If you’re having problems generating leads or converting leads to sales, the obvious place to look is the alignment of your sales and marketing teams. When numbers are being missed and revenue isn’t coming in as expected, there can be a lot of friction and finger pointing. Sales will blame marketing for not doing its job generating awareness and leads, and marketing will blame sales for not using what it created, and for acting like entitled brats. 

This battle has been going on since I have been working, and I have experienced it on both sides. 

When I was in marketing, developing product and sales training for the sales executives, they thought we were clueless on how to sell and out of touch with what customers actually wanted. They didn’t think we had anything to teach them and were mentally checked out during the training. 

Then, when I was a sales executive, I was irritated that marketing was telling me how I should do my job because they weren’t in the trenches, and they weren’t personally held to a quota. Sometimes the messaging and strategy didn’t make sense with what I was hearing in sales conversations. What the heck did they know? 

In 2024, two analysts at Forrester, John Arnold and Rick Bradberry, completed a survey of B2B organizations, specifically looking at the alignment between sales and marketing. The difference between perceptions at the C-level and the sales and marketing professionals was stunning, although not unexpected from my point of view. 

In “The Truth About B2B Sales And Marketing Alignment,” written by John Arnlold, Principal Analyst for Forrester, he writes:

Truth #1: Sales and marketing are not aligned, even though most leaders think that they are. We found that C-suite executives have sky-high perceptions of alignment (for example, Forrester’s Priorities Survey, 2024, found that an astounding 82% of C-level B2B business and technology professionals say that their product, sales, and marketing teams are aligned, with 41% describing those teams as highly aligned). But Forrester’s Q2 2024 Sales And Marketing Alignment Survey found that 65% of sales and marketing professionals believe there is a lack of alignment between the sales and marketing leaders in their organizations. Our research also found a significant lack of communication, teamwork, trust, and other needed qualities for true alignment.

My colleague, Susan Tyson, called out these statistics and offered her insights as a career marketing professional with a track record of getting sales and marketing to work effectively together in B2B companies. Here is her LinkedIn post. (You can scroll down to read the whole post):

The truth is that sales and marketing need to work closely and be more like chocolate and peanut butter, which are great together, than oil and water, which don’t mix. 

Photo by Bevlea Ross on Unsplash