Is Your Sales and Marketing Disconnect Costing You Deals?

You hired a marketing person to generate leads. They’re creating content, running campaigns, and updating the website. They’re busy.

You have salespeople making calls, taking meetings, and working deals. They’re busy too.

But when you look at the results, something’s off. Marketing says they’re delivering leads. Sales says the leads aren’t qualified. Both teams are frustrated. Revenue isn’t hitting targets. And you’re caught in the middle, wondering why two functions that should work together feel like they’re operating in different businesses.

If you’re a founder of a professional services firm, this disconnect isn’t just annoying. It’s expensive. When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, you’re paying twice for half the results. According to research from HubSpot, 52.2% of sales professionals say the biggest impact of sales and marketing team misalignment is lost sales and revenue.

The Symptoms Everyone Recognizes

Here’s what sales and marketing misalignment looks like in practice:

Marketing creates materials sales doesn’t use. Your marketing team spent weeks developing case studies, one-pagers, and pitch decks. Sales keeps using the old PowerPoint they made themselves three years ago. Marketing is frustrated their work goes unused. Sales says the materials don’t address what prospects actually ask about.
Sales complains that leads aren’t qualified. Marketing reports they delivered 50 leads this month. Sales says maybe five were worth calling. Marketing insists they met the agreed criteria. Sales says “warm body with an email address” isn’t qualified. Nobody agrees on what “qualified” actually means.
Both teams work hard, but the results disappoint. Marketing hits their activity metrics—downloads, website traffic, email opens. Sales hits their call volume and meeting numbers. But pipeline isn’t growing at the rate needed to hit revenue targets. Everyone’s busy, but the business isn’t moving forward.
Finger-pointing replaces problem-solving. When deals don’t close, sales blames marketing for poor lead quality. When the pipeline is thin, marketing blames sales for not following up fast enough. The conversation becomes about whose fault it is instead of how to fix it.
The founder becomes the translator. You find yourself in the middle, explaining marketing’s perspective to sales and sales’s feedback to marketing. You’re spending hours per week mediating, clarifying, and trying to get both teams moving in the same direction.

This pattern is common enough that most founders assume it’s just how things work. Marketing and sales have always been separate functions with different goals. Some friction is inevitable, right?

Actually, no. The friction isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom of a specific structural problem.

The Root Cause Nobody Addresses

Sales and marketing misalignment doesn’t happen because you hired the wrong people or because the teams don’t like each other. It happens because they’re operating from fundamentally different assumptions about three critical things:

1. Different Assumptions About the Buyer Journey

Marketing typically thinks in stages: awareness, consideration, decision. They build programs to move prospects through these stages sequentially. Content for awareness. Webinars for consideration. Case studies for decision.

Sales experiences reality differently. Prospects don’t move linearly. They circle back. They jump stages. They’re in decision mode one week and back to research the next. The neat funnel marketing builds doesn’t match the messy reality sales navigates daily.

Neither perspective is wrong. But when they don’t align these views, marketing creates programs for a buyer journey that doesn’t match what sales actually experiences. The content doesn’t fit the conversations. The nurture sequences don’t match the sales cycle. Everything feels slightly off.

2. Different Success Metrics

Marketing gets measured on things like leads generated, content downloads, website traffic, and engagement rates. They’re incentivized to maximize volume and demonstrate activity.

Sales gets measured on revenue, deals closed, and pipeline created. They’re incentivized to focus time on opportunities most likely to close.

These metrics aren’t inherently incompatible. But without shared goals, they create opposing behaviors. Marketing optimizes for volume to hit lead targets, even if quality suffers. Sales ignores marketing leads to focus on self-generated opportunities that “actually have a chance.”

Both teams are doing exactly what they’re being measured on. The problem is they’re being measured on different things.

3. Different Role Definitions

Marketing sees their job as generating awareness, creating interest, and delivering leads to sales. Once a lead is “qualified” (by their definition), the handoff happens. Their work is done.

Sales sees their job starting when a prospect is actually ready to have a real conversation about doing business. Everything before that is marketing’s responsibility, or so they think.

The gap between “qualified by marketing” and “ready for sales” is where opportunities die. Nobody owns the middle ground. Prospects who need more nurturing get pushed to sales too early. Prospects who are ready to buy get stuck in marketing automation too long.

The Diagnostic Conversation Guide

Most firms try to fix sales and marketing alignment with process changes: better lead scoring, more frequent meetings, and new CRM workflows. These help, but they’re treating symptoms, not causes.

Real alignment starts with a different kind of conversation, one where both teams surface their actual assumptions and experiences rather than just reporting metrics.

