B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment: An Actionable Guide

B2B sales and marketing alignment create a cohesive customer experience in the buyer’s journey. If these teams are misaligned, you’ll see clear signs like attracting low-quality leads that don’t convert or churn soon after conversion. The blame game begins between teams, ultimately resulting in a loss of revenue. In this article, we’ll look into what it takes to align B2B sales and marketing teams and how to do it strategically. 

Let’s first align on what B2B sales and marketing alignment means. 

What does B2B sales and marketing alignment really mean? 

When you say “B2B sales and marketing alignment,” you mean “B2B revenue alignment”. This alignment delivers a cohesive customer experience to maximize revenue. 

It involves bringing all teams and departments together and setting up one north-star metric. This ensures all departments in your company, including sales, marketing, product, support, and customer success, share the same vision and keep everyone accountable toward one goal that represents success. 

B2B sales and marketing alignment is more than a structural shift; it is a strategic and mindset shift that growing revenue teams need. According to HubSpot’s sales trends report, around 70% of sales professionals feel more aligned with marketing teams in 2024 than the previous year. 

Where are you at when it comes to sales and marketing alignment? 

How to strategically align B2B sales and marketing teams

When there’s a constant struggle for attribution, the gaps in seeking the right customers broaden. Sales keeps targeting big deals that bring huge revenue (and more incentives), whereas marketing focuses on the low-hanging fruits that can fuel their lead generation engine. 

The teams are doing what’s best for them in their respective departments, but this prevents them from making a sizeable impact on the business. These gaps don’t close organically. 

You must consciously solve for revenue alignment to bring these teams together. 

1. Set one North Star for everyone

Before setting the unifying goal, it’s essential to see sales, marketing, implementation, and customer success as one team. This is the revenue team. Once they’re together, consistently promote your North Star metric among the team. Whenever you discuss a new idea or initiative, see how it aligns with your North-Star metric. 

This metric may or may not be directly linked to revenue. For example, it can be related to product usage. In every company meeting, consistently discuss this metric so it becomes an ingrained company value. When all your teams strive toward the same goal, it automatically makes the company’s messaging consistent across all departments. 

This ensures that your teams are well-aligned toward one thing that drives revenue.

Sales and marketing teams must understand the buyer’s journey similarly, helping them engage the audience effectively at every touchpoint. 

Here’s an example of a typical customer journey map from TechTarget. 

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Ensure all teams have ownership of metrics one level deeper in the funnel. Simply put, the marketing team would own a number of marketing-qualified leads (MQL), and how many would be turned into SQLs (sales-qualified leads). 

Similarly, salespeople will own several prospects in the funnel, and how many of them turned into opportunities after the implementation team qualified them. 

Make sure you also incentivize your people for the one-level deeper metric. Simply giving ownership will not help until there is an incentive structure in place. 

2. Make communication and collaboration easier 

The idea here is to let teams collaborate naturally rather than forcefully. When teams share goals and the corresponding metrics (one-level deeper KPI), collaboration is easier, and teams have the support they need to influence their metrics. 

In this approach, you would own a metric aligned with your processes,  and additionally, you’ll partially own another KPI beyond the point where your processes conclude. Ensure all of these performance indicators are aligned toward the North Star metric you set in the first step. 

Suppose MQL gets disqualified as an SQL. The sales leader can share feedback directly from the customer, helping marketing optimize their targeting and refining their ideal customer profile (ICP). 

If your company has a remote or hybrid work environment, you might encounter a lack of accountability, but it’s easy to solve.

‍Did you know? Reelay, a corporate AI meeting assistant, automatically captures meeting minutes, action items, highlights, discussion topics, and questions from a meeting. You can assign actions from Reelay’s dashboard, making it easier to keep teams more accountable for the actions discussed. 

3. Align teams with a process

To ensure natural alignment between B2B sales, marketing, and other teams, you need to create processes that consistently keep these teams aligned. For example, create a process for marketing folks to shadow sales demos periodically, like two times a month. 

If marketing shadowing a demo is tricky, sales can share recordings that marketing teams can go through in an async manner. However, at times, salespeople might not be comfortable sharing entire recordings or naturally feel friction when the demo didn’t go as planned or they’ve innocently committed a mistake. 

Ideally, a company’s culture wouldn’t limit anyone from discussing their mistakes openly and would likely encourage people to do so. But this isn’t an ideal world; neither are all salespeople the same. 

Some might feel the friction; some might not. When you create a standardized process, it’s essential that all team members adopt it. To encourage this adoption, you can create a process for sharing meeting minutes from sales demos instead of full transcripts or recordings.

Here’s an example of how Reelay automatically captures and sends the essential meeting information over email. 

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Or, you can convert your meeting recordings to Micro Meeting™, which is easy to share with the team. This keeps them posted about valuable notes taken automatically from the call. 

4. Give and take feedback consistently

Sales and marketing teams need consistent feedback from each other to keep the alignment effective. It’s not just about input on performance but more holistic feedback about how customers' needs are changing and how the revenue team can adapt. 

For example, if salespeople regularly encounter situations where prospects compare them with a new product, the marketing team can create battle cards to ensure that all sales reps address these situations. 

Similarly, when the marketing team struggles with generating high-quality leads, sales can provide feedback to refine the messaging based on client expectations. 

The impact of aligning sales, marketing, and other teams

Effective collaboration and alignment between sales, marketing, and other departments have several benefits. Here are a few results you’ll see:

• Identifying issues becomes easier. When aligned teams work toward achieving the North-Star metric, it becomes easier to identify issues and mitigate risks before they become a bigger problem. 
• Improving understanding of the ideal customer. All your teams will be going after the ideal customer profile refined consistently in the process of a team owning the one-step deeper metric. This ultimately improves lead quality and increases your chances of closing them. 
• Attract top talent to your team. Teams that avoid the blame game experience less friction in performing their work. This makes top players excited about working with your team, where they face minimal friction after the North-Star metric you set for them. 

When everyone on your team works toward the same goal, everyone feels inspired and responsible for moving closer. This creates a supportive environment for your team to work in. 

Here’s what different companies observed when it comes to sales and marketing alignment: 

• Business growth. LinkedIn found 87% of sales and marketing leaders achieved higher business growth with robust alignment between the two departments. 
• Increased sales-win rate and retention rate. Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing show a 36% higher customer retention rate and 38% higher sales win rate. 

It directly impacts the revenue when aligned teams deliver a higher revenue than set targets, improving the profitability and an organization’s bottom line. 

Aligning teams strategically

This B2B sales and marketing alignment approach will help you make mindset and structural shifts in an organization and its hierarchy. It will also help you develop processes that these teams follow to use the alignment to achieve and exceed business goals that matter. 

Align teams toward one goal that matters the most for your business. 

Frequently asked questions

1. What is the primary benefit of aligning the sales and marketing teams? 

An aligned sales and marketing team delivers a more cohesive and impactful buying experience. 

2.  What is the impact of not aligning sales and marketing teams?

According to HubSpot's research, 52.2% of sales professionals feel that sales and marketing misalignment results in lost sales.