Too often, marketing and sales operate in silos, marketing measures success by leads generated, while sales only cares about deals closed. This disconnect costs B2B organisations millions of pounds in wasted budget and missed opportunities. Research shows companies with aligned sales and marketing see up to 209% higher ROI from their marketing investment.
How Can Marketing Support Sales?
Marketing is often the first touchpoint in the customer journey. Through campaigns, events, and content, marketers identify and attract the right prospects, often shaping the brand's reputation long before sales make contact.
In B2B, marketing can equip sales with:
- Audience data: demographic and firmographic insights such as industry, company size, and job roles.
- Behavioural intelligence: what prospects are engaging with, downloading, or searching for.
- Pain points and challenges: gathered through market research and digital interactions.
- Decision-maker mapping: clarity on who within a target business holds influence.
By continuing to nurture leads even after handover, marketing keeps engagement alive and ensures sales have warm, educated prospects.
What Does Sales Do for Marketing?
Sales teams have the advantage of direct, one-to-one conversations with potential clients. They hear first-hand the questions, concerns, and objections that arise in the buying process. These insights are gold dust for marketers.
By feeding this information back, sales enables marketing to create resources that directly address customer needs, case studies, FAQs, product comparisons, and thought-leadership content. These assets not only support sales in conversations but also help prospects self-educate earlier in the funnel.
Sales also provides valuable feedback on the quality of leads marketing generates. For example, if a campaign delivers high lead volume but few conversions, sales can help pinpoint why—so marketing can adjust targeting, messaging, or channels accordingly.
What Is Sales and Marketing Alignment?
Sales and marketing alignment, sometimes called "smarketing", is the practice of uniting both teams under shared goals, strategies, and communication. Instead of passing leads down a one-way funnel, both functions work side by side across the entire buyer journey.
Traditionally, marketing focused on generating leads while sales focused on closing them. However, this handoff often leads to wasted effort: research suggests that only 20% of marketing leads are ever acted on by sales. That's a vast opportunity lost.
With alignment, the funnel becomes a shared responsibility. Both teams target the same accounts, pursue the same decision-makers, and remain engaged throughout the journey—from awareness to renewal.
Why Do You Need Sales and Marketing Alignment?
1. Better Sales Enablement
Without alignment, marketing often produces content that sales never uses. In fact, 80% of marketing content goes unused by sales teams. With content marketing now a big driver in digital engagement, there is a lot of wasted opportunities because the teams are not on the same page.
2. Higher Quality Leads
79% of MQLs do not convert into sales due to poor nurturing. When both teams agree on what a qualified lead looks like, they can implement consistent scoring systems. This drastically reduces wasted effort and improves conversion rates.
3. Improved Visibility and ROI
Shared systems for tracking and reporting give both sides visibility into what's working. Marketing can finally prove ROI, while sales gain insight into which campaigns generate real opportunities.
4. Stronger Financial Performance
Companies with poor alignment experience a 4% revenue decline. On the other side, aligned marketing and sales processes see up to 209% higher return from their marketing investment.
5. Cohesive Buying Experience
Today's B2B buyers are nearly 57% - 70% of the way through their decision-making process before they speak to sales. When sales and marketing align, they deliver a consistent, cohesive message throughout the buyer journey, long before a salesperson enters the conversation.
Barriers to Sales and Marketing Teams Alignment
The idea of sales and marketing alignment has gained significant attention in recent years. Many leaders now see it as essential for growth. Yet, putting it into practice is often more complex than many organisations anticipate.
Several barriers can stand in the way:
1. Fragmented Technology and Data Silos
In many organisations, sales and marketing rely on different systems to track their activity. Marketing may focus on automation and campaign analytics, while sales depends on CRM data and pipeline reports.
When these systems don't integrate, valuable insights get stuck in silos. Without a single source of truth, neither team has a complete picture of the customer journey, making collaboration difficult.
2. Conflicting KPIs and Definitions
Success looks very different depending on which side of the table you sit. For marketers, a campaign with a low cost per lead (CPL) might be seen as a win. For sales, however, those leads only matter if they turn into opportunities and revenue. The problem is magnified in B2B, where definitions of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) often vary.
3. Lack of Consistent Communication
Perhaps the most common challenge is the lack of ongoing communication. In many organisations, the two teams operate separately with limited opportunities to exchange ideas, review performance, or plan together. Without regular meetings, clear feedback loops, and a culture of openness, misalignment quickly takes root.
A survey found that 71% of marketing leaders want more visibility into the bottom of the funnel, while 57% of sales leaders want better insights into marketing activity. This gap highlights how communication failures create blind spots on both sides.
Overcoming these barriers requires more than new software or quick fixes. It demands senior marketing leadership that can align strategy, culture, and investment decisions.
Sales and Marketing Data Alignment
Centralising sales and marketing data is the first step towards alignment. When information from campaigns, pipelines, and customer interactions is consolidated into one system, such as HubSpot CRM or an integrated platform, leaders gain a single source of truth.
This makes it possible to:
- Track the entire buyer journey in real time.
- Generate accurate reports and dashboards that combine both historic and live data.
- Create transparency and eliminate silos between teams.
- Encourage better collaboration, with decisions based on facts rather than assumptions.
With this foundation, businesses can finally see performance across the board and identify what truly drives revenue.
How gigCMO Aligns Marketing and Sales Teams
At gigCMO, we know technology alone won't create alignment; it needs to be guided by marketing leadership and embedded into strategy. That's where our Fractional CMO Service comes in:
- Strategic investment decisions: We help you choose and implement the right CRM and marketing automation tools, ensuring platforms like HubSpot are used to their full potential and not left underutilised.
- Playbook-driven alignment: Our playbook approach defines how marketing and sales should use shared data, ensuring transparency, accountability, and consistent lead management across teams.
- Knowledge transfer: We don't just run the system for you. We equip your teams with the skills and processes to interpret data effectively and make better decisions long after our engagement.
Alignment isn't just about fixing inefficiencies; it's about unlocking predictable revenue growth. With gigCMO's Fractional CMO Service, your business gains clarity on where to invest, confidence in how teams work together, and the capability to sustain results. Book your free consultation today and take the first step towards unlocking your biggest revenue opportunity.
