Your sales team says the leads are rubbish. Your marketing team says sales never follows up. Both are convinced they are doing their job. Neither can prove it.<\/p>\n
This is what misalignment looks like in most B2B companies. Not open warfare. Something quieter. Two departments operating on parallel tracks, each with their own targets, their own tools, and their own version of what a “good lead” means. The tension shows up in pipeline reviews, in blame-shifting conversations, and in a CRM that tells two different stories depending on who you ask.<\/p>\n
Sales and marketing alignment is not a team-building exercise. It is a systems problem. When the two functions are not connected by shared definitions, shared data, and shared accountability, leads fall through the cracks and revenue suffers.<\/p>\n
If these five signs look familiar, it\u2019s time to stop the blame-shifting and fix the underlying systems.<\/p>\n
A B2B company with a 12-month sales cycle losing even 10 percent of its pipeline to misalignment is leaving serious money on the table. A study by LinkedIn found that aligned sales and marketing teams close 67 percent more deals. Forrester reported that aligned organisations grow revenue 19 percent faster.<\/p>\n
Beyond the statistics, the daily friction is where the real damage happens. Marketing runs a campaign that generates 50 leads. Sales cherry-picks five, ignores the rest, and complains that “the leads are cold.” Marketing sees the data showing 45 un-contacted leads and wonders why they bother. Neither team has a shared definition of what qualifies a lead, so both are right from their own perspective.<\/p>\n
In the Netherlands, we see this often in established B2B companies with \u20ac5M to \u20ac50M in revenue. These businesses grew through direct relationships and sales grit, leaving marketing as a background support function. Now that leadership expects marketing to drive the pipeline, these two teams have to work together for the first time without any of the necessary systems in place.<\/p>\n
Most advice about sales and marketing alignment focuses on communication. Get the teams in a room together. Encourage collaboration. Create shared messaging channels. Host weekly stand-ups.<\/p>\n
Communication helps, but no amount of weekly stand-ups will fix a system that routes the wrong leads to the wrong people at the wrong time.<\/p>\n
Alignment is an infrastructure problem. It requires shared definitions, shared tools, shared data, and shared accountability. Without these, all the team-building workshops in the world will not change the fact that marketing is generating leads sales does not want, and sales is closing deals marketing never influenced.<\/p>\n
Here are the five signs that tell you alignment is missing, and what each one actually means.<\/p>\n
The sales team has a CRM they were told to use, but they rarely touch it. Call notes are missing and lead statuses are weeks out of date. Opportunities lack source attribution, and half the contacts were entered manually with missing info.<\/p>\n
Sales reps ignore the CRM because it doesn’t help them close deals. The CRM was set up by someone (often marketing or IT) without input from the people who use it daily. The fields do not match the sales process. The stages do not reflect how deals actually move. The data marketing needs is not the data sales enters.<\/p>\n
The fix:<\/strong> Redesign your CRM pipeline with both teams in the room. Map it to the actual buyer journey, not an idealised funnel from a textbook. Define five to seven stages that both teams agree represent real progression. Then automate what you can: lead source tracking from marketing campaigns should be automatic, not manual entry.<\/p>\n Ask both teams to define a ‘qualified lead.’ If the answers differ, you’ve found the source of the friction.<\/p>\n Marketing might define qualified as “downloaded a whitepaper and works at a company with more than 50 employees.” Sales might define qualified as “has a budget approved and is ready to have a conversation this month.” These are vastly different levels of readiness, and shipping the first type to the sales team while calling them “qualified” destroys trust.<\/p>\n The fix:<\/strong> Create a formal lead definition that both teams agree on. Most B2B companies need at least two levels:<\/p>\n Document the criteria. Put them somewhere both teams can see. Review them quarterly. If marketing is generating MQLs that never convert to SQLs, the criteria need to change.<\/p>\n A new client signs. Sales says it was their relationship. Marketing says the prospect attended a webinar six months ago. The CEO says it was a referral from a board member.<\/p>\n When attribution is unclear, it is impossible to know what is working. Marketing cannot prove ROI. Sales gets credit for every deal regardless of what generated the initial interest. Budget allocation becomes a political discussion instead of a data-driven one.