Here are the questions sales and marketing should ask each other:

Questions Marketing Should Ask Sales:

When you talk to prospects, what stage are they actually in? Are they exploring options, comparing vendors, or ready to make a decision?
What objections or questions come up repeatedly that our current materials don’t address?
When you look at the leads we send, what information is missing that you need to have a productive conversation?
What would a “sales ready” lead look like? Walk me through a recent example.
Which pieces of marketing content do you actually use? What makes them useful?
If you could change one thing about how we deliver leads to you, what would it be?

Questions Sales Should Ask Marketing:

When you categorize someone as “qualified,” what assumptions are you making about their readiness to buy?
What happens to leads after we mark them as “not ready”? Do they go back into nurture, or do we lose them?
How do prospects typically interact with our content before they reach out? What’s the pattern?
What information do you need from sales conversations to improve targeting and messaging?
When deals close, what role did marketing touchpoints play? Do we know?
If you could sit in on five sales calls, what would you want to learn?

Questions Both Teams Should Ask Together:

Can we map out the actual journey our best clients took from first contact to closed deal? What does that reveal?
Where are prospects falling out of the process? Is it a marketing problem, sales problem, or both?
What does “qualified” actually mean for our business? Can we define it in terms both teams agree on?
Are we aligned on who our ideal client is? Would we both describe the same company?
How long does our sales cycle actually take? Does marketing’s nurture timeline match that reality?
What’s one thing marketing could do differently that would make sales more effective? What’s one thing sales could do differently that would help marketing improve?

The goal isn’t to find perfect answers. It’s to surface the disconnects. Once both teams understand where their assumptions differ, you can start building shared understanding.

A Simple Shared Metrics Framework

Alignment improves dramatically when sales and marketing share at least some of the same success metrics. Not all metrics need to be shared. Marketing will always care about things sales doesn’t, and vice versa. But there should be overlap.

Here’s a basic framework that creates meaningful shared accountability:

Shared Metric 1: Pipeline Created

Both teams should be measured on qualified pipeline generated, not just leads or activities. This shifts marketing from “we sent 50 leads” to “we contributed to $200K in pipeline.” It shifts sales from “marketing leads don’t work” to evaluating whether marketing-sourced pipeline is growing. Companies with aligned sales and marketing teams generate 208% more revenue from marketing efforts.

How to implement: Track pipeline by source (marketing-generated, sales-generated, partner, etc.). Set joint targets for total pipeline created. Review together monthly.

Shared Metric 2: Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion

This is the bridge metric. It measures how effectively leads become real opportunities. Low conversion indicates a qualification problem—either marketing’s criteria are off, or sales isn’t following up appropriately, or the handoff process is broken. According to Gartner, one of the most critical parts of effective lead management is for marketing and sales to jointly define what makes a good lead.

How to implement: Define clear criteria for when a lead becomes an opportunity. Track the percentage that convert. If it’s below 20%, you have a qualification or follow-up problem to diagnose together.

Shared Metric 3: Velocity Through Stages

How long do opportunities sit in each stage? Fast movement suggests good alignment between marketing’s nurture and sales’s process. Stalls indicate disconnects.

How to implement: Track average days in each pipeline stage. Look for bottlenecks. Discuss as a team whether marketing can help accelerate specific stages.

Individual Metrics (Still Important):

Marketing-specific: Traffic, engagement, content performance, brand awareness, campaign ROI

Sales-specific: Win rate, deal size, sales cycle length, individual quota attainment

The shared metrics don’t replace individual metrics. They supplement them. You want both teams focused on their specific craft while also being accountable to joint outcomes.

The Customer Journey Mapping Exercise

One of the most effective alignment exercises is mapping the actual customer journey together. Not the theoretical funnel. The real, messy path your clients take.

Here’s how to facilitate this internally:

Step 1: Pick 5-10 recent clients (ideally won in the last 6-12 months). Choose a mix of sizes and sources.

Step 2: Gather both teams in a room (or video call) with a whiteboard or large paper.

Step 3: For each client, reconstruct their journey chronologically:

How did they first hear about you?
What content did they engage with? (Pull from your CRM and marketing automation)
When did sales first connect with them?
What conversations happened? What questions came up?
How long between first contact and closed deal?
What materials or touchpoints were most important?

Step 4: Look for patterns:

Do clients typically engage with content for weeks or months before sales contact?
Are there specific pieces of content that appear frequently in won deals?
How long is the real sales cycle versus what you assumed?
Where do prospects get stuck? What unsticks them?
Do marketing and sales touchpoints overlap effectively, or are there gaps?

Step 5: Identify disconnects:

Is marketing handing off too early or too late?
Is there content missing for critical stages?
Are sales conversations happening before prospects have enough context?
Are qualified prospects sitting in marketing automation when they’re ready to talk to sales?

