Coordination failure

Coordination failure is the pre-event failure mode of in-person GTM, in which sales and marketing fail to agree on which accounts matter, who should engage them, and what the plan is before the show.

It’s the first of 3 failure modes across an event. They show up at companies between $5M and $500M ARR, and your event operators and your CMO both feel them.

Capture failure follows during your event, and follow-up failure after it. Read the FieldXM thesis, which tells them as 3 acts.

How does it show up?

• Your target lists live in spreadsheets that stay inside one team.
• Your reps skip the kickoff doc, then message marketing with the questions it answered.
• Reps who can’t see the reasons behind a target list distrust it, re-research their own accounts for weeks, and start outreach late.
• High-fit accounts arrive at the show before your reps have worked them, a coverage gap.

“They didn’t have strong confidence in the target account list… it took them weeks… then everybody already has plans for that night.”

A director of performance marketing at a B2B software company around $25M ARR

Why does it recur?

Your marketing team owns the event’s outcome. Sales, SDRs, executives, and customer success cover the accounts, and none of them report to marketing. When that work doesn’t have a shared home, it ends up in spreadsheets, chat threads, and an operator’s memory.

Where do you find it in FieldXM?

Give sales and marketing one plan before the show. FieldXM’s account planning labels and tiers every account at the show from your own CRM fields, and shows the reasons behind each score. It assigns owners from your CRM and flags coverage gaps before your team travels.