If there’s one pattern we see inside almost every client we work with — from scaleups to €200M enterprise teams — it’s this:
The GTM strategy isn’t failing because it’s wrong. It’s failing because the system makes it impossible to work.
On paper, everything looks elegant. Clear ICP. Crisp messaging. Smart channel mix. A tidy funnel that would make any board happy.
But strategy doesn’t collapse on paper. It collapses where behaviour meets incentives — and that’s where most organisations are quietly operating with structural misalignment baked into the foundations.
The Hidden GTM Tax: Competing Incentives
Let’s start with the part nobody wants to say in the leadership meeting:
You do not run a unified go-to-market team. You run three competing micro-economies inside one logo.
- Marketing optimises for reach.
- Sales optimises for revenue.
- Customer Success optimises for stability.
- Leadership optimises for dashboards.
None of these incentives are “wrong.” They’re just incompatible.
And when incentives collide, alignment becomes a slogan, not an operating reality.
Why GTM Breaks the Moment It Hits the Real World
Behavioural economics gives us a simple rule: People optimise for what’s measured, not what’s intended.
So what happens?
- Marketing celebrates 3,000 MQLs — even if pipeline is flat.
- Sales pulls any deal over the line at quarter-end — even bad-fit ones.
- Success absorbs the consequences — and gets blamed for churn.
- Leadership reviews dashboards that tell a cleaner story than reality.
You don’t have a strategy problem. You have a behaviour problem created by a misaligned incentive structure.
It’s not dysfunction. It’s design.
Proof: Behaviour Changes the Second Incentives Change
I’ll give you an example from a client transformation we led recently.
They had spent 12 months rewriting ICP docs, optimising funnels, running workshops, buying tech. All useful — none effective.
The performance breakthrough came from one change: Success was incentivised based on expansion opportunity identification — not just retention.
Within 90 days, expansion revenue surpassed new business. Not because talent changed. Because incentives did.
It reinforced a truth we see over and over: Your GTM is the behaviour your incentives produce — nothing more, nothing less.
The Incentive Audit Every CMO, CRO, and CS Leader Should Run
If you want to understand why your GTM performance feels unpredictable, start here:
- Does Marketing benefit more from volume than commercial impact?
- Does Sales get rewarded for deals Success cannot sustain?
- Does CS inherit pipeline issues but carry the retention quota?
- Does Leadership reward forecast cleanliness over market truth?
If even one of these is true, you’re rewarding behaviour that contradicts your strategy.
When incentives don’t match intentions, the GTM machine works against itself — quietly, consistently, and expensively.
The Actual Job of a Modern GTM Leader
The most effective GTM executives we work with share a trait: They understand that strategy is the story; incentives are the steering wheel.
They redesign how their organisation rewards value creation, not vanity performance. They build operating systems where:
- Marketing is incentivised on contribution, not confusion.
- Sales is rewarded for sustainable revenue, not quarter-end acrobatics.
- Success wins when customers win — not when they firefight bad-fit accounts.
They don’t ask teams to “align.” They design alignment into the economic model.
Why This Matters: Incentives Determine the Trajectory
When incentives align, three things happen almost immediately:
- Velocity increases because handoff friction drops.
- Forecasting stabilises because behaviour stabilises.
- Pipeline compounds because every function pulls in the same direction.
And when incentives misalign? The GTM engine develops micro-frictions everywhere: bad-fit deals, avoidable churn, inaccurate forecasting, bloated CAC, and disjointed execution.
The Call to Action: Fix the System, Not the Symptoms
Most organisations keep rewriting strategy decks, revisiting ICPs, rebuilding messaging, and refreshing funnels.
But until the incentives change, nothing else will.
Your GTM isn’t broken. Your incentive system is miscalibrated.
Fix the incentives, and strategy finally works as intended — in the real world, not just the workshop room.
If you’re unsure where your misalignment sits, start with a diagnostic. At Wanted.Berlin, this is often the first step we run with leadership teams because misaligned incentives are the hidden tax on growth. Once you surface them, everything becomes solvable.
The GTM problem isn’t execution. It’s economics — behavioural economics.