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Why Sales and Marketing Should Stop Competing and Start Collaborating
- Gathoni Njenga
- Apr 10
- 2 min read
A strategic guide to building unity between sales and marketing teams by aligning goals, improving communication, and maximizing customer engagement
Summary: Explore strategies to bridge the gap between marketing and sales teams, ensuring cohesive messaging and a unified approach to customer engagement. This guide emphasizes the importance of communication and shared objectives.
Why Do Sales and Marketing Teams Often Struggle to Work Together?
In many organizations, sales and marketing teams operate in silos, each blaming the other for missed targets. Marketing claims sales doesn’t follow up on leads; sales insists the leads aren’t qualified. This disconnect can harm revenue, waste resources, and confuse customers.
According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report, 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between their departments enables critical business growth, yet only 36% feel the two functions are aligned.
A key step in improving alignment is recognizing their shared objective: customer acquisition and retention. Both teams must move beyond metrics that serve internal purposes and instead focus on joint success benchmarks.
What Are the First Steps to Align Sales and Marketing?
The first step is shared definitions—particularly of lead stages. Sales and marketing need to agree on what qualifies as a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and a sales qualified lead (SQL). This shared vocabulary improves handoffs and reduces finger-pointing.
A practical framework, such as the SLA (Service Level Agreement) approach, helps here. HubSpot reports that companies with SLAs between marketing and sales are 3X more likely to be effective.
How Can Teams Improve Communication?
Sales and marketing must meet regularly to review progress and adjust tactics together. Weekly sync meetings, shared KPIs, and collaborative dashboards foster transparency and accountability.
Tools like Slack, Asana, and Salesforce support real-time communication and project alignment. For example, Salesforce’s Pardot provides lead intelligence and automates marketing-to-sales transitions.
According to Salesforce’s “State of Sales” report, 67% of sales professionals say that cross-functional collaboration is critical for closing deals.
What Shared Metrics Should Be Tracked?
Instead of focusing solely on vanity metrics like impressions or call volume, teams should align around revenue-based metrics such as:
Lead-to-customer conversion rate
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Sales cycle length
Campaign-influenced revenue
When both teams are incentivized by shared revenue goals, collaboration becomes a necessity rather than a luxury. Aberdeen Group found that B2B organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams achieve 24% faster growth and 27% faster profit growth over a three-year period.
How Can Technology Play a Role?
Marketing automation platforms like Marketo, HubSpot, and CRMs like Salesforce help ensure lead information is not lost between teams. Integration is essential—disconnected tech stacks can lead to missed opportunities and duplicate work.
AI-powered analytics can also help identify the behaviors most likely to predict deal closures, giving marketing insight into what content works and helping sales prioritize outreach.
How Do You Keep Everyone Accountable?
One of the most effective ways to ensure long-term alignment is to involve leadership from both sides in setting shared targets. Monthly reviews and campaign retrospectives—where wins and misses are discussed candidly—can keep teams in sync.
According to McKinsey, organizations with tightly aligned marketing and sales functions can achieve up to 208% higher marketing ROI.
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