Why Your Marketing and Sales Teams Need to Stop Working Separately

Your marketing team generates leads, but sales say they’re not the right fit. Your sales team closes deals, but marketing can’t seem to replicate what worked. You’re hitting your numbers, but it feels more like luck than strategy.

This won’t work for long though.

After analyzing hundreds of post-PMF companies generating $5-30M in ARR, we’ve found a clear pattern: sustainable growth depends heavily on how marketing and sales teams collaborate. While early deals might come through various channels, systematic growth requires these teams to work as a unified force, not separate departments with competing priorities.

In this post, we’ll explore why marketing-sales alignment becomes critical at this stage, and how to build it in a way that drives predictable enterprise growth.

The Real Cost of Misalignment

When marketing and sales teams operate independently, the impact goes far beyond just internal friction. Here’s what we typically see:

Your enterprise deals take longer to close because marketing materials don’t address the right buyer concerns. Sales teams spend valuable time creating their own content or constantly requesting new materials from marketing. Meanwhile, marketing continues producing content that rarely gets used in actual sales conversations.

The qualification process becomes inconsistent. Marketing thinks they’re sending qualified sales-led leads, but sales disagree on what makes an account “enterprise-ready.” This leads to wasted effort on both sides – marketing invests in generating leads that sales won’t pursue, while sales spend time qualifying leads that should have been filtered out earlier.

Most critically, your ability to scale becomes limited. When that first enterprise customer signed, was it because of your systematic approach, or was it through a founder relationship? Without alignment between marketing and sales, it’s nearly impossible to create a repeatable process that captures what actually works in winning enterprise deals.

These issues become especially problematic when you’re trying to:

• Move upmarket to larger enterprise accounts
• Reduce dependency on founder relationships
• Prove to investors that your growth is systematic and repeatable
• Scale your sales team beyond the first few reps
• Shorten your increasingly complex sales cycles

Building-blocks of Effective Marketing-Sales Alignment

Let’s get practical about what real alignment looks like and how to achieve it.

Unified Account Definition

One of the biggest disconnects we see is the different definitions of an “ideal” account. Marketing targets companies based on firmographic data, while sales have learned through experience which characteristics actually indicate a good fit. The solution? Create a shared ideal customer profile that incorporates both marketing’s data-driven insights and sales’ field experience.

Shared Success Metrics

Too often, marketing celebrates hitting lead generation targets while sales struggle to convert those leads. Instead, both teams should focus on shared outcomes:

• Account engagement levels
• Sales cycle length
• Deal size
• Win rates
• Customer lifetime value

Clear Buying Journey Ownership

A common pitfall we see is confusion around who owns which part of the customer journey. Marketing might nurture an account for months, only to have sales jump in too early – or too late. The key is establishing clear ownership and transition points based on actual buying behavior, not just internal processes.

For example, when a target account shows specific buying signals (like multiple stakeholders engaging with enterprise-focused content), that should trigger a coordinated response. Marketing continues its nurture programs while sales begin its outreach, each team knowing its role in moving the account forward. This coordination prevents the common scenario where promising accounts get stuck in limbo between marketing and sales efforts.

How to Achieve Marketing-Sales Alignment

Joint Account Planning and Reviews

Transform your quarterly planning sessions into strategic alignment workshops. Instead of the typical scenario where marketing presents their campaigns and sales shares their targets, structure these sessions around account-specific strategies.

Have your teams collaboratively identify 10-15 key enterprise accounts to focus on each quarter. For each account, map out specific stakeholders, current engagement levels, and potential barriers to entry.

Marketing can share intent signals and content engagement data, while sales provide insights from actual customer conversations and competitive intelligence. This joint planning ensures both teams are invested in the same outcomes and understand their roles in achieving them.

