Sales & Marketing Alignment

Create seamless demand generation and sales execution systems that eliminate friction between marketing and sales. Alignment on strategy, process, metrics, and accountability accelerates pipeline and revenue for technology companies.

Why Sales & Marketing Alignment Matters

In most technology companies, sales and marketing operate as separate functions with different goals, metrics, and incentives. Marketing generates leads that sales ignores. Sales complains about lead quality while marketing claims sales doesn't follow up. This dysfunction wastes budget, limits growth, and creates organizational friction.

Misalignment manifests in poor lead conversion, long sales cycles, inefficient budget allocation, and missed revenue targets. Marketing measures activities and lead volume. Sales measures pipeline and closed deals. Neither takes shared responsibility for revenue outcomes.

With true alignment-shared definitions, integrated processes, and mutual accountability-technology companies achieve 30-50% higher lead conversion, 40-60% faster lead response, 20-35% improved pipeline velocity, and better ROI on marketing investment. Sales and marketing become a unified revenue engine, not competing silos.

Key Components

Lead Scoring & Routing

Define lead qualification criteria, implement automated scoring models, and create SLA-based routing that gets qualified leads to sales fast. Objective scoring eliminates quality debates.

Content & Campaign Strategy

Build integrated content strategies that support the entire buyer journey from awareness to decision, aligned with sales playbooks. Marketing enables sales conversations.

Sales & Marketing SLAs

Establish service level agreements on lead volume, quality, follow-up speed, and conversion that create mutual accountability. SLAs eliminate finger-pointing.

Attribution & Analytics

Implement multi-touch attribution, pipeline analytics, and shared dashboards that show end-to-end funnel performance and ROI. Measure what matters together.

Shared Planning & Reviews

Establish joint planning processes and regular review cadences where both teams commit to revenue goals together. Integration starts with shared accountability.

Lead Lifecycle Management

Define clear stages from inquiry to opportunity with handoff criteria and SLAs at each transition. Systematic lifecycle management prevents leakage.

Key Takeaways

  • • Lack of shared definitions and accountability is the root cause of sales-marketing misalignment
  • • Marketing should be measured on pipeline and revenue contribution, not just lead volume or activities
  • • Data-driven lead scoring and SLAs eliminate most quality debates-define criteria explicitly and measure performance
  • • Multi-touch attribution shows which marketing efforts actually influence pipeline and revenue, enabling better investment decisions
  • • True alignment requires joint planning, shared goals, and integrated systems-not just better communication

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