Step 6: Build a shared journey map that reflects reality, not theory. Document:

Typical timeline from awareness to close
Key content or touchpoints at each stage
Handoff triggers (when does marketing pass to sales?)
Shared definitions of qualified, opportunity, etc.

This exercise does two things. First, it creates shared understanding of what actually works. Second, it makes visible where the current process doesn’t match reality. Those gaps become your priorities for improvement.

Why This Is Hard (And Why It Stays Broken)

Understanding why sales and marketing should align is easy. Actually achieving alignment is hard. Here’s why:

They’re measured differently. Even when you add shared metrics, individual performance reviews and bonuses are typically based on function-specific goals. Marketing gets judged on marketing metrics. Sales gets judged on sales results. When push comes to shove, people optimize for what determines their compensation.
They report to different people. In many firms, marketing reports to the CEO or a CMO, and sales reports to the CEO or a CRO. This creates two separate reporting chains with potentially different priorities. Even with the best intentions, alignment suffers when there’s no single leader accountable for both functions working together.
They speak different languages. Marketing talks about funnels, conversion rates, MQLs, and SQLs. Sales talks about pipeline, deal stages, objections, and close rates. These aren’t just different vocabularies—they reflect different mental models of how the business works. Translation requires ongoing effort.
Alignment requires ongoing maintenance. You can’t just align once and be done. Markets change. Messaging evolves. New people join. Processes drift. What works this quarter might not work next quarter. Maintaining effective sales and marketing alignment requires regular check-ins, shared planning sessions, and continuous recalibration.
There’s no neutral arbiter. When sales and marketing disagree about strategy or priorities, who decides? Usually it’s the founder or CEO. But you’re already overloaded. Playing referee between sales and marketing becomes another time sink. The dysfunction continues because nobody has the bandwidth to really fix it.

This is why many founders live with misalignment even though they know it’s costly. The path to alignment requires sustained effort, structural changes, and consistent leadership attention. It’s not a project you complete. It’s an ongoing discipline.

Two Paths Forward

Some teams can facilitate this alignment work themselves. They use the diagnostic questions above, map their customer journey, establish shared metrics, and steadily improve coordination over 6-12 months. Progress is incremental but real.

The teams that succeed with this approach typically have:

A leader willing to hold both teams accountable to shared outcomes
Enough process discipline to actually implement and track shared metrics
Regular (at least monthly) joint planning and review sessions
Trust between the teams (they assume good intent even when results disappoint)

If you have these conditions, the frameworks in this post can guide your work. Set aside dedicated time. Work through the diagnostic questions. Map your real customer journey. Define shared success. Iterate as you learn.

Other teams quickly realize they need an outside facilitator. Someone who speaks both sales and marketing languages. Someone who can ask the hard questions, surface the real disconnects, and help design solutions that work for your specific business.

This isn’t about hiring someone to do sales or marketing for you. It’s about bringing in expertise to establish the foundation—the shared understanding, the aligned metrics, the clear handoffs—so your teams can execute effectively.

Building alignment between sales and marketing is foundational to scaling professional services firms. Without it, you’re running two separate engines that sometimes pull in opposite directions.

What Happens Next

Sales and marketing misalignment is expensive in ways that don’t show up on a P&L line item. You can’t easily quantify the cost of leads that die in the handoff, sales time wasted on unqualified conversations, marketing programs nobody uses, or revenue opportunities missed because the teams weren’t coordinated.

But you feel it. In the frustration during joint meetings. In the finger pointing when targets are missed. In your own exhaustion from playing translator.

The good news: alignment is solvable. It requires honest diagnosis, shared accountability, and consistent effort. But it’s solvable.

Ask yourself:

Can I clearly articulate our customer journey in a way both sales and marketing would recognize and agree with?
Do sales and marketing share any success metrics, or are they measured entirely differently?
When was the last time both teams sat down together to discuss what’s working and what’s not?
If I asked sales and marketing separately “what does a qualified lead look like,” would I get the same answer?
Are we treating alignment as a priority, or just hoping it improves on its own?

If you hesitated on any of those questions, alignment gaps are likely costing you pipeline and revenue.

Some founders grab the frameworks in this post and start the alignment work themselves. They schedule the diagnostic conversations, facilitate the journey mapping, and establish shared metrics. It takes discipline, but it works.

Others recognize they need someone who’s done this before. Someone who can ask the questions both teams need to hear, help them surface uncomfortable truths, and guide them to solutions that stick. Our Align phase is designed specifically for this: getting sales and marketing rowing in the same direction, with shared understanding of who you serve and how you win.

Either way, the key is starting. Sales and marketing alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when someone decides the dysfunction is too expensive to tolerate and commits to fixing it.

The question isn’t whether alignment matters. It’s whether you’re ready to do the work to achieve it.