From Sellers to Strategic Partners: Aligning Teams for Smarter Account Planning

The sales professional’s role has evolved significantly; customers aren’t just looking for products, they’re seeking strategic partners who offer deep insights and collaboratively develop tailored solutions. This transformation requires sellers to take the role of trusted consultants – a shift that not only elevates customer service but also significantly boosts the go-to-market (GTM) team’s overall effectiveness. 

Yet recent Mural research uncovered a paradox: While 85% of GTM teams are confident in their best practices, that same percentage reported ongoing alignment challenges. This reveals that teams are trying to collaborate but aren’t achieving the deep, shared understanding needed for genuine alignment. 

This GTM misalignment hinders consultative selling and often drives missed revenue, frustrated teams, and wasted investment. Conversely, when teams are aligned, the impact is transformative: You see faster market entry, more qualified leads flowing through the pipeline, accelerated deal cycles, and, ultimately, better win rates. This powerful alignment is built through shared understanding, clear goals, and a visual plan everyone can see, contribute to, and act upon. 

Here I’ll address three ways sales and marketing teams can become true consultants by getting (and staying) on the same page from day one.

Develop a Shared Understanding of the Customer

Sales and marketing may bring different perspectives to the table, but they’re fundamentally united by a focus on the customer and solving their problems. When both teams work together to define success through the customer’s eyes, they build a powerful foundation for alignment. One of the first steps to creating alignment between sales and marketing is identifying the ideal customer profile (ICP).

An effective ICP goes beyond surface-level demographics and identifies the shared traits of your best-fit customers – those most likely to buy, be retained, and get long-term value from your product. This profile should capture not only “who” your ideal buyers are, but also their core pain points, decision-making behaviors, all stakeholders involved throughout the journey, and the signals that indicate purchasing readiness.

To build this alignment, bring marketing and sales together to co-create a clear, visual customer journey map. Use insights from both recent wins and losses, and ensure every relevant team’s perspective is included. This can help direct a conversation between marketing and sales that creates your targeting and why. A deep, shared understanding helps GTM teams further refine their strategy. 

For example, through this process, you may uncover that online demos often fail to convert due to a missing call to action. This shared insight empowers marketing to revise demo assets and prompts sales to refine their follow-up approach – ensuring that prospects have a seamless path to becoming satisfied customers.

Bring Customers in Early to Co-Create Solutions

According to our research, 73% of GTM teams report ineffective customer engagement. Too often, involving the customer early is skipped or delegated to a single team. That can cause other teams to work from assumptions they made about the customer and can lead to last-minute scrambling to incorporate late-stage customer feedback along with delayed GTM timelines. 

Once a comprehensive understanding of the customer is established, the next crucial step for evolving from seller to trusted consultant is to engage customers early in the process. By inviting customers to be active participants in the product development process, sellers can help GTM teams directly address specific pain points from the get-go and tailor solutions that resonate. 

Bringing customers in even earlier to help finalize your sales team’s impact statement – and therefore confirm alignment with your customer on how your solution ties to and addresses the customer’s need – will further grow your partnership.

Co-creation ultimately builds stronger customer trust and retention by positioning sellers as indispensable advisors, and it also speeds up the GTM timeline due to improved alignment between the customer and your GTM team as a whole.  

Foster Seamless Knowledge Sharing Across the Organization

Our research shows that making the work visible can help teams avoid alignment breakdown. In fact, 81% of GTM teams said visuals drive greater alignment and efficiency. Not surprisingly, visual learning tops the list as the preferred learning style among team members.

This underscores the need for teams to move beyond scattered DMs, static docs, and isolated decks. Instead, adopting a shared visual plan – such as a collaborative board, digital canvas, or timeline – clarifies what needs to get done, who owns each responsibility, and when tasks are due. This visibility brings structure and accountability to the GTM motion, keeping everyone on track. 

Leveraging a central collaboration platform along the way allows cross-functional teams to iterate and maintain one source of truth as the plan progresses and evolves. When plans, priorities, and ownership are always visible, teams can seamlessly share knowledge, minimize redundant efforts, and spend more time analyzing results and crafting customer-centric solutions. It makes the plan real, keeps it visible to everyone at any time, and helps teams course-correct before things go off-track – allowing GTM to happen faster.

GTM Alignment for Sales Success 

The evolution of sellers into consultants is not merely a desirable outcome but a necessity for modern GTM success. This transformation hinges on intentional alignment across sales, marketing, and R&D teams, which can be met through a shared understanding of the customer, early customer engagement, and a collaborative tool for cross-functional knowledge sharing and feedback.

This synchronized approach allows sellers to truly act as consultants, fostering deeper customer relationships and driving GTM success that endures. As a result, your teams will get to market faster, earn more qualified leads, accelerate deal cycles, and have better win rates.

Bill Dwoinen is the chief revenue officer at Mural, with over two decades of award-winning sales and sales leadership experience at large sales organizations, including Slack, Salesforce, and LinkedIn.