Sales and Marketing Alignment: Best Practices for Predictable Growth
According to a LinkedIn survey, 85% of revenue leaders say sales and marketing alignment is the largest opportunity for improving B2B business performance. Yet, 44% of teams agree that this alignment is one of their biggest challenges.
According to Filip Dimitrijevski, Business Development Manager at CLICKVISION BPO, “Dealing with goals that don't go together is the hardest thing I've had to do. Marketing wants to build the brand for the long term, but sales wants results quickly. This can be hard.”
Despite desiring similar outcomes, sales and marketing teams often disagree on their immediate goals, how to measure success, and who deserves the credit for finding a lead. This creates friction, and ultimately impacts the company’s bottom line.
Eliminating the friction between sales and marketing is essential for seamless business growth, and a CRO is key to success. I’ve rounded up best practices from revenue leaders on how you can drive alignment in your business.
What is Sales and Marketing Alignment?
Sales and marketing alignment refers to the coordination between the two functions to meet a shared goal. Aligned sales and marketing teams speak the same language, share goals and objectives, and keep the lines of communication open.
When there’s alignment between the two teams, both functions are on the same page about who an ideal lead is, what the customer journey looks like, and how to measure the success of their efforts. This allows them to attract and convert higher quality leads, reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) by up to 30%, and improve lifetime value (LTV) by as much as 20%.
Challenges of Sales and Marketing Misalignment
Ninety-six percent of sales and marketing professionals agree that disparate reporting structures, separate KPIs, and separate goals and objectives cause some alignment issues among sales and marketing teams.
Here are some other challenges of sales and marketing misalignment:
- Siloed teams and communication breakdowns: Siloed teams and communication breakdowns are both causes and effects of not having shared objectives across marketing and sales teams. Steve Khanna, Head of Growth at Endorsely, says “First, the biggest challenge is getting both sides to agree on what success looks like. Sales and marketing often speak different languages: one talks leads, the other talks deals.”
- Inconsistent messaging and brand experience: A Gartner study reveals that 47% of sales and marketing leaders believe the common factor in sales and marketing misalignment is separate funnels. This creates an inconsistent experience at different stages of the buyer journey and diminishes trust with potential clients.
- Difficulty in measuring marketing ROI: Since sales and marketing use different tools, they often work from separate data. With separate sources of truth and unintegrated software, sales and marketing will continue to disagree on how to measure success.
- Poor lead qualification and nurturing: Less than 50% of teams agree on the definition of MQL and SQL, which then leads to sales ignoring as much as 80% of leads from marketing. This puts the teams at odds when it comes to nurturing and converting high-quality leads.
The biggest challenge is getting both sides to agree on what success looks like. Sales and marketing often speak different languages: one talks leads, the other talks deals.
Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment
According to Mike Vannelli, Creative Director at Envy Creative, “The value of alignment isn’t just in avoiding missteps—it’s in unlocking faster deal cycles, happier customers, and ultimately, a healthier bottom line. When done right, sales and marketing alignment feels less like two teams working in parallel and more like a single, unstoppable force.”
Here are some key benefits of sales and marketing alignment:
- Increased sales pipeline velocity: Without the friction or the mixed messages that come from working in a silo, sales and marketing teams improve close rates and speed up time to close. For example, when aligned on what a MQL is, sales spends less time nurturing leads and close deals faster. As a result, this alignment enables 19% faster revenue growth and 15% profitability.
- Improved win rates: Companies with aligned sales and marketing are 67% more effective at closing deals than non-aligned teams. Also, when they’re aligned on who their ideal customer is, sales reps can be more targeted in their outreach and more successful in proving the value of the company’s solution.
- Enhanced customer experience: Raviraj Hegde, SVP of Growth at Donorbox, says “Consistent customer experience starts with aligned sales and marketing.” When sales and marketing are on the same page, they provide a unified experience throughout the customer journey, addressing the lead’s problem and building confidence in the company’s solution.
- Stronger brand reputation: A unified customer experience and consistent messaging throughout the buyer journey builds trust between the company and the lead. A study by Qualtrics shows that a company’s reputation impacts 63% of customers’ purchasing decisions.
Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices
Sales and marketing alignment has a net positive impact on a company’s reputation, customer loyalty, and on the organization’s bottom line.
Here are some best practices that help ensure that your sales and marketing teams are aligned.
Shared Metrics and Reporting
Sales and marketing should collaborate to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Vannelli says that “Shared metrics like pipeline velocity, customer acquisition cost, and lead conversion rates then keep everyone rowing in the same direction.”
Shared dashboards help you track these common metrics. Reilly James Renwick, CMO at Pragmatic Mortgage agrees: “Unified dashboards that monitor key metrics like customer acquisition cost or sales cycle length help pinpoint issues and encourage collaboration. This unified method then creates consistent messaging across all touchpoints—improving both customer experience and internal teamwork.”
Shared metrics like pipeline velocity, customer acquisition cost, and lead conversion rates keep everyone rowing in the same direction.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
SLAs help keep sales and marketing accountable and establish expectations for performance. Vannelli thinks of them as a “handshake deal backed by data. Marketing commits to delivering a set number of qualified leads, while sales promises to follow up within a specific timeframe.”
According to Khanna, SLAs help teams to speak the same language and bridge the gap between marketing’s focus on leads and sales’ focus on deals. “Suddenly, everyone’s on the same page, and the finger-pointing dies down”
SLAs are also effective in helping both teams define and set expectations for the handoff process between marketing and sales teams.
Content Collaboration
Marketing and sales have separate but equally important roles in attracting, engaging, and converting leads into customers — they have complementary insights into the ideal customer profile (ICP). Combining these knowledge sets enables both teams to effectively define and target buyer personas and provide value to the ideal customer.
