The failure mode is a good session that changes nothing. Everyone leaves understanding each other better, and behaves identically next week, because nobody's incentive moved.
Design the session around artefacts, not conversation.
Who is in the room
One decision-maker per function: marketing, sales development, sales, customer success. Plus one or two practitioners, because leaders describe how the process should work and practitioners know how it does.
Half a day. Anyone who cannot commit to changing a number should not be there.
Open by surfacing the real disagreement
Ten minutes, silent, separate. Everyone writes their own answer to:
- What is a qualified meeting?
- What is our ICP, including who we decline?
- What number are you measured on this quarter?
Then read them aloud.
This works because people assume alignment exists until they hear four different definitions of a qualified meeting read consecutively. It converts an abstract complaint into a specific, fixable gap in the first half hour.
Artefact 1: one ICP, with disqualifiers
Not a persona. The account-level definition, including the exclusions, which is the half usually missing.
If the room cannot agree, that is the meeting. Everything downstream depends on it, and a session that only achieves this has still been worth the half day.
Format in the ICP development workshop.
Artefact 2: stage definitions, signed
MQL, SQL, qualified meeting, opportunity. Write what each means, what evidence is required, and who decides.
The evidence part is what makes it stick. "Has a named problem the prospect described in their own words" is checkable. "Shows genuine interest" is not.
Artefact 3: one shared number per seam
The artefact that actually changes behaviour, and the one most workshops skip.
| Seam | Shared number |
|---|---|
| Marketing to SDR | Meetings held from marketing-sourced leads |
| SDR to AE | Meeting-held rate, and next-step rate |
| AE to CS | First-year retention on that AE's accounts |
Both sides of each seam carry it. Expect resistance here, and expect it to be the most productive argument of the day: it is where alignment stops being free.
Close with owners and a date
Each artefact gets a named owner and a review date. An unowned definition drifts back within a quarter.
Book the thirty-minute review now, in the room, while everyone is present.
Where this sits
This is Motion and Measurement in the Tenbound Pipeline Architecture Standard. The argument behind the format is in why GTM alignment matters: misalignment is a measurement problem, so only the third artefact fixes it.