Building a Unified GTM Engine: Sales Enablement Summit London 2025

What it takes to break silos, align teams, and deliver for buyers in a world where strategy often dies in the field.

At the Sales Enablement Summit 2025 in London, the panel “Building a Unified GTM Engine” brought together four senior leaders facing one of the most persistent and costly challenges in modern sales: despite best intentions, misalignment between sales, marketing, and customer success remains the biggest barrier to GTM success. Messaging is lost in translation. Handoffs create friction. Revenue growth stalls when teams don’t work to the same goals. In a marketplace where buyers expect more and time-to-value is everything, what does real cross-functional collaboration look like and how do top-performing companies make it a reality?

Panelists:

Breaking Silos: The root problem of modern GTM

It’s no secret that strategy often gets lost somewhere between the boardroom and the field. Even the best-laid GTM plans can unravel at the point of execution: marketing launches new messaging, but sales sticks to what they know; customer success hears buyer pain points that never reach product; enablement is stuck producing content no one uses. As Hive Perform’s research shows, 67% of well-formulated strategies fail because of poor execution.

The panel put it bluntly: misalignment is not a tech problem, it’s a people and process problem. And unless every part of the value chain is connected, friction and inefficiency will drag down even the most ambitious teams.

What a unified GTM engine looks like

1. True Orchestration, Not Just Meetings

Mirze Rey described her GTM role at Microsoft as “the cross-functional orchestrator” bridging the field and headquarters, ensuring product, marketing, sales, and engineering operate as a single, adaptive system. For Mirze, unification is both a system and a culture:

“I create the system around a unified GTM strategy. But I’m also the curator of culture, setting an ambitious vision and being honest that things will go wrong so we need agility and a feedback loop from sales right back to product.”

2. Single Source of Truth

Ian Matthews, leading GTM transformation at Teradata, shared how a recent re-org brought field marketing, sales, and customer success together under one CRO.

“We used to have sales, marketing, and CS in different functions. Now it’s a single, unified team, all aligned to a core set of processes and metrics. This is the only way to adapt at speed and scale.”

He emphasized that data can’t just be available, it must be trusted and actionable, with everyone working from the same dashboards and definitions.

3. Simplicity, Speed, and Scale (“The Three S’s”)

Somesh Chablani of FIS offered a concise formula for true unification: “Simplicity of structure drives innovation. Speed is everything. And you need a system that can scale.” For FIS, bringing together solution launches, enablement, RFP teams, and partner content under one operating model made a measurable difference to speed-to-market and pipeline health.

4. Customer-Driven Strategy

Daniel Silbereisen highlighted Visa’s scale of - 150 million merchants, 8,000+ financial institutions, and over 180 products worldwide. “Misalignment happens when product strategy is divorced from client and market needs. If short-term execution isn’t linked to product strategy and if feedback from customers doesn’t flow upstream, year two and three will fall apart, even if year one looks good.” His advice: align OKRs to the customer journey, not just internal goals.

Why alignment fails: real-world missteps

Panelists were candid about where even the most sophisticated companies go wrong:

Siloed KPIs: Teams optimize for different outcomes, causing cross-functional friction.
Too Much Tech, Not Enough Trust: “If you’re misaligned, AI and new tools will just amplify the chaos,” warned Mirze.
Unclear Ownership: Strategic initiatives collapse when no one has both authority and accountability across functions.
Data Overload, Action Underload: With endless dashboards, teams can drown in data without real behavioral change.

How top teams fix it

Cross-Functional, Shared Ownership: Teradata’s approach is to assign leaders from product, marketing, and sales a shared goal and shared authority and then let them solve the challenge together.
Fortnightly Rhythms: Microsoft runs tight, regular check-ins with all stakeholders, creating both structure and space for feedback.
Actionable Data: Visa and FIS both shared that success is not about the amount of data, but about giving every GTM stakeholder the right data, at the right time, to act, what one panelist called the “new KPI: keep people informed.”
Feedback Loops and Rapid Iteration: All agreed that launch is only the beginning; feedback from buyers and the field must constantly refine strategy and process.

The role of AI: multiplier or magnifier?

AI is now an unavoidable topic in GTM strategy. Visa and Microsoft are both pushing the boundaries, from agentic commerce to predictive analytics. But the panel was clear: AI will only multiply what’s already present in your culture and systems. If you have misalignment and unclear goals, AI will simply accelerate confusion. If you have clarity and a feedback-driven engine, AI will multiply your ability to respond and win.

At Hive Perform, this philosophy underpins our platform. We know AI isn’t a silver bullet. It’s the connective tissue that links strategy, pipeline, and people but only if the fundamentals of orchestration, shared context, and buyer focus are in place.

Hive Perform’s take: the new mandate for GTM teams

In a market where 4 out of 5 leaders say improving buyer experience is their top priority, and 78% of reps still miss quota, something has to change. The Sales Enablement Summit London panel didn’t just highlight the challenges, they mapped the way forward:

Make orchestration your default, not your exception.
Give every team a shared source of truth and purpose.
Use technology to reinforce, not replace, human alignment.
Build feedback loops that connect every stage of the buyer journey.

The result? Strategy no longer dies in the field. Sales, marketing, and CS move together, not apart. And the buyer feels it at every touchpoint.

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Building a Unified GTM Engine: Sales Enablement Summit London 2025 - Panel Takeaways

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