For instance, with sales’ knowledge of what people are actually asking as well as objections they face during the sales process, marketing can create high-quality content (blogs, ebooks, whitepapers) that educates leads and supports sales efforts.
Regular Communication and Collaboration
Foster open communication channels through meetings, calls, and internal collaboration tools. You can also have joint training sessions to improve team understanding. According to Gartner, 32% say the most effective tactic to align sales and marketing teams is to create a liaison role that spans both functions.
Khanna’s top tip for collaboration? “Get sales and marketing in the same room—virtually or otherwise. Nothing beats a brainstorm session where marketing understands sales' pain points, and sales appreciates marketing’s efforts to generate leads. And if you add coffee and snacks, you’d be amazed how much faster the walls come down!”
The Role of Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) In Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment
The role of the CRO in the last 10 years has evolved from a glorified head of sales to a leader uniting all go-to-market functions. The secret behind a CRO’s ability to align their teams is a close relationship with RevOps — a cross-functional support team that brings marketing, sales, and customer success together through processes, tools, and data.
Here’s how the CRO and RevOps can work together to address common alignment challenges between sales and marketing.
Challenge Addressed: Siloed Teams and Communication Breakdowns
According to Khanna, RevOps is the glue that keeps it all together. “Think of them as the friendly translator who takes marketing’s creative vision and sales’ revenue-driven goals and finds ways to make them align. They’re also the go-to for breaking down silos—whether that’s through consistent messaging, setting up shared dashboards, or even hosting monthly team meetings to hash out challenges before they spiral.”
Working with their ops counterpart, the CRO facilitates the standardization of processes for the lead lifecycle, encourages collaboration among revenue-generating functions, and establishes shared communication channels to break down silos.
Challenge Addressed: Inconsistent Messaging and Brand Experience
The customer experience is foremost in the mind of the CRO. That means creating documentation and workflows that provide sales and marketing access to the same data and definitions. Through dashboards with shared data and messaging guidelines, CROs enable a seamless customer experience through the RevOps team.
Challenge Addressed: Difficulty Measuring Marketing ROI
By bringing together the goals and objectives of all revenue-generating teams under a single strategic umbrella, CROs strategically centralize customer data so that everybody is looking at the same numbers. This allows them to measure both sales and marketing’s impact against set KPIs and identify areas for improvement and optimization.
CROs coordinate the use of analytics tools for insights into lead behavior, campaign performance, and sales pipeline health, creating a more accurate picture of sales and marketing ROI.
Challenge Addressed: Alignment Through Technology and Tools
By using the same tools, sales, marketing, and customer success have access to the same customer data and can make smarter, more informed decisions. The CRO works with RevOps to oversee the selection and implementation of sales and marketing software (CRMs, MAPs, etc) so that every team has access to the same tools and the data within them. This improves communication, collaboration, and data sharing, and creates a unified tech stack through seamless system integrations.
Software Solutions For Sales and Marketing Alignment
Rather than letting each team choose tools that don’t work well together, CROs need to identify and implement software that will benefit everybody. Here are some of the best tools to make that happen.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a centralized platform for managing leads, contacts, and customer data. Michelle Nguyen, Product Owner and Marketing Manager at UpPromote, says “A robust CRM allows both teams to track interactions with potential customers, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding lead status.”
Hegde agrees: “CRM systems like Salesforce let the selling team see how leads behave and allow personal touches based on that knowledge.”
Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs)
Marketing automation platforms automate marketing workflows like email campaigns, lead nurturing, and social media publishing. However, to prevent silos, sales also needs insight into these tools so they understand what marketing is already doing so they don’t contradict or duplicate it.
According to Khanna, the CRM and MAP have to work together to get the best results. “A good CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, take your pick) ensures both teams can see the same data, so there’s no confusion about lead status or pipeline stages. Add a Marketing Automation Platform to keep nurturing leads and analytics tools to measure what’s working, and you’ve got the tech stack of dreams.”
Sales Enablement Tools
Sales enablement tools that provide sales with the content they need to sell effectively in a way that doesn’t go against marketing’s efforts. According to Vannelli, they “bridge gaps with tailored content and training.”
Sales enablement tools give sales teams content, training materials, and battle cards to close deals effectively, while also improving sales rep productivity and win rates.
Data Analytics Software
Data is the bread and butter of RevOps. So software that collects and analyzes data is an essential tool in their toolbox. These tools analyze web traffic, customer behavior and marketing campaign performance. It also provides insights to refine targeting and personalize customer journeys.
According to Hegde, “Analytics [tools] assure that both teams see clearly what works and what does not. This holistic approach has empowered us to be more efficient, better at lead conversion, and cohesive in the customer experience.”
Choosing The Right Software Solution
To make sure you choose the right software for your aligned teams, consider the following:
- Company size: A startup company has different needs than an enterprise business. Choose tools that can cater to the needs of your company’s stage of growth, fits your budget, and fulfills your specific needs.
- Evaluate features and integrations with existing tech stack: To avoid duplicate work, ensure that the tools you procure integrate well with the tools you already have. Implement tools that are easy to use but still provide the features you need.
- Prioritize scalability and ongoing support: Prioritize software that will grow with you and that comes with built-in support that enables easy onboarding and team-wide adoption.
Alignment Drives Growth
Sales and marketing alignment is essential for sustainable growth. Aligned revenue-generating teams have increased revenue, higher win rates, and a better brand experience. It also improves company culture and removes communication siloes that cause friction between teams.
The CRO is critical in driving cross-functional collaboration between the two teams through integrated tools, shared metrics and reporting, and open communication. Working alongside RevOps, a good CRO helps design a CRM automation and data management strategy that allows both teams to make data-driven decisions and streamline essential processes. That means more predictable revenue and faster growth for your business.
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