Let us guess: you are here because sales keep falling short of target. And to make it worse, marketing and sales blame each other for the misses instead of joining forces.
The problem is common. One in four companies believe the two departments are not aligned at all, and while 75% believe there is “some sort of alignment”, only 17% consider themselves highly aligned.
If you are part of the 83% with an alignment gap, either the importance of SMarketing (sales plus marketing) hasn’t landed yet, or a few misconceptions are in the way.
Marketing and sales depend on each other
The first thing to understand is that SMarketing means combining the efforts of two teams with different skills — not merging them into one homogeneous team. The functions genuinely are different; what matters is recognising how interdependent they are.
Because sales deals directly with the customer and knows their pain points first-hand, marketing gains from those insights when optimising campaigns. And because sales depends on marketing-generated leads to hit target, it has to feed marketing the information needed to shape the ideal customer profile and attract qualified leads.
So while the secondary objectives differ, both teams share the same overarching goal — generating revenue for the company. That is precisely why combining efforts is so important.
What misalignment costs
A lack of synergy between the two inevitably means lost business. It is estimated that only 37% of misaligned companies hit their sales targets.
The reason is simple: without coordination, marketing attracts leads with the wrong profile. That sets off a domino effect — sales wastes time chasing deals that were never going to close, while genuinely hot leads get buried in a pipeline full of contacts with no fit and no real interest in the offer.
The impact is predictable: a very high customer acquisition cost, targets that stay out of reach and, underneath it all, a business that isn’t sustainable.
Defining roles and moments of handover
For synergy to exist, each team’s role needs to be clear, along with the moments they interact.
Marketing communicates with a broad audience, and its skill lies in steering activity — as far as possible — towards the audience that actually fits. Marketing budgets are usually limited, so firing in every direction to see what sticks isn’t an option.
Its role, then, is to define the buyer personas, identify the channels where they spend their time and shape a message that captures the attention of people with the pains the product or service solves.
Marketing then builds the mechanism that turns website visits into leads. Through educational content and an image of authority and trust, it converts leads into prospects and hands them to sales.
When sales enters, it is no longer dealing with a broad audience but with qualified leads — sales qualified leads, or SQLs. Marketing has already filtered, educated and built a degree of trust to give sales a better chance, but it is the salesperson who closes.
From there, the rep uses their full set of communication tools — email, phone, video calls, messaging, social selling, in-person meetings — to earn the prospect’s attention and trust.
Their job is then to set out the features, benefits and value proposition with real persuasive force, and connect them to the pains the prospect is actually feeling.
What needs to be aligned
We have established that sales picks up where marketing leaves off in the buying journey, and that each contributes to the other’s success. But which specifics need aligning?
- Ideal customer profile and buyer personas. Salespeople talk to customers directly and should share what they learn in the field to help marketing attract better leads: job title, company size, industry, region, interests, preferred sources of information, pain points and the content they look for.
- Recording information in the CRM. Marketing nurtures leads at the top and middle of the funnel, and knows which content, pages and emails they engaged with and which products they considered. All of it belongs in the CRM, because it is what allows sales to build rapport and convert.
- Lead qualification and lead scoring. When both teams jointly define what counts as a Marketing Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Lead, along with the scoring parameters, sales spends its time only on genuinely interested leads.
- KPI definition. Marketing KPIs (traffic, leads generated, email open rates) and sales KPIs (sales growth, average deal size, number of deals) should be defined separately. But add the end-to-end conversion rate too: how many closed deals began as marketing-created opportunities.
- Complementary targets. Sales cannot hit its numbers unless marketing delivers a certain volume of qualified leads. So a fundamental part of alignment is setting lead generation targets based on what sales actually needs.
- Service Level Agreement. Everything above — plus whatever else matters in your organisation — gets formalised in a Service Level Agreement (SLA), a document that sets out each team’s responsibilities and expectations and keeps the two complementary.
Conclusion
Why is it so important to align sales with marketing? Arguably the better question is why you would not, given that the two are so interdependent that neither really works without the other.
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