Marketing Thinks It's Winning. Sales Thinks It's Losing

If you ask most business leaders whether sales and marketing should be aligned, almost everyone will say yes. But ask whether they actually are, and the answer is usually much less convincing.

It's one of the most common challenges I come across when talking to clients. Everyone agrees sales and marketing should be working towards the same objective, but when you look beneath the surface, they're often operating with different priorities, different measures of success and, in some cases, different definitions of what a good customer even looks like.

The result is predictable. Marketing believes it's generating demand. Sales believes the leads aren't good enough. Marketing argues sales isn't following up quickly enough. Sales argues marketing is measuring the wrong things.

Meanwhile, customer acquisition costs continue to rise, conversion rates remain stubbornly low, and revenue growth becomes harder than it needs to be.

The irony is that neither team is necessarily wrong. The problem isn't sales and it isn't marketing. It's the way the business has asked them to work and it’s a C-suite issue.

Marketing and sales are two parts of the same commercial process, yet many organisations still manage them as though they are completely separate functions. Marketing is measured on engagement, lead volumes and pipeline creation. Sales is measured on revenue. Customer success is measured on retention and expansion.

Now individually, those metrics make perfect sense. Collectively, they often encourage behaviours that work against one another.

I've seen marketing teams celebrate campaigns that generated hundreds of MQLs while sales quietly (or sometimes not so quietly!) question whether any of those prospects were ever likely to buy. Equally, I've seen sales teams dismiss marketing-generated opportunities while continuing to complain there isn't enough pipeline.

Neither side is deliberately creating friction. They're simply responding to the objectives they've been given. This is why I believe siloed thinking is one of the biggest barriers to growth in B2B organisations.

One of the first questions I ask clients is surprisingly simple. What does a qualified opportunity actually look like? It's remarkable how often that question creates disagreement. Marketing has one definition. Sales has another. Leadership sometimes has a third. If there isn't agreement on something as fundamental as that, it's almost impossible to build a joined-up go-to-market strategy.

The same challenge often extends beyond qualification. Ask sales and marketing what success looks like and you'll often receive very different answers. Marketing may talk about engagement, awareness or pipeline creation. Sales is understandably focused on revenue (or whatever triggers commission). Customer success is thinking about retention and expansion, while leadership could be looking at customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV) and the overall return on investment. None of those perspectives are wrong, but if they're not aligned around a common commercial objective, they can end up pulling the business in different directions.

The organisations that do this well don't simply encourage sales and marketing to collaborate more. They redesign the way the two functions work together. That starts with agreeing what a qualified opportunity looks like. It means creating shared commercial objectives rather than departmental targets. It means reviewing performance together, sharing customer insight and building a common understanding of where growth is really coming from.

Perhaps most importantly, it means recognising that the customer doesn't experience marketing, sales and customer success as separate departments. They experience one brand. If those teams aren't aligned internally, customers notice.

When organisations get this right, the benefits extend far beyond having a better relationship between departments. Marketing produces work that helps sales have better conversations. Sales provides better feedback that improves future marketing activity. Customer success shares insight that strengthens both functions and creates a continuous feedback loop rather than disconnected teams operating in silos.

The commercial impact is usually quite significant.

Conversion rates improve because opportunities are better qualified. Sales cycles shorten because customers are entering conversations with a clearer understanding of the problem they're trying to solve. Customer acquisition costs begin to fall because less time and budget are wasted pursuing poor-fit prospects.

More importantly, growth becomes more predictable because the entire commercial function is working towards the same objective. One of the biggest misconceptions in B2B is that sales and marketing alignment is about improving relationships between departments.

It isn't. It's about improving commercial performance and direction needs to come from the very top or at least from leadership alignment at senior level.

When sales and marketing operate to different goals, the business pays the price. When they operate as one commercial function, decisions become clearer, customers receive a more consistent experience and the organisation is far better placed to achieve sustainable growth.

In my experience, some of the fastest-growing B2B organisations aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest marketing budgets or the largest sales teams. More often, they're the ones that have removed friction between the two and created an operating model where everyone is working towards the same outcome. That's when sales and marketing stop competing for credit and start creating growth together.