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The execution gap: Why 63% of corporate strategy value never materializes

Bad ideas succeed every single day. And the strategies that fall short don’t usually fail because they’re poorly conceived. Most of the time, they simply don’t get executed.

Plays stall, signals get missed, and teams move too slowly to catch the moment. That gap between strategy and action adds up to $2 trillion in lost revenue and wasted potential.

This report from unpacks the problem and what it takes to close the gap.

Turning Plans into Pipeline

It’s the start of a new quarter. Your go-to-market (GTM) strategy is bulletproof. Your ideal customer profile is laser-focused, backed by months of research and customer interviews.

The messaging resonates. The plays are documented in detail, complete with sequences, talk tracks, and success metrics. The team is trained and ready.

So why is your pipeline still flat?

Here’s what most GTM leaders won’t admit: The problem isn’t what you’re planning to do. It’s actually getting things done.

It’s the execution gap: a of missed opportunity for GTM teams. Bridging this gap has never been more urgent. If you’re an executive, entrepreneur, or operator today, this could be the most important job of your career. Here’s how to make it to the other side.

The Execution Gap: Where Good Strategies Go to Die

The execution gap is the space between your documented playbook and what your team actually runs. It’s the dead zone between strategic intent and tactical reality.

If you’ve worked in a company of any significant size, you’ve experienced this problem firsthand. And it’s well documented by serious business researchers:

• Most corporate strategies only deliver .
• As companies grow, their .
• Solving the execution gap could .
• 90% of executives admit the is to blame.

Where does all that wasted potential actually go? Executives and experts agree that a lack of information, poorly communicated goals, and dozens of other small bits of friction and misalignment are to blame.

In fact, a 2023 PwC survey found that time spent on the most common administrative tasks is inefficient.

Frontline practitioners feel the pain, too: Salesforce’s regular surveys of salespeople reveal that the amount of time devoted to actually selling is on a long-term decline, from 36% in 2016 to about 30% today.

In a 2024 report, that the friction and inefficiency inherent in modern business likely costs the U.S. economy $10 trillion. In sales and marketing alone, pegs the cost at $2 trillion.

Sand in the gears. Red tape. “” in your engine. Whatever you call it, here’s what it looks like in practice.

The Expansion Play That Never Launched

Your team identified the perfect expansion opportunity: existing customers showing increased usage patterns and budget growth signals. The strategy was brilliant: personalized outreach to key stakeholders, custom ROI analysis, executive engagement. But executing it required individual account research, stakeholder mapping, and sequence customization for each target.

Three weeks later, when the first outreach finally went out, your main competitor had already engaged those same accounts with their own expansion offers. Result: Three accounts contacted out of 47 identified opportunities. The other 44 opportunities? Still sitting in a spreadsheet, waiting for someone to have time to work on them.

The Data Chaos Problem

Here’s a problem that sounds mundane until you try to solve it: Many midmarket and enterprise companies report having 10%-30% duplicate records in their CRM systems. One is a free trial, another is a prospect and one is an open opportunity. When you’re trying to route an important signal about what’s happening at that company, you simply can’t do it effectively when there are conflicting records scattered across your systems.

This feels like a small problem, but when you’re trying to build go-to-market AI and automation, it’s a massive problem. Your “smart” workflows break down when they can’t tell which version of ACME Inc. is the real one.

The Intent Signal Graveyard

Your intent data platform flagged a high-value prospect researching your category, visiting your pricing page multiple times, and downloading competitive comparison guides. The signal was hot, the timing perfect. But acting on it required building a contact list, researching decision-makers, crafting personalized messaging, and coordinating across sales and marketing.

Five days later, when your SDR finally made contact, the prospect had already engaged with two competitors and was deep in their evaluation process. “Thanks for reaching out,” they said, “but we’re already pretty far along with another vendor.”

ZoomInfo tested this, with online form-fill submissions from a real C-level officer at 1,000 companies. Nearly .

The Hidden Cost of Execution Debt

Every strategy that doesn’t execute creates what we call “execution debt,” or the compound cost of missed opportunities, delayed responses, and unrealized potential. This debt accumulates faster than most leaders realize, creating a systematic disadvantage that compounds over time.

If your competitor can respond to the same signal in minutes while you take days, they’re not just winning individual deals. They’re training the market to expect faster response times, making your eventual outreach feel slow and unresponsive by comparison.

Reps waste hours on tasks that don’t drive revenue: chasing follow-ups, updating CRM, routing leads and switching tools. It’s busywork that drains time, focus, and selling momentum. When your best people spend the majority of their time on execution logistics instead of actual selling, you’re not just losing efficiency, you’re losing talent.

The compound effect is devastating: Execution gaps create more execution gaps. Teams fall further behind, priorities pile up, and the gap between strategy and reality widens until execution becomes impossible. Eventually, you stop planning new strategies because you know they won’t get executed anyway.

Why Companies Rarely Solve The Execution Gap

Most companies try to solve the execution gap with more tools, better processes, additional training, or dashboard visibility. But consider the following.

• More tools hurt: Each adds complexity, training overhead, and coordination challenges.
• Better processes still require human execution: Perfect documentation doesn’t solve capacity constraints.
• Training doesn’t solve capacity: Your team knows what to do; they lack time to do it.
• Dashboards don’t equal action: They show what’s happening but don’t make anything happen.

The fundamental problem isn’t tools, processes, or training. It’s that we’re still asking humans to do work that should be automated.

Your Execution Reality Check

Before we go further, do something uncomfortable: Audit your own execution gap.

Pull up your GTM strategy document. Count the documented plays, sequences, and campaigns. Now count how many your team actually executed last quarter.

If you’re like most companies, the ratio is somewhere around 3 in 10.

Now ask yourself:

• How many priority signals are just sitting in dashboards, waiting for someone to act?
• How many expansion plays never launched?
• How many competitor moves went unanswered?
• How many high-fit prospects engaged but never got a follow-up?
• How many conflicting versions of your key accounts are floating across your systems?

That’s not a people problem. Your team isn’t lazy or incompetent. It’s not a process problem. Your strategies are probably sound. It’s not even a tool problem. You almost certainly have tools coming out of your ears.

It’s a GTM Intelligence problem.

The companies that solve it first won’t just grow faster, they’ll make everyone else irrelevant. They’ll execute strategies so quickly and consistently that manual approaches can’t compete. They’ll turn the execution gap from a universal challenge into a competitive moat.

Most GTM leaders know their execution isn’t perfect. But few realize how dramatic the gap really is. Fewer still understand it’s solvable.

The question isn’t whether you have an execution gap. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

Which will you be: The company that owns its market, or the one watching from the sidelines?

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