Most articles, posts and comments I read seem to interpret Go-to-Market as synonymous with Sales only, and even the broadest interpretations at best include Marketing.
In reality, Go-to-Market extends across all core commercial functions that acquire, retain and grow customers: Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and, where applicable, Channel & Partnerships.
These functions are operationally interconnected.
Marketing depends on Sales to qualify market response and close the feedback loop on demand generation.
Sales depends on Marketing for visibility, positioning and qualified demand, and on Partnerships where market access, influence or delivery capabilities matter.
Customer Success depends on Sales for the context and commitments required to take over a customer successfully.
Sales depends on Customer Success for expansion signals, references and insights from existing customers.
Partnerships depend on Sales, Marketing and Customer Success to turn an ecosystem into actual commercial value - and those functions depend on partners in return.
None of the GTM-functions execute in a vacuum and ignoring their dependencies would limit the effectiveness of each individual function.
Moving to the 2nd reason why Sales alone should not be considered synonymous with Go-to-Market, more importantly, is that disregarding these aforementioned dependencies would ignore the way customers themselves perceive your organization.
A customer does not experience Marketing, Sales, Partnerships and Customer Success as separate functions. From the outside, they form one continuous, non-linear journey from initial awareness and engagement through evaluation, purchase, implementation, adoption, maintenance and, ultimately, expansion.
Every interaction contributes to the customer’s experience of the company.
The operational capabilities from inside the organization therefore need to mirror the customer journey seen from the outside, with the ability to execute, anticipate, shape and respond not only quickly, but also reliably and at scale.
The customer experiences one company, so all Go-to-Market functions need to be capable of executing as a GTM system.