Sales-marketing alignment has become something of a buzzword for revenue teams over the last few years — but despite being top-of-mind for many revenue leaders, the data shows that most organizations simply aren’t there yet. According to Forrester’s 2024 Priorities Survey, 82% of C-level B2B business and tech professionals believe that their product, sales, and marketing teams are aligned — but the result of their Q2 2024 Sales And Marketing Alignment Survey revealed that 65% of sales and marketing professionals experience a lack of alignment between their organization’s sales and marketing leaders.
So, how do you align your sales and marketing teams (for real)? This blog will explore strategies for bringing sales and marketing closer together — from both sales and marketing perspectives.
What is sales and marketing alignment?
Let’s start with definitions. In short, sales and marketing alignment is when sales and marketing teams collaborate to achieve shared goals, like generating more revenue, improving lead quality, and creating a better customer experience. Done right, sales and marketing alignment helps teams to share insights and use consistent messaging throughout the buyer's journey.
Why is sales and marketing alignment important?
Before we dive into sales and marketing alignment strategies and best practices, let’s look at why bringing your revenue teams closer together matters in the first place. Sales and marketing alignment is important for a few reasons:
Sales and marketing are on the same side
Of course, your marketing and sales teams have distinct functions and responsibilities. But both sales and marketing are working towards common goals: increasing pipeline with more qualified leads and driving revenue for your business. Without proper alignment, you could end up with teams that should be supporting one another, unknowingly undermining each others’ efforts. 
Your buyers need your teams to align
Nowadays, buyers expect a frictionless journey at every stage, including seamless interactions with your marketing materials and — when the time is right — your sales team. And with B2B buyers now favoring online purchases and their own research over interactions with sales reps, it’s crucial that sales and marketing work together to create a customer experience that matches their preferences and expectations.
Common sales and marketing alignment struggles
Clearly, collaboration between sales and marketing is essential if you want to drive growth — but it’s not always plain sailing. Here are a few hurdles that both sales and marketing teams often run into when working together:
Sales
- Poor lead quality: Sales reps may feel that the leads that marketing brings in aren’t qualified enough, meaning they waste time chasing prospects who just aren’t ready to buy yet.
- Not enough timely support: Sales teams often rely on marketing to produce collateral like brochures, sales proposals case studies, or content for different critical stages of the buyer journey — but they don’t always have time or capacity to produce the assets they need quickly enough.
- Different goals: Sales and marketing often have different b2b metrics for success (e.g., revenue vs. MQLs), which can lead to tension and misunderstandings if not properly communicated.
- Inconsistent messaging: When sales and marketing teams don’t use the same messaging in their communications and conversations, prospects get mixed signals, which can undermine your credibility and their trust in your company.
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Marketing
- Input and feedback disconnect: Marketing teams may feel they don’t get enough input from sales to create campaigns or content that resonate — or enough feedback on how their campaigns and content perform with prospects.
- Unclear follow-through: Marketing may feel that sales don't follow up on leads effectively, which makes it hard to demonstrate the ROI on campaigns.
- Pressure to prove ROI: Marketing teams are often tasked with driving pipeline growth but lack visibility into sales outcomes, which makes it difficult to measure the impact of campaigns or content.
- Content misuse or neglect: Content created by marketing might go unused by sales, either because it's not easily accessible or doesn't meet their needs.
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How can sales and marketing help each other?
So, what are some ways that marketers can help foster better alignment with sales (and vice versa)? Both parties have an equally crucial part to play. Let’s take a look at a few strategies that professionals from both functions can implement to get everyone on the same page:
How can sales align with marketing?
1. Provide constructive feedback
Compared to sales, marketing teams usually have fairly limited contact with actual customers and prospects. So, it’s up to sales to actively share insights on the quality of leads received from marketing, as well as which content is resonating with prospects and which needs to be improved or adapted.
2. Collaborate on Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)
When it comes to creating buyer personas, sales can provide valuable real-world input on prospects’ challenges, objections, and priorities based on their experience with actual customers. Sales can also share their observations about shifts in the market or any changes in buyer behavior, which can inform your organization’s b2b marketing strategy.
