Six Steps to Put Marketing and Sales on the Same Page

By Julia Payn, founder of Fractional CMO Services

Misaligned sales and marketing efforts cost businesses dearly. Teams unintentionally undermine one another, opportunities are lost, and prospects disappear due to mixed messaging.

Companies with strong sales-marketing alignment, on the other hand, generate 208% more revenue – according to LinkedIn’s 2018 The Art of Winning report. This upside becomes even greater considering the digital tools available today, which make successful collaboration easier than ever.

The challenge? Sparking the cultural shift that turns these tools into real-world results.

According to HubSpot, 79% of marketing leads never convert,  often due to poor hand-offs and broken communication. The good news is, it’s not a people problem. Rather, it’s your processes. By focusing on systems and structure, organisations can turn dysfunction into momentum with these six high-impact moves being a great place to start.

1. Align on success

Marketing typically tracks metrics like cost-per-lead and MQLs, whilst sales focuses on pipeline value and SQLs. Without shared metrics and definitions, however, accountability breaks down.

Leaders can fix this by building a unified scoreboard that maps the full customer journey – from first contact through to conversion and renewal – as one. They must then choose two or three joint KPIs that both teams should be held accountable for. These may include:

• Pipeline generated (quantity)
• Pipeline conversion rate (quality)
• Customer acquisition cost or payback period (efficiency)

Ultimately, they must reflect the values and results most important to the company. When both teams are measured against these shared success criteria, blame will soon turn into ownership and results improve.

Likewise, by agreeing on what a ‘good’ lead actually looks like, leaders can overcome the frustrations of team misalignment. Marketing might hand off leads too early, whilst sales may ignore qualified prospects – but by introducing shared lead definitions, and distinguishing MQLs from SQLs using behavioural and demographic criteria such as job title and industry, a unified approach can be adopted.

Build a lead scoring model to prioritise target leads and refine it monthly. This creates clarity and consistency, ensuring fewer opportunities are missed. SLAs can also help to formalise expectations across teams, specifying how fast marketing should hand off leads and how quickly sales should follow up. Once again, this is a living document that must be regularly reviewed – but, with one scoreboard and one standard overall, alignment soon becomes routine.

2. Integrate your tech stack

Alignment can falter if teams use disconnected platforms. If there is no visibility between marketing and sales, hand-offs stall and confusion reigns.

Introducing a unified CRM is a straight-forward fix, giving both teams real-time visibility into lead activity, customer history and deal progress, eliminating blind spots, delays and potential duplications.

Automation also plays a key role, enabling marketing to nurture leads effectively before handing them off – giving sales better context and increasing the chances of conversion.

Ultimately, when your systems talk to one another, so do your teams. And transparency throughout this process builds trust, ensuring that collaboration becomes second nature rather than something seen as an unnecessary requirement or a leadership dictat.

3. Meet regularly – and be honest

Of course, technology is no substitute for conversation – and teams also need to talk. Set structured weekly, fortnightly, or monthly check-ins to share feedback on lead quality, align on upcoming campaigns, flag process bottlenecks and celebrate any wins together. By encouraging open, solution-focused discussion, collaboration becomes much more productive. Avoid blame and focus on progress. Over time, this builds the mutual respect and shared accountability you are looking for, strengthening collaboration in ways dashboards alone never can.

4. Co-create content

Then, there’s the issue of coordination on output. Marketing may own brand voice, but sales owns customer insight and both of these are needed to create effective content.

Bring sales into the process early on, asking questions such as:

• What objections are prospects raising?
• What questions do they ask the most?
• What tools or information would help you close faster?

Then, co-create high-impact resources, such as case studies, product explainer decks, objection handling sheets and key talking points for both teams to work with.

When marketing produces materials that sales can actually use, rather than in isolation, communication becomes clearer and more consistent across all touchpoints, boosting conversions and strengthening your brand as a result.

5. Train together

Joint training is yet another great way to break down barriers, eliminating silos and helping to develop shared understanding. Leaders must hold regular shared training sessions to ensure teams align on everything from customer personas and value propositions to sales processes, campaign timelines and product updates.

By using platforms like Slack or Teams to share wins throughout this iterative process, where feedback and market intel can be updated in real-time, teams learn to grow together, celebrating shared victories that nurture team spirit. It might sound cliché but teams that learn together grow together and teams that grow together win, making collaboration cultural, not just procedural – although having the right procedural foundations most certainly helps.

6. Review, optimise, repeat

Finally, leaders must remember that true alignment is a mindset, not a milestone, meaning it’s something that requires constant maintenance. Track and review shared KPIs, revisit SLAs, refine your lead scoring model and hold regular retrospectives. Keep asking yourself – what’s working and what’s not? What needs to change?

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to set the tone, fostering a culture where continuous improvement is expected and where teams thrive on honest feedback. Put the right systems in place from the top and you’ll get smarter, faster, more collaborative success throughout the entire organisation.

Alignment as a growth strategy

Bringing marketing and sales together is never easy but it does deliver serious commercial results. With the right systems, routines, mindset and external support in place, your teams will close more deals and deliver better experiences for every customer. Start small, stay consistent and bring in an expert if needed. Once the rhythm is right, shared success becomes inevitable.