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If Your Sales Kickoff Still Feels Like 2015, You’re Already Losing 2026
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This week’s research note includes:
GTM Research: Stop Running Sales Kickoffs Like It Is 2015
GTM OS Certified Partner Spotlight: Ariana Shannon
Analyst Note: Clari and Salesloft Merger
Events: How to build a fractional business in 2026
Research: Stop Running Sales Kickoffs Like It Is 2015
Most sales kickoffs fail because they try to motivate people before they align them.
Teams get charged up, but they do not walk out with a shared plan. That gap shows up fast in missed targets, weak messaging, and a slow Q1.
If you want your 2026 plan to hold, you need a different frame.
You need a Go-to-Market kickoff.
Instead of an old-fashioned sales rally, you need a company-level alignment moment that explains how you plan to win, who owns what, and how the motions fit together to create and keep revenue.
GTM is bigger than just sales. It also includes marketing, CS, product, and RevOps. Sales cannot function without those other teams, so the idea of doing a kickoff without them is short-sighted.
But here is the tension. SKO is usually owned by sales. Most sales leaders do not control the full GTM agenda. They cannot dictate what marketing, CS, product, or RevOps bring to the room. So they default to what they own. Product updates. Comp plans. Motivation. The result is an event that does not reflect how revenue is actually created.
You can fix GTM this without restructuring the org.
Ask your peers in the other GTM departments for four things.
One slide on how their team supports the 2026 motion.
One clear commitment on what they will deliver for the field.
One ask they have of sales.
One risk they see that could block revenue.
This gives you alignment and shared ownership without politics. It also makes your kickoff a real GTM event, even if sales still runs point.
Now build the kickoff your team actually needs.
Rename the event (if you can) and reset expectations
Call it a GTM Kickoff or a Company Kickoff. This signals that the plan belongs to the whole org. It changes the tone immediately. You are not launching a rally.
You are launching an operating year.
Show the real plan, not the wish list
Show how marketing, sales, CS, product, and RevOps work together to create pipeline, move deals, and deliver value.
Use the eight questions. Connect targets to capacity. Connect product bets to actual buyer problems. Connect customer outcomes to retention and expansion.
Your teams should leave knowing the plan, not guessing at it.
Bring real voices into the room
Have a customer share why they bought, where they hesitated, and what value they received.
Don’t waste any more money bringing in a business school professor who wrote a motivational book or hosts a podcast. Bring in a speaker who has built and led a company at your size.
Someone who talks about real decisions, not abstract motivation.
Force clarity through Q & A
Run a live Q & A with the entire exec team. No slides. No canned talking points. Hard questions build trust. Trust drives execution. If you have crickets when you give your team the opportunity to ask questions, you have a problem.
Set expectations
Tell the field exactly what will change. Tell managers how they will be measured. Tell marketing and CS how their work connects to revenue. People cannot execute a plan they cannot describe.
Build the cadence that makes the plan stick
Treat kickoff as the starting line. Run monthly or quarterly GTM reviews. Look at leading indicators. Revisit assumptions. Adjust messaging and capacity. A strategy stays alive only if you keep touching it.
Here’s some help on how to do a quarterly GTM check in. (Steal this!)
Do:
Frame it as a company-level event.
Share a unified GTM strategy with clear owners and KPIs.
Bring in customer insight and real operator experience.
Build a yearlong cadence that reinforces the plan.
Do Not:
Do not run a sales only event. That is where misalignment begins.
Do not let the CEO riff. Clear narratives matter.
Do not drown people in features. Focus on what moves deals.
Do not set goals that ignore capacity.
Do not skip role plays.
Do not let the plan evaporate by March.
Here is the audit question that tells you if your kickoff worked:
Can your reps explain your 2026 GTM motion in two sentences by the end of kickoff?
If not, you do not have alignment. You have an event.
If you want your team to win next year, your kickoff has one job. Create a shared understanding of how the company plans to grow and what every person will do to make that real.