3. Actively use the collateral that marketing produces
Marketing teams often put a lot of effort into producing content, whether that’s case studies, white papers, or even dedicated sales enablement content. Sales teams should make the most of the assets that marketing produces and communicate any improvements or content gaps to the marketing team so they can adjust accordingly.
4. Share data and results
Sales teams should keep marketing up to speed when it comes to pipeline, sharing data on lead progress through the sales funnel, and helping marketing assess the effectiveness of campaigns.
It can also be valuable to share examples of successful deals and the marketing touchpoints that contributed to them — as well as the deals that didn’t work out and why. 
How can marketing align with sales?
1. Develop buyer-centric content
As a marketer, it’s your job to create targeted, sales-ready content like case studies, battle cards, and one-pagers that fit within your buyer’s journey and support buyer enablement. You can even take it a step further and empower sales to adapt and tailor content for individual prospects themselves, with an easy-to-use content creation platform like Foleon.
2. Improve lead handoffs
Create well-defined workflows for passing leads to sales to make sure they’re properly nurtured and qualified. Setting up real-time automation to alert sales about high-priority leads or key customer actions can also help them follow up more effectively.
3. Open the floor for input and feedback
Invite representatives from sales to discuss campaign performance, feedback, and areas for improvement. This can also be a moment to give sales visibility into marketing campaigns and lead generation activities, review what’s working, and adjust campaigns based on closed-won or lost deals.
4. Enable sales teams
If sales aren’t using marketing materials, either the content itself is missing the mark, or they simply need more guidance on how to use them with customers. Marketing teams can set up training sessions with sales representatives to provide tips on using collateral like sales presentations or white papers effectively. Marketing can also enable sales teams by guiding them on brand and product messaging and which messages to use when.
5 best practices for better sales and marketing alignment
How you align sales and marketing in your organization heavily depends on how roles and responsibilities are divided within your company. Still, there are a few sales-marketing alignment best practices that revenue leaders should be aware of:
1. Create common goals
Defining shared key performance indicators (KPIs) like revenue, pipeline growth, or sales cycle reduction is one of the first steps to getting sales and marketing teams facing in the same direction. It’s also important to make sure there’s a mutual understanding of lead definitions, like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), to avoid confusion or miscommunication further down the road.
2. Find shared tools and processes
Of course, marketing and sales teams will have their own specific tools and platforms for role-specific work, but for tasks with a lot of overlap, such as content creation or lead handoffs, finding shared tools and processes ensures more transparency and leaves less room for double work or miscommunication.
3. Shadow each other at work
Better alignment between marketing and sales starts with truly understanding each other’s work — and what better way to get an insight into the “other side” of revenue generation than by shadowing each other? Marketing professionals can join sales calls with customers or prospects, for example, to get a better understanding of their pain points and objections. And sales representatives can participate in a brainstorming session for a marketing campaign, to get a better understanding of how those pains are translated into campaign concepts and content ideas.
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4. Collaborate on content creation
Creating targeted, relevant content starts with truly understanding your audience and the messages that will hit home with them. Why not bring your sales and marketing knowledge together by collaborating on content that will speak directly to your buyers’ needs?
5. Communicate, communicate, communicate
This applies to any good collaboration: communication is key. Whether it’s giving updates on shared goals, providing feedback and input on each other’s work, or sharing knowledge and insights, you can’t have close alignment between marketing and sales if they don’t speak to one another. Setting up regular meetings to align or centralizing communications in a shared Slack or Teams channel can be a great starting point here.
Final thoughts
In today’s ever-shifting buyer landscape, sales and marketing alignment is crucial for improving lead quality, establishing consistent messaging throughout the buyer’s journey, and ultimately driving growth and revenue.
By establishing common goals, finding shared tools and processes, and communicating transparently about what’s working (and what isn’t), sales and marketing teams can help to align their work and create a better experience for prospects and customers.
Looking for more ways to foster better alignment between marketing and sales? Check out our ultimate guide to sales enablement.
