“Most companies treat go-to-market as a compliance function rather than the value engine it actually is.”
Scott Santucci
That line hit us hard when we read it. Scott is right, GTM isn’t just a series of activities to be managed; it’s a system designed to create value. Even when revenue and finance leaders agree with that philosophy, they often fail to collaborate as if it’s true.
Both departments are trying to build the same engine, but with different blueprints, different metrics, and different languages.
The result? A GTM machine that’s overfunded in some places, under-optimized in others, and misunderstood by the executives tasked with making it run.
Can you build a unified value engine if revenue and finance don’t share a common operating language?
The Boardroom Translation Problem
Every executive team knows this scene:
CRO: “Pipeline is up 40%.”
CFO: “Costs are up 40%.”
Both are technically right, and both are talking about growth, yet each hears a completely different story.
The CRO hears progress. The CFO hears pressure.
And in that silent translation gap between growth ambitions and financial discipline, most GTM strategies start to unravel.
Why the Gap Exists
Finance and sales evolved on parallel tracks that were never designed to intersect:
- Finance built for precision: managing cash flow, risk, and payback. Leaders speak in lagging indicators: margins, CAC payback, free cash flow.
- Sales built for momentum: creating activity, coverage, and conversion. Leaders speak in leading indicators: pipeline, meetings, opportunities.
The Bridge: Predictive Data as a Common Language
The solution isn’t another dashboard or meeting, but instead a shared foundation of predictive, probability-based data that both sides can operate from.
Traditionally, GTM metrics have been activity-based: how many calls, meetings, or campaigns were executed. To the finance leader this may as well be a foreign language, they don’t want to invest in effort. They want to invest in outcomes.
The solution comes when you blend data and activity, and this is where propensity modeling comes into play.
A propensity model assigns a probability of conversion to a specific action, segment, or rep.
Instead of saying, “We made 10,000 calls” a GTM leader can now say:
“This segment converts at 26%, and reps following this pattern generate 1.8x higher yield per dollar invested.”
That’s a statement a CFO can model, evaluate, and fund. Our analysis of over 100 propensity models reveals a striking pattern:
80% of closed-won deals come from high-propensity accounts.
Yet 22% of those accounts have no sales coverage in their respective GTM motions.
The GTM engine doesn't have a TAM problem, but a resource allocation problem. When you overlay propensity-to-buy with addressable spend, you get what we call a Predictable Growth Map: a ranked, data-driven picture of where your next dollar delivers the highest return.
The impact cascades across every function:
- Finance gains a capital allocation lens: “What’s the ROI of closing that 22% coverage gap?”
- Revenue leaders optimize territories by yield instead of geography.
- Marketing builds campaigns around conversion probability, not click volume.
The Strategic Implication for Operating Partners
Historically, GTM has been the hardest part of an investment thesis to model, underwrite, and control.
Propensity-based data changes that. It offers:
- Predictable visibility into revenue efficiency.
- Standardized frameworks to benchmark portfolio companies.
- Early warning signals weeks before a miss shows up in the numbers.
From Growth vs. Governance to Growth and Governance
To come full circle on Scott’s question:
If GTM is supposed to orchestrate value across investors, employees, customers, and influencers what happens when measurement systems don’t align?
You get noise instead of orchestration. Activity instead of yield. Effort without leverage.
But when revenue and finance share the same predictive framework, GTM evolves from reactive to reliable, and from a reporting function to a value engine.
At The Pipeline Group, we believe the future of growth isn’t in bigger budgets or louder sales motions. It’s in closing the gap between the story you tell and the math that proves it.
Want to see this advantage in action?
Author's Note
This article was inspired by Scott Santucci’s framework on orchestrating companies as value engines.
While Scott focuses on architecture (how companies operate as integrated systems) this piece focuses on execution (how leaders can operationalize that vision).
We’ll be teaming up with Scott for the next installment of our blog, together exploring how GTM can truly function as a value engine rather than a cost function.