If you get that part right, everything else gets easier. Execution speeds up. Messaging tightens. Pipeline quality improves. Managers coach with clarity instead of guesswork.
If you want help shaping that narrative or want a speaker who can ground your team in real GTM strategy, Bryan and Sangram do this work every week with B2B companies (and of course they literally wrote the book on GTM strategy).
They can anchor your kickoff in a clear GTM plan, answer the hard questions, and give your team a practical path to execution.
(Already booked at eight KO’s in Q1, so get on the calendar soon!)
Certified Partner Spotlight: Ariana Shannon
Strategic Brand, Demand, and GTM Leadership for B2B SaaS
When your brand isn’t breaking through, your deals stall, and your competitors keep winning, Ariana Shannon is the partner who helps you turn it around.
With 10+ years of experience in B2B SaaS, Ariana brings a rare blend of GTM strategy, design thinking, and marketing execution to help companies clarify their positioning, accelerate pipeline, and show up with confidence. Through fractional leadership, GTM workshops, and strategic brand and demand engagements, she turns go-to-market confusion into measurable momentum.
When to Work with Ariana:
Your POV isn’t differentiated, and it’s costing you deals
You’re ready to move upmarket but still serve smaller accounts
Competitors are consistently capturing market share and getting in earlier
You need brand and demand strategy that’s rooted in GTM execution, not fluff
Ariana brings more than strategy. She builds clarity, trust, and GTM alignment that sticks.
Learn more: Ariana Shannon Partner Page →
If you’d like to be a certified GTM Partner like Ariana and more than 50 others, we’d love to talk to you about how to make that happen.
Analyst Note: Clari and Salesloft Close Merger, Create New Predictive Revenue Player
Clari and Salesloft have officially closed their merger, forming one of the largest combined platforms in the revenue technology market. The company now positions itself as the first end to end predictive revenue system, with a clear bet on AI, data scale, and tighter orchestration across the entire go to market motion.
Key points GTM leaders should know
Scale and footprint. The combined company now serves more than 4,000 customers and manages an estimated $10 trillion in revenue signals across major enterprises such as Adobe, IBM, 3M, and Zoom. This scale gives them an unusual view of engagement, deal progression, and risk patterns across industries.
Aggressive AI investment. Leadership announced a plan to double R and D, signaling an accelerated push into Revenue AI. The thesis is simple. They believe neither company could have built an enterprise grade system fast enough alone.
Data advantage. With more than 10 billion revenue interactions and over a trillion data signals flowing through the platform, the merged entity is betting that data breadth plus sales engagement depth gives them a defensible edge in training reliable models.
New leadership. Steve Cox steps in as CEO. Cox has long experience leading SaaS transformations and driving growth through M and A, which signals a focus on integration, scale, and category creation.
Category framing. The company introduced a new term, the Predictive Revenue System. Their vision looks like a GPS for revenue, consolidating human and agent interactions across marketing, sales, and CS to surface risk, prescribe actions, and drive coordinated execution.
Why this matters
This is the clearest attempt yet to fuse sales engagement, pipeline intelligence, and execution management into a single operating layer. For GTM teams, the merger raises real questions about platform consolidation, vendor overlap, AI readiness, and the speed at which revenue operations roles will need to adapt.
The company will outline more of its roadmap at a webinar on December 10.
Last EVENT of the Year:
Fractional Leaders, This One Is Worth Your Time
Sarah Allen Short, a GTM OS Certified Partner, is hosting a live session on December 15 where she will share her first full year as a fractional, including real numbers, wins, mistakes, and what the work actually looks like day to day.
She did this once before and over 300 people signed up, so she offered to do it again.
She made more this year than she did as a CMO and is opening the entire playbook with no pitch attached.
If you are fractional or even fractional curious, this is a rare chance to cut months off your learning curve.
(this is LIVE only and may not be recorded due to lot of personal info)
Love,
Sangram and Bryan
p.s. Access GTM University | Hire GTM OS Certified Partners | Read Fractional Friday
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