The Last Mile: Why GTM Handoffs Make or Break Your Systems.

If you work in RevOps, GTM, or a similar space, you've probably lived this exact scenario.

You build something you're genuinely proud of. A new lead qualification system, full of early signals that your sales team has been asking for. You run the kickoff. Everyone's excited. They tell you this is exactly the data they've been waiting for, that they can finally hit quota now, that they'll know exactly what part of your product a prospect cares about before they even send an email. High fives, virtual or IRL, are shared.

Two weeks later, you check in.

Crickets.

Then, slowly, the responses trickle in.

• "I thought I'd have more time to look into this, but I didn't. I haven't used it at all."
• "I expected notifications in Slack, but they don't come there, so I don't know where to look."
• "These signals are too complicated. I'm not sure what actually matters here."
• "I think I missed the kickoff. What's this system again?"

I'm not knocking sales. I loved my sales team. But every team has different priorities, backgrounds, and skills, and what feels urgent to you in ops doesn't automatically feel urgent to them. What's most likely more urgent is the deal they need to get over the finish line before EOQ, or making sure their email and LinkedIn sequences are running as expected. In GTM ops, we often forget that our beautiful systems are not the most important piece of the sales puzzle for everyone. And unless the handoff goes well, our systems just sit in a void.

What Needs to Be True for a GTM System to Stick

Build the system with the sales team's input from the start. At the end of the day, they're the ones you're building these signals for. Figure out what's important to them and how they prefer to receive information and notifications.

Route signals to a specific person, not a queue. When a new signal comes in, it needs to already be assigned to the individual rep you want to act on it. If it's an existing account in your CRM, route it to the owner. If it's net new, round-robin it. Unowned signals get ignored because they're not a priority to anyone.

Tag them directly. Once it's routed, make sure the rep is tagged in it. Figure out if they prefer a Slack notification, email, or both. Your sales rep is probably stretched for time and doesn't have the capacity to go searching for early signals.

Give them a clear, specific CTA. Use your GTM power to help the rep figure out what to do next. "High-intent lead from Acme Corp" is not a CTA. At Replicated, we built an AI bot in Slack that would qualify the lead and, if it fit our ICP, write out a draft Apollo email sequence ready to send. That turned into a powerful CTA for the rep, and it took them less than 3 minutes to kick off a new, customized engagement to a high-potential lead.

Don't create noise. Only surface the signals that actually matter. Set a lead score threshold or define a high-signal event that's worth a notification. Let everything else run quietly in the background. If every signal triggers an alert, reps will tune all of them out, and you probably will too.

Check in often, one on one. Have regular syncs about what's working and what isn't, with individuals and with the whole team. Don't assume silence means the system is running perfectly. It might mean no one has touched it.

The Real Job

The most powerful GTM teams have sales and ops designing together from the start, not ops building in isolation and hoping for adoption. It means asking your reps what they actually need before you architect the perfect workflow. And it means accepting that the best signal in the world is worthless if it lands in a tool no one opens.

Building the system is the part that feels like the work. But getting your team to trust it, use it, and keep using it? That's the real job. Don't skip it.