Stop the Tug-of-War: How to Align Sales and Marketing for Growth

September 16, 2025
4 min read
Leadership, Marketing, Marketing Strategy

I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. A business is buzzing with potential, marketing is pulling in leads, and the sales team is busy. Yet, somehow, the growth engine starts to sputter. Revenue targets are missed, frustration mounts, and nobody can quite pinpoint the problem. More often than not, the issue lies in a silent, internal tug-of-war between two departments that should be best friends: sales and marketing.

When these two teams operate in separate silos, business growth can stall fast. Marketing generates leads that sales can’t close, sales complains about lead quality, and the entire process becomes inefficient. The secret to breaking this cycle and unlocking sustainable momentum isn’t a bigger budget or a new hire: it’s a unified strategy.

When teams aren't aligned, they can't effectively support each other's goals.

As a fractional marketing leader, I help businesses bridge this gap all the time. Aligning your sales and marketing teams isn’t just a “nice-to-have” corporate goal. It is the single most effective way to streamline your revenue operations and accelerate growth. Let’s break down why this disconnect happens and how you can fix it.

Why Misalignment Kills Momentum

The symptoms of a sales and marketing disconnect are often mistaken for other business problems. Do any of these sound familiar?

Leads That Go Nowhere

This is the classic sign of a breakdown. Marketing celebrates a record number of new leads from their latest campaign. They pass them over the fence to sales, expecting high-fives and closed deals. Instead, they hear crickets. The sales team argues that the leads are low-quality, unqualified, or simply not ready to buy. Marketing feels their hard work was wasted, and sales feels their time was spent chasing ghosts. The result is a pile of expensive, abandoned leads.

Missed Goals and Mounting Frustration

When teams aren’t aligned, they can’t effectively support each other’s goals. Sales falls short of its quota because the pipeline is weak. Marketing’s return on investment (ROI) tanks because their efforts aren’t translating into revenue. This creates a cycle of blame. Marketing thinks sales isn’t trying hard enough, and sales thinks marketing doesn’t understand what a real customer looks like. Everyone is working hard, but they’re not working smart.

Slower Growth and Wasted Resources

Every moment sales spends on a dead-end lead is a moment they could have spent nurturing a promising one. Every dollar marketing spends attracting the wrong audience is a dollar that could have been invested in a more targeted campaign. These inefficiencies add up. They create bottlenecks that slow down your entire sales cycle, directly impacting your bottom line and hindering your ability to scale.

Stop measuring marketing solely on lead volume and sales solely on closed deals. Instead, establish shared metrics that hold both teams accountable for the entire customer journey.

5 Steps to Create a Unified "Smarketing" Strategy

Fixing the disconnect between sales and marketing—often called “smarketing”—doesn’t require a massive overhaul. It starts with a few intentional steps to build a bridge and create a culture of collaboration.

1. Set Goals You Both Care About

The first step is to get both teams rowing in the same direction. Stop measuring marketing solely on lead volume and sales solely on closed deals. Instead, establish shared metrics that hold both teams accountable for the entire customer journey.

What to track: Focus on goals like conversion rates from Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), the overall sales cycle length, and, most importantly, revenue.
How to do it: Bring the team leaders together to agree on these shared Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). When marketing is invested in generating sales-ready leads and sales is invested in providing feedback to improve lead quality, you create a powerful feedback loop.

2. Define What a “Good Lead” Actually Is

This is arguably the most critical conversation you can have. Your sales and marketing teams must have a crystal-clear, mutually agreed-upon definition of a qualified lead. This prevents marketing from wasting resources on prospects who will never convert and stops sales from ignoring potentially great leads.

Create a profile: Develop an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas together. What industries are you targeting? What are their pain points? What is their company size and role?
Establish a scoring system: Use lead scoring to rank prospects based on their demographics, behaviors (like downloading an ebook or visiting the pricing page), and overall fit. A lead only becomes an MQL once it hits a certain score, ensuring sales only receives leads that are worth their time.

3. Talk Often (Seriously, It’s That Important)

Communication is the glue that holds this alignment together. You can’t just set goals and walk away. Regular, structured check-ins are essential for maintaining momentum and adapting your strategy.

Schedule bi-weekly meetings: Hold a recurring "smarketing" meeting. This isn't just another status update. Use this time to review lead quality, discuss campaign performance, and share insights from the front lines.
What to discuss: Marketing can share upcoming campaigns so sales is prepared. Sales can provide real-time feedback on which talking points are resonating with prospects and which are falling flat. These conversations provide invaluable intelligence for both sides.

You can't just set goals and walk away. Regular, structured check-ins are essential for maintaining momentum and adapting your strategy.

4. Use Tools That Actually Help Collaboration

Technology can be a powerful ally in aligning your teams. A shared Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is non-negotiable. It provides a single source of truth and eliminates the chaos of spreadsheets and siloed data.

Leverage your CRM: Platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce are perfect for this. They allow marketing to see what happens to their leads after the handoff and give sales full visibility into a lead's history and interactions with the brand.
Automate the process: Use your CRM to automate lead assignments, track touchpoints, and create shared dashboards. This transparency ensures everyone is working with the same information, which builds trust and efficiency.

5. Make Collaboration the Norm, Not the Exception

Ultimately, aligning sales and marketing is about creating a cultural shift. You need to foster an environment where both teams see themselves as part of one unified revenue team. Their success is intertwined.

Encourage cross-functional projects: Have sales team members contribute to marketing content like blog posts or webinars. Invite marketers to sit in on sales calls to hear customer objections firsthand.
Celebrate wins together: When a big deal closes that started with a marketing campaign, celebrate it as a team win. Acknowledge the contributions of both departments. When both sides feel seen and invested in each other’s success, collaboration becomes natural.

The Payoff: Growth That Lasts

When your sales and marketing teams finally team up, the results are powerful and immediate. Collaboration improves, inefficiencies disappear, and your revenue engine starts to fire on all cylinders. You’ll see better-qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and a much healthier bottom line.

By aligning these two critical functions, you aren’t just fixing a workflow problem. You are building a scalable foundation for long-term, sustainable growth. Stop the tug-of-war and start building your unified revenue team today.

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