Sales and marketing alignment is a critical step in revenue operations, but it rarely happens on its own. Here are five signs your teams are pulling in different directions, and what it actually takes to bring them back together.
Part of the work in revenue operations is owning how well sales and marketing actually get along, because without real alignment between them, you do not have a growth team, you have two departments that happen to share a logo.
As a chief marketing officer, I often sat across from a sales leader convinced marketing was not sending enough inbound leads. At the same time, sales qualified leads sat untouched for hours before anyone made contact, and some were eventually marked unable to contact and abandoned, affecting the number of sales qualified leads marketing had driven, which was marketing's own KPI, and leaving the marketing team frustrated.
This is what misalignment looks like in practice: missed targets, wasted spend, a pipeline that never matches the forecast, and often team conflict, with each side pointing fingers and the working relationship turning sour.
When I became chief revenue officer, the success of both teams mattered to me equally, not just one end of the funnel. Aligning sales and marketing became my priority in building a proper revenue operations process.
Strong alignment is consistently linked to significantly higher revenue growth. As Melbourne based marketing leader Erin Smart noted in 2025, drawing on LinkedIn's B2B Benchmark Report, companies with strong marketing and sales alignment grow 19 per cent faster and are 15 per cent more profitable than those without it.
Before any of this works, both teams need to be using the same basic tools, starting with a shared CRM. Without that foundation, the fixes below have nowhere to live.
This goes beyond agreeing on what a lead is, but on important factors such as what each lifecycle stage means for both teams, what the lead scoring variables and weighting are, and the exact point a lead is marked unqualified and the responsibility for it moves back to marketing.
Fix it by deciding these definitions collectively, as they shape individual performance and often remuneration, so genuine buy in matters as much as the definitions themselves. It is also the job of whoever holds the CRO or commercial leadership seat to layer these definitions with the wider business requirements, so they represent every stakeholder rather than just the two teams involved.
Many businesses stop at one headline number, such as overall conversion from sales qualified lead to closed deal, which hides exactly where the leak is happening and does not show what actually needs optimising.
Fix it by going deeper on both sides. On top of the regular marketing only metrics such as sessions, leads, cost per lead, and other channel specific metrics like open and click rates, marketing should track how many sales qualified leads each channel produces that become pipeline and closed revenue, as well as how many come back unqualified or unable to contact per channel. Sales should track time to contact per rep, what lead status each rep's sales qualified leads are sitting in, such as unqualified, unable to contact, or contacted, and conversion at every deal stage, not just the top line figure. More visibility by stage, channel, and salesperson means the team optimises together instead of trading blame.
In sales, data integrity comes down to how well each salesperson keeps their part of the CRM tidy, updating deal properties as a deal progresses and logging where a lead came from so marketing has a secondary reference for source data.
Fix it by recognising that automation captures most of this, but some only gets recorded manually depending on the lead's journey. Doing the right thing for the other team benefits the whole business, and the commercial leader needs to repeat and reward that message often.
Data visibility alone does not fix anything.
Fix it by agreeing, as one team, on soft targets and service level agreements once the numbers are visible to everyone, such as a shared time to contact target for new sales qualified leads.
The last sign is cultural, not operational. Sales is often busy with less day to day structure than marketing, and without a regular forum, feedback tends to happen in fragments rather than honestly and in the open.
Fix it by meeting regularly as one team, in person where possible, which builds more clarity and trust than the same conversation over messages. The first thing I did when I became chief revenue officer was change the team name to the 'growth team', rather than sales and marketing, which creates a real sense of unity from the outset. I then set up a weekly growth team meeting to review a shared performance dashboard, so everyone became familiar with the key metrics each side was responsible for, and feedback and ideas naturally started flowing between the two groups. Regular bonding outside work, shared seating, fair mediation during frustrations, and generous credit to both sides all build that trust over time.
Each of these signs points back to the same root cause: sales and marketing operating as two separate functions instead of one connected revenue engine. This is the core purpose of revenue operations.
The real shift for me came once sales and marketing sat under one team that I led. I could finally hear both sides properly, and we set targets that reflected what was best for the business, with enough transparency that neither team had to guess what the other was doing. No growth team is aligned from day one. It is constant work in progress, and it can take months, sometimes years, to get right.
How is your growth team alignment right now? Are your teams left frustrated, or genuinely working together towards the same goal?
Main image by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash
Nina Jung is a Sydney-based growth strategist who works with founders as a fractional CMO and CRO, bringing senior-level strategy and hands-on execution at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. She also mentors early-stage founders and business students through GrowthMentor, Startmate, and UNSW.
