Sales and marketing misalignment isn’t just a problem for those two departments—it’s an organization-wide issue. And it’s one the CEO must address, quickly.
Why?
Because companies with aligned sales and marketing efforts can experience up to a 20% increase in revenue. But when the two are out of sync, they can experience a 4% revenue decrease.
So if you’re a CEO ready to take on the challenge, where do you begin?
You start by listening to the different perspectives from your sales and marketing teams. Now you can better understand why they do what they do. Then you bring them together under one unified process.
In this post, we’ll demonstrate exactly what that looks like.
Alignment starts at the beginning
We believe the best place to start aligning sales and marketing is at the beginning—by launching a coordinated initiative.
As a digital marketing agency, we have our own proven process for launching a marketing program, which we’ll share below. But we also wanted to understand how sales leaders approach the same challenge.
John McLeod
That’s why we partnered with John McLeod, founder of Sales Growth Solutions. John has worked for decades with executive teams and sales organizations to launch successful sales initiatives.
We’re using the word launch, but this approach applies even if your sales and marketing teams are already up and running. It’s a valuable framework for building—or refreshing—your go-to-market strategy, especially as you plan for the year ahead.
To create it, John and I each documented our organization’s blueprint for launch. Then we used those individual blueprints to build a unified sales and marketing launch process, presented here in a table format.
Step 1: Establish the two points of view
Let’s start with the sales perspective from John McLeod.
When John launches a sales program, he focuses on key areas like market assessment, sales process design, pipeline management, and scaling with the right talent and tools. Here’s what his launch program looks like:
Sales Launch
Marketing Launch
Now, let’s take a look at our marketing approach. It’s built on Winbound’s Digital Twin strategic framework, which aligns your messaging, develops targeted content, and distributes it across key digital channels. These steps are typically outlined in a documented marketing strategy. Here’s what our marketing launch process looks like:
Step 2: Align the sales and marketing approaches
Next, we merge the original sales and marketing launch processes into a single, unified framework. Each row represents a key activity or strategic requirement and identifies the responsible department—sales, marketing, or both. Use this integrated view to ensure alignment and coordination between the two functions from day one.
Step 3: Manage the alignment moving forward
If you’ve followed the combined launch table above, you’re already on the path to alignment. But here are a few essential practices to keep the momentum going:
Plan together—regularly. Don’t let collaboration end after the initial launch. Hold joint planning sessions to review goals, metrics, and new initiatives.
Review and collaborate. Have sales review content and marketing listen in on sales calls. Each team brings insights that can sharpen the other.
Use shared tools and dashboards. A single source of truth (CRM, analytics, KPIs) keeps everyone on the same page.
“Your number is my number.” In addition to shared KPIs, identify the one metric—like revenue growth or MQL-to-SQL conversion—that both teams rally around.
“Your comp is my comp.” Look for compensation tie-ins. Reward each to enjoy the fruit of the other’s rewards.
Debrief consistently. Meet monthly to assess what’s working, what’s not, and where to adjust.
Recognize complementary strengths. Sales teams excel at 1:1 communication. Marketing shines in 1:many storytelling. Respect and leverage each other’s skills.
Celebrate wins—together. How about one of those corny team-building exercises? Hey, if you’re hanging out with the sales team, it’s going to be a good time. Go have fun and celebrate those wins together!
We started out this article noting the importance of the CEO in establishing this combined effort. But let’s be clear: This won’t be a study in micro-management. Once the wheels are set in motion, the sales and marketing teams should push and support each other, and not require oversight to play nice.
It will be the CEO who will launch this initiative—but the aligned sales and marketing teams will ultimately make it fly.
