3 pitfalls of sales-marketing misalignment—and how CMOs can bridge the divide.

When these two teams join forces, the rewards for both—and the business—can be transformative.  

Are your marketing and sales teams … on the same team?

They are siloed in many organizations, with marketing focused on long-term brand-building and campaign engagement, and sales under pressure to close deals quickly. 

But companies that align the two are 67% more efficient at closing deals and 15% more profitable. So how can they bridge the sales-marketing divide?

The CMO holds the key.

As a member of the C-suite—with a cross-disciplinary perspective, unique access to both marketing analytics and sales metrics, and broad organizational influence—the chief marketing officer (CMO) is ideally positioned to bring these two teams into alignment. 

Here are three major sources of marketing-sales misalignment, and practical ways CMOs can solve them. 

Mismatch#1: Fractured Storytelling.

In most companies, content creation is marketing’s responsibility—but sales teams often end up developing their own materials if marketing doesn’t have a thorough understanding of their needs.

The problem? If sales reps are delivering different messages than what marketing is promoting, it can have a significant cost to the business. In fact, an AdAge study found that 78% of companies with a lack of consistent messaging across the organization see a negative impact of $6 million or more. That includes:

• Delayed—or lost—sales opportunities. Inconsistent messaging can confuse prospective customers and make them spend extra time evaluating your claims—blocking their progress through the sales funnel.
• Wasted resources. Marketing teams may invest time and effort creating content that sales teams don’t use because it doesn’t address their needs or reflect real customer conversations.
• Damaged brand reputation. When prospects receive mixed messages across different touchpoints, it undermines brand credibility and causes them to question your company’s reliability. 

 

The CMO Solution:

• • Invite sales to collaborate on your story. Your sales team is a rich source of insight into what messages resonate best with customers and prospects. Bring key sales and marketing stakeholders together to develop or update the foundational elements of your brand story, including your elevator pitch, customer value proposition, and overarching messaging themes. Then, document them in a messaging playbook, with examples of how they should be tailored specifically for both marketing and sales materials.
  • Collaborate on content. Establish a regular cadence of marketing-sales planning meetings to share content needs, discuss what’s working well, and identify what new assets are needed by both groups. 
  • Establish a library. Create a shared repository of modular content that marketing and sales staff can use to build their own tools and campaigns. Ensure that messaging addresses customer pain points and is consistent across all materials.

Mismatch #2: Separate success metrics. 

Marketers are typically rewarded for top-of-funnel metrics like lead generation and content engagement, while sales is evaluated on bottom-of-funnel metrics like win rate and deal size. 

Of course, each team prioritizes what they’re measured on, which can create conflict and mismatched expectations about issues including:

• Quantity vs. quality. Imagine a scenario where marketing celebrates generating 1,000 new leads from a trade show—but when sales follows up, they discover only 10 are ready to buy. Both teams worked to meet company expectations, but the overall result is disappointing.
• Credit clashes. If marketing nurtures a lead with content, then sales closes the deal, who gets the credit for the resulting revenue? Both groups think they deserve it—and end up competing rather than collaborating.
• Whose timeline is it anyway? Marketing teams often focus on longer-term projects (like building brand awareness) that can take 6-12 months to show results, while salespeople need to hit monthly or quarterly quotas. This creates tension when company leaders are deciding where to invest resources.

 

The CMO Solution:

• • Establish a shared scorecard. While not every metric applies equally to sales and marketing, track those that measure which collective efforts are moving the needle. These might include acquisition costs by channel and the percentage of leads that convert to sales.
  • Hold regular joint review meetings. Bring both teams together to review weekly results, track monthly trends, make quarterly adjustments, and set annual goals. This promotes more informed and cohesive planning, supports shared accountability, and reduces conflict.
  • Define a “marketing qualified lead.” When everyone agrees on what constitutes an MQL—for example, budget authority, a specific timeline, and demonstrated product interest—marketing can focus on handing off prospects with real potential, sales can follow up on them more confidently, and revenue can be generated more efficiently.

Mismatch #3: Tech-dis-integration 

Sales teams typically rely on CRM systems like Salesforce, while marketing teams operate with platforms like Marketo or HubSpot. But that means working with different versions of reality, including:

• Incomplete customer insights. Marketing and sales don’t have access to each other’s information about individual prospects, leading to poor customer experiences and missed opportunities.
• Conflicting data stories. If they’re pulling reports from different systems, marketing might show 100 qualified leads were delivered to sales, while sales data shows only 75 were received. These discrepancies make it impossible to optimize the revenue process effectively.
• Redundancies. Without integrated systems, marketing might nurture a prospect with emails while sales tries to engage them with similar content—wasting resources and annoying potential customers.

 

The CMO Solution:

• • Integrate the tech stack. Implement technology that syncs data between marketing automation and CRM systems, provides both teams real-time visibility into customer interactions, and creates a single source of truth for customer data.
    
  • Measure success. Track time saved through automated data sharing, reduction in data disputes, and improvement in lead response times and conversion rates.

Keep the lines of communication open.

Today’s CMO must be a strategic architect, responsible for building bridges between traditionally siloed marketing and sales teams to support sustainable revenue growth. That requires an ongoing, cooperative conversation between the two teams, so they can work collaboratively to their mutual benefit—and the good of the company.

 

Ready to tell a cohesive, informed story that works hard for both your sales and marketing teams? Get in touch and let’s talk.