You can also set up a shared dashboard in HubSpot that tracks both marketing and sales signals for your top 15 accounts. For instance, if you’re targeting a company, your dashboard would show:

• Marketing Signals: Downloads of enterprise security whitepapers, attendance at your technical webinars, engagement with pricing pages
• Sales Signals: Recent conversations, stakeholder map, current objections, competitive situation When the dashboard shows multiple stakeholders engaging with technical content, both teams can quickly mobilize – marketing adjusts their nurture content while sales times their outreach accordingly.

Create a Revenue Team Structure

Rather than maintaining traditional departmental boundaries, establish a dedicated revenue team that includes both marketing and sales professionals. This team should meet weekly to review account progress, share insights, and adjust strategies. The key is to focus these meetings on specific accounts and opportunities, not general updates.

For example, if marketing sees increased content engagement from key stakeholders at a target account, the revenue team can quickly develop a coordinated approach – perhaps combining marketing’s thought leadership campaign with sales’ direct outreach to specific decision-makers. This structure enables quick adjustments based on real-time feedback and ensures resources are allocated to the most promising opportunities.

To implement this, you can create a simple weekly “Account Action” meeting with this agenda:

• Monday 9-9:30 AM: Review top 5 active accounts
• Each account gets 5 minutes
• Marketing shares: New content engagement, website activity, event participation
• Sales shares: Recent conversations, next steps, blockers

From here on you can take a joint decision on the next actions. For example, if you see the CTO and Security Director from your target account both engaged with your compliance documentation, you can immediately plan coordinated outreach specific to their roles.

Implement an Account Scoring Framework

Develop a unified scoring system that combines both marketing and sales signals. Start by analyzing your recently won enterprise deals – what combination of activities and engagement typically led to success? Your framework should include both quantitative metrics (like content engagement, website visits, and event attendance) and qualitative insights (such as stakeholder involvement, budget discussions, and technical evaluation readiness).

Make sure that both teams use this scoring system to prioritize their efforts. When a target account reaches certain score thresholds, it should trigger specific actions from both marketing and sales, creating a seamless transition through the buying journey.

To build your scoring system, break down your scoring into key buying signals:

• Technical engagement (like API documentation downloads),
• budget authority signals (senior leaders viewing pricing),
• solution fit indicators (industry-specific case study engagement),
• and stakeholder involvement (multiple department heads engaging with content).

Each signal carries points based on how strongly it indicates buying intent. For example, when a CTO downloads your security whitepaper (10 points) and their technical team attends your implementation webinar (7 points), you know they’re seriously evaluating. Once an account hits certain thresholds – say 50 points for SDR outreach — both marketing and sales teams will know exactly what actions to take.

Establish a Shared Content Creation Process

Transform your content development from a marketing-led process to a collaborative effort. Start by having sales record the actual questions and objections they encounter in customer conversations. Use these insights to create a prioritized content calendar that addresses real sales challenges.

For each major piece of content, have sales review early drafts to ensure they align with customer conversations. Once the content is published, track its usage in actual sales situations and gather feedback on its effectiveness. This approach ensures your content directly supports sales conversations while giving marketing clear insights into what works in the field.

The Compounding Effect of Getting This Right

Here’s something we’ve observed across hundreds of Series A companies: When marketing and sales finally click together, the impact goes far beyond just closing more deals.

Your product team suddenly gets clearer feedback loops, as both marketing and sales funnel consistent insights about enterprise needs. Your customer success team finds onboarding smoother because expectations were properly set during the sales process. Even your engineering roadmap benefits from better-qualified enterprise requirements.

And most importantly, your story to investors transforms. Instead of showing them a few impressive but isolated wins, you can demonstrate a systematic engine for enterprise growth – backed by data and repeatable processes.

The next six months are critical for building this foundation. The companies that get it right now will have a significant advantage in an increasingly competitive market.

Ready to transform your early enterprise wins into systematic success? Join other post-PMF companies in our ABM Accelerator Program and build the growth engine your board wants to see.

Let’s make your next enterprise win the start of a pattern, not an exception.