spend time with the highest-performing sellers in any hospitality tech company and you find the same behavioral patterns repeating. They are not waiting for marketing to send them a hot lead. They are researching target accounts six to twelve months before any active buying signal appears. They attend HITEC and industry events not to collect badge scans but to deepen specific relationships with specific people at accounts they have already decided to pursue.

They know the difference between a brand mandate and a property-level decision. They know which accounts are in active system replacement cycles and which are locked in for another three years. They personalize their outreach by account, not by persona.

When the deal finally moves, they win not because of a better deck but because they have been building credibility with the people who matter for longer than any competitor has.

This is ABM. Instinctive, informal, living entirely inside one person’s workflow. The company around them has no visibility into it, no way to support it systematically, and no ability to replicate it when that seller moves on.

ABM Is Not a New Playbook. It Is the Formalization of the Old One.

This distinction matters, because one of the most common failure modes when hospitality tech companies explore ABM is framing it as a radical transformation. Something new and complex requiring an overhaul of the whole revenue operation.

It is not. ABM is the codification of what your best people already do, extended to the whole team, with consistent data, aligned marketing support, and shared account intelligence.

The numbers from organizations that have studied this at scale are striking. ITSMA, which has tracked ABM adoption since the methodology had a name, reports that 87% of marketers who measure ABM describe it delivering higher ROI than any other approach. Companies running structured ABM programs report a 48% increase in revenue per account. Demandbase research points to a 171% increase in average deal size when marketing and sales align around named accounts.

These numbers make more sense when you understand the mechanism. ABM concentrates resources on the accounts most likely to buy, aligns marketing activity to the specific deal contexts those accounts are in, and creates a compounding effect as the account learns to associate your brand with genuine relevance. For hospitality tech companies operating in a world where the total addressable market is a few thousand enterprise accounts, and where 80% of revenue often comes from a fraction of that number, concentrated account investment is not a strategy preference. It is the only approach that makes economic sense.

The Compounding Advantage Most Teams Miss

Here is what changes when the entire growth team runs this way, not only the top one or two closers. Feedback loops tighten. When marketing is aligned to the same named accounts that sales is working, every content asset, every event conversation, every piece of thought leadership gets pressure-tested against whether it moves specific accounts forward. Generic content dies quickly in this environment. Relevant content compounds.

Institutional knowledge stops leaking. Account intelligence stops living in one seller’s CRM notes and starts becoming a shared organizational resource. When someone leaves, or when an account needs a new coverage model, the groundwork is not lost with them.

Win rates improve across the board. Buyers who engage with a vendor’s content consistently before the formal evaluation begins are significantly more likely to land that vendor on the shortlist. When marketing is consistently reaching the right people at the right accounts with credible, relevant content, sales walks into the process with a structural advantage.

The top closer who already operates this way is not threatened by ABM. They tend to be the first to see the value, because what they have been doing in isolation finally gets the organizational support it deserves.

Signals You Are Ready to Make the Shift

ABM does not require a perfect tech stack or a restructured team before you start. But there are markers that suggest a hospitality tech company is at the right inflection point.

Your win rates on named target accounts already outperform your average win rate across the board. Your best sellers are running multi-threaded deals almost by default. Marketing is generating volume but struggling to show pipeline attribution. You can name the 100 to 200 accounts you would most want to win over the next two years.

If two or three of those resonate, the infrastructure question is secondary. The first move is alignment: getting sales and marketing looking at the same list, with shared definitions of what “engaged” and “in-market” mean for the accounts that matter most. The rest of the architecture, intent data, account scoring, personalized content by tier, expands from there.

The Real Question

Enterprise hospitality sales has always rewarded patient, multi-stakeholder, account-centric selling. The companies winning the largest deals are not the ones with the loudest brand or the most aggressive outbound. They are the ones whose growth teams operate the way their best individual sellers have always operated.

ABM is not a bet on a new approach. It is an investment in making your best approach the default one.

If your current motion is not delivering, the answer is rarely more volume. It is more precision. ABM is where that precision lives.

Follow for more on B2B growth strategy in enterprise tech. Questions, disagreements, and examples from the field welcome in the comments.