In today’s modern era, where customer expectations are rising, new technology is coming out every day, and data is living among disparate systems, the key to achieving sustainable growth is proving to be about how your teams, data, and technology are connected and coordinated across the customer lifecycle.
Why? Internal misalignment among people, processes, and technology creates leaky funnels, slows down pipeline, erodes customer trust, leads to churn, and decreases customer lifetime value. And when 80% of customers say that their experience is as important as the product itself (cropink.com, 2025), it’s clear that a negative customer journey will stunt your growth.
However, the challenge isn’t merely a “culture fix”. It takes strategic planning and coordinated execution to align your marketing, sales, and customer success teams across their processes, data, technology, and analytics through a customer-first lens.
To capture the state of this challenge, the 2025 Trilliad Sustainable Growth Study surveyed 350+ senior growth professionals and provides a playbook for how top performers structure teams, connect workflows, and measure what matters. Below are the 12 most critical statistics that should inform how you consider shaping your strategy for sustainable growth in today’s market.
Growth is challenging, but it’s easier for integrated teams
Let’s level set, growth isn’t easy. When asked to assess the current sentiment around growth, go-to-market (GTM) leaders expressed that it’s becoming more challenging, but the ones who did find it to be easier were the ones who had integrated or joint leadership among their GTM teams.
- 62% of leaders say growth is getting harder.
- This feeling is widespread, but the study shows the problem isn’t just external. The single greatest internal roadblock is the lack of coordination between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success, cited by 44% of respondents. Confirming that alignment is a key determining factor of your growth.
- Organizations with “Integrated Leadership” are 3x more likely to find growth easier.
- Integrated leadership means your Marketing, Sales, and CS functions are managed jointly around a single set of KPIs. Only 22% of organizations have adopted this high-performing model. If your leaders are held accountable to siloed metrics, rather than a shared goal, your teams will be driven toward optimizing in service of their own function, rather than in service of their customer, or to each other.
This is a mindset shift that needs to happen internally. Aligning around a shared vision of what the ideal customer experience should look like, around your revenue goals, and around the key metrics to be tracking to get there, becomes the north star that all three teams are marching toward to drive growth easier.
Each department may have its own alignment blind spots
Having cross-team alignment is critical to your growth, but a part of what might be standing in the way of getting aligned in the first place is that some teams may be feeling the disconnects more than others and therefore may not be seeing it as a priority.
- 54% of Sales teams reported that they feel coordination pain, while only 33% of Customer Success (CS) teams feel the same.
- This “pain gap” points directly to a process problem. The broken customer handoff occurs within your systems, and Sales, as the team closest to customer revenue expansion, is on the front line of that failure.
- CS teams rate their organizational coordination significantly higher than other functions (8.33 vs. 7.36 for Sales).
- This finding suggests a potential cross-team collaboration blind spot. CS teams may be achieving high internal cohesion, but this often happens in isolation from broader GTM processes.
Marketing, sales, and customer success may all have their own internal thoughts on how well aligned they are cross-functionally, but this can lead to pain for the other departments, and worse, for your customer. Therefore, it’s critical when approaching alignment conversations to get all three teams in a room to think holistically about the customer experience and the shared metrics to track performance.
The customer isn’t thinking to themselves: Am I in a marketing experience, a sales, or a customer success experience? They just know that they’re having an experience with the brand as a whole. Therefore, if customers aren’t thinking about your organization in terms of siloed departments throughout their journey, you shouldn’t be either.
The alignment differentiator: going beyond planning
When it comes to aligning marketing, sales, and customer success, these teams may be strategically aligned, but the question is, are they actually executing it? The data shows that talking about alignment isn’t the same as doing it.
- Only 27% of organizations say their teams are “fully integrated” across strategy, KPIs, planning, and execution, and 1 in 3 admit that their alignment stops at the planning phase.
- Meaning the other 70%+ have gaps in how they are making alignment happen in their organization. Getting all your growth teams in a room to talk holistically about the customer journey and align on shared metrics is critical, but then there needs to be the next step of actually acting on the alignment strategy. Bringing this alignment into the technology that your GTM teams use daily is critical to going beyond the planning phase and achieving sustained collaboration.
- Twice as many high-performing organizations as opposed to struggling ones (48% vs. 23%) are actually acting on their alignment strategy.
- The key differentiator is action. High-performing organizations prioritize going beyond the planning phase and actively executing it. True integration is a unified process and a single source of truth built into your technology, not a recurring meeting.
Full customer journey data visibility is a must for seamless experiences
One of the ways to gauge your level of alignment is to approach the buying process through the eyes of your customer. If your customer is having to repeat themselves, waiting to be responded to, sharing their frustrations, or not being guided toward the best purchase, or their next best purchase, chances are there’s misalignment in your organization. A big piece of this is your data. Disconnected data prevents seamless experiences.
- Only 12% of organizations rate their Customer Experience (CX) maturity as “Advanced.”
- When your data is living in different systems and no one has a complete view of the customer journey, it can seem impossible to have an advanced CX—and with customers now rating the experience to be just as important as the product itself, teams can’t afford anything less than an advanced experience.
- High-growth organizations are 50% more likely to use data across the “full customer journey.”
- While 40% only use data for acquisition. The best teams are building their strategy around retention and expansion, not just new logos. To do this, marketing, sales, and customer success need visibility into the critical touchpoints happening throughout the entire customer journey.
- How else is marketing supposed to know when to tee up a cross-sell campaign that triggers the customer to raise their hand and expand their relationship?
- How else is sales and customer success supposed to know when an account is at risk and act proactively to ensure retention and reduce churn?
- While 40% only use data for acquisition. The best teams are building their strategy around retention and expansion, not just new logos. To do this, marketing, sales, and customer success need visibility into the critical touchpoints happening throughout the entire customer journey.
Sustainable growth requires moving past a “first-half” strategy to a truly “full journey” approach and this includes with your data how your technology is integrated to support this.
The path forward: aligning for sustainable growth
The data from the 2025 Trilliad Sustainable Growth Study confirms that alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success is critical to driving sustainable growth. However, this cannot stop at the planning phase, but needs to be executed in your technology and data strategy throughout the whole customer journey, not just at the acquisition stage.
Prioritizing aligning your people, processes, and technology will deliver a smoother customer experience, leading to stronger brand loyalty, increased retention, and ultimately growth for your business.
If you’d like support with aligning your marketing, sales, and customer success teams across your customer lifecycle, reach out to the Sercante team. Our experts will listen to understand your goals, discover your friction points, and help develop a strategy as well as set up scalable processes for successful execution inside your data, technology, and analytics.