<\/p>\n The fix:<\/strong> Implement first-touch and last-touch attribution in your CRM. Every lead should have a source: organic search, paid campaign, referral, event, outbound call. This is not perfect (multi-touch journeys are complex), but it is infinitely better than no tracking at all.<\/p>\n Review attribution data monthly. If you discover that 40 percent of closed deals had their first meaningful interaction through a specific blog post or campaign, that is information that changes how you allocate resources.<\/p>\n Marketing’s quarterly goals: increase website traffic by 20 percent, publish 12 blog posts, grow the LinkedIn audience by 500 followers. Sales’ quarterly goals: close 1.2 million in new revenue, add 15 new clients, hit 40 percent close rate on qualified opportunities.<\/p>\n When marketing is judged on clicks and sales on revenue, they aren’t even playing the same game.<\/p>\n The fix:<\/strong> Introduce one shared KPI that both teams report on. The most effective shared KPI for B2B companies is qualified pipeline value: the total value of opportunities that marketing sourced or influenced, that sales has accepted as real. Both teams contribute. Both teams are accountable.<\/p>\n This does not replace individual team metrics. Marketing still tracks content performance and campaign ROI. Sales still tracks close rates and deal velocity. But the shared number forces alignment because neither team can hit it alone.<\/p>\n When a lead hits the website, marketing gets a notification and might mention it in a meeting or Slack. Sales is supposed to follow up, but they often forget or call three days late after the prospect has already moved on to a competitor.<\/p>\n The handoff is the single most valuable moment in your revenue process, and in most B2B companies, it runs on luck and memory.<\/p>\n The fix:<\/strong> Build a documented handoff process. When a lead meets the agreed SQL criteria, the following happens automatically:<\/p>\n This takes two hours to set up in any modern CRM. Companies that enforce a 4-hour SLA typically see a double-digit jump in lead-to-meeting conversion.<\/p>\n This week, schedule a 30-minute meeting with one person from sales and one from marketing. Ask them both to write down, independently, what a “qualified lead” means. Compare the answers.<\/p>\n If the definitions match, you are ahead of the curve. If they don’t, that gap is your priority. Write a shared definition together in that meeting and put it in a document both teams can access. Start using it immediately. Once you agree on what a lead actually is, the technical fixes fall into place.<\/p>\n It is the structural integration of sales and marketing around shared definitions, shared data, and shared goals. Aligned teams agree on what a qualified lead looks like, share a CRM with consistent data, and report on at least one common KPI.<\/p>\n The structural changes (shared definitions, CRM setup, handoff process) can be implemented in four to six weeks. Behavioural change takes longer: expect three to six months before both teams consistently operate within the new framework.<\/p>\n No. Most B2B companies already have a CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive) with the features needed. Don’t buy more software to fix a human disagreement. Fix the workflow first.<\/p>\n Separate reporting structures. When marketing reports to a CMO and sales reports to a VP of Sales with no shared accountability, alignment becomes a negotiation between two competing priorities. The strongest alignment happens when both functions report to a single revenue leader.<\/p>\n Small teams have an advantage. Fewer people means fewer handoffs, faster decisions, and easier consensus. A company with two salespeople and one marketer can align in a single meeting. The principles are the same regardless of team size.<\/p>\n If your sales and marketing teams are not aligned, adding more leads will not help because they will leak through the same cracks. Running more campaigns will not help if sales ignores the results. Hiring more salespeople will not help if they inherit a broken handoff.<\/p>\n Fix the handoff. Fix the definitions. Fix the shared targets. The leads you already have are worth more than the new ones you are chasing.<\/p>\nSign 2: Marketing and sales define “qualified lead” differently<\/h3>\n
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Sign 3: Nobody can tell you where a deal originated<\/h3>\n
Sign 4: Marketing goals and sales goals do not connect<\/h3>\n
Sign 5: The handoff between marketing and sales is informal<\/h3>\n
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Implementation: Start with the Definition<\/h2>\n
Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n
What is sales and marketing alignment?<\/h3>\n
How long does it take to align sales and marketing in a B2B company?<\/h3>\n
Do we need special software for sales and marketing alignment?<\/h3>\n
What is the biggest obstacle to alignment?<\/h3>\n
Can a small team achieve alignment, or is this only for large organisations?<\/h3>\n
Stop Treating the Symptoms<\/h2>\n