Marketing and Sales on the Same Page.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

If marketing and sales aren’t aligned, growth will stall.

Not might.
Will.

And no, another “alignment workshop” won’t fix it.

That just creates shared trauma and a Miro board nobody opens again. Useless.

Why this always breaks

Lack of alignment isn’t a personality problem. It’s a structural failure.

What usually happens is painfully fucking predictable.

Marketing is measured on activity.
Sales is measured on revenue.
Nobody owns the space in between.
Everyone optimises for their own bloody scoreboard.

And so the cycle begins and naturally it continues to spin. For eternity if you let it.

Marketing generates “leads”.
Sales rejects them.
Marketing gets defensive.
Sales gets cynical.

Pipeline leaks quietly in the background while leadership wonders why growth looks like a drunk man walking home.

Rinse. Repeat. Quarterly.

The core issue. Say it slowly.

Revenue is shared.

Accountability isn’t.

That’s the bug.

When responsibility’s vague, behaviours follows suit. People do what they’re measured on, not what the business actually needs.

And then everyone’s somehow surprised when the system behaves exactly as designed. Brilliant? Nope.

What alignment actually means

Alignment isn’t the LinkedIn circlejerk version of harmony.

It’s not sales “buying in” to marketing.
It’s not marketing “supporting” sales.
It’s definitely not weekly stand-ups where nobody decides a fucking thing.

Real alignment comes down to three things.

Shared definitions

You can’t align teams who are speaking different languages.

You need agreement on what a lead actually is. What “qualified” means. What counts as pipeline. What’s in scope and what isn’t.

And don't even get me started on MQLs and SQLs. They can get in the bin.

If sales and marketing define success differently, the system fights itself.

And it will win.

Shared targets

If marketing isn’t accountable for pipeline quality, you get volume without value.

If sales isn’t accountable for disciplined follow-up, you get excuses instead of insight.

Shared targets force better feedback loops. Faster learning. Fewer tedious unnecessary arguments.

Nothing aligns teams faster than a number they both have to stand behind.

Funny that.

Shared process

This is the boring bit.

It’s also the bit that works.

Alignment lives and dies in process. How leads are handled. How feedback flows back. How priorities are set. How trade-offs are made.

If this isn’t written down and enforced, alignment isn’t real. It’s just a vibe.

And vibes don’t scale. They just create chaos with nicer meeting notes.

The role of Revenue Operations

You don’t need a RevOps team.

But you do need RevOps thinking.

One view of the funnel.
One set of numbers.
One source of truth.
Clear ownership at every stage.

When the funnel’s fragmented, optimisation becomes impossible.

You can’t fix what you can’t see. And you definitely can’t fix what nobody bloody owns.

Where the fractional CMO fits

This is one of the most valuable roles a fractional CMO plays.

The person who calls it.

Not referee. The person who calls it.

They translate between sales and marketing. They insist on clarity where people would rather stay vague. They kill vanity metrics before they spread. They make revenue conversations adult again.

Because they sit above functions, they can make trade-offs. Reprioritise without bias. Call bullshit without worrying about internal politics.

That independence is the point. And it's one of the reasons I do what I do.

What changes when alignment works

When sales and marketing operate as one engine, useful things start happening.

Lead quality improves.
Feedback gets sharper.
Pipeline becomes more predictable.
Internal friction drops.
Decisions happen faster.

And most importantly, less energy’s spent arguing like siblings in the back of the car on the way to LEGOLand. Yes, true story.

More energy's spent winning.

A case in point

I've been fortunate enough in my career, or perhaps just best-placed who knows, to have sat across both sales and marketing in several roles.

It probably comes from having founded a couple of businesses from the ground up, seeing up close and overly personal how a business needs to operate to make sure the team can all pay their mortgages and put cornflakes on the table.

When I joined ...Gasp! there was some truly excellent marketing. Way ahead of most creative businesses.

But there was no process. 

There was a CRM, but no direction on how to use it to progress opportunities.

There was a great client services team, but no emphasis on growing client accounts.

There is now. Solid processes documented and operationalised. 

And it helped deliver a record revenue year. Which was nice.

The line leaders need to hear

If marketing and sales are misaligned, that’s not their failure.

It’s leadership failure.

Alignment doesn’t magically appear.

It’s designed.

Final thought

If revenue’s everyone’s job, it’s no one’s.

Decide who owns what.

Or accept the leakage.