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Sales and marketing are meant to drive growth together. Yet misalignment between these departments remains one of the biggest challenges for B2B companies. Everyone talks about “sales and marketing alignment”, but few organizations actually understand what meaningful alignment looks like in practice. Executives nod enthusiastically when consultants preach about “breaking down silos,” but when it comes to implementing real change, many teams find themselves lost—unsure where to begin or what specific actions will move the needle. When sales and marketing teams operate with conflicting goals, separate data sources, and misaligned processes, it creates inefficiencies that directly impact revenue.

In this article, we’ll explore the reasons behind this misalignment and also explore some strategies to get sales and marketing work together.

Why Companies Struggle with Sales & Marketing Alignment

In many organizations, sales and marketing departments operate on separate tracks. Here are some of the biggest roadblocks to alignment:

1. No Clear Definition of “Alignment”: Many organizations use the term “alignment” without truly defining what it means for their teams. Without a common definition/understanding, both departments continue operating in silos with different expectations.
2. Lack of a Single Source of Truth: Sales and marketing often rely on separate systems, processes, and data sets, leading to conflicting insights. This fragmentation results in poor decision-making and a lack of trust between teams.
3. The Ownership Problem: Marketing owns marketing systems, and sales controls the CRM. Lack of joint ownership leads to poor processes, handoffs, and unnecessary spends. The situation worsens when specialized teams like demand generation, field marketing, marketing operations, outbound sales, sales enablement, and sales analytics operate independently, each with limited visibility into the others’ work.

Why Alignment Matters: Business Benefits

Tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience higher customer retention rates and sales win rates. Here are other business benefits of sales and marketing alignment:

1. Unified Data for Consistency and Accuracy
   When sales and marketing teams operate from a single source of truth, they get a clear view of campaign results, customer interactions, and sales efforts. This eliminates silos and makes sure both teams are working with the same information, metrics, and goals.
2. Actionable Insights at Every Level
   With aligned systems and processes, organizations gain both micro and macro insights that drive decision-making. At the micro level, teams can track individual campaign effectiveness and lead progression. At the macro level, they can understand overall business performance.
3. Process and Technology Optimization
   Sales and marketing alignment drives operational excellence through optimized processes and better technology utilization. This streamlined approach not only improves efficiency but directly contributes to business growth by ensuring that both teams can execute their strategies more effectively, ultimately driving better business outcomes.

Additionally, with better targeting and nurturing, companies spend less on acquiring new customers. Every dollar spent is more effectively allocated, leading to more revenue.

How to Align Sales & Marketing Functions

Despite the benefits, achieving alignment remains challenging. As per Forrester’s Q2 2024 Sales and Marketing Alignment Survey, 65% of sales and marketing professionals believe there is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing leaders in their organizations While aligning these teams is a long-term game, here’s how your organization can get started:

1. Smart Customer Journey Tracking
   What It Means:
   Create a comprehensive tracking process across all platforms that monitors how contacts advance through each stage of their buying journey.
   How to Execute:
   • Map out key touchpoints in your customer lifecycle
   • Identify specific triggers that move contacts to the next stage
   • Monitor the time contacts spend in each stage, and how many times do they repeat a stage
   Business Impact: Better pipeline forecasting and ability to optimize the customer journey at each stage.
   
2. Scoring What Matters
   What It Means:
   Build a scoring model that identifies truly sales-ready leads by measuring engagements that directly indicate buying intent.
   How to Execute:
   • Weight content interactions based on their correlation with sales readiness
   • Track and score participation in high-value events
   • Measure meaningful offline interactions with prospects
   • Incorporate sales team feedback on lead quality signals.
   Business Impact: Sales teams can confidently prioritize prospects who are genuinely interested in making investments, while marketing can focus on activities that generate qualified opportunities
   
3. Unified Performance Reporting
   What It Means:
   Establish a single source of truth for all marketing and sales performance metrics, from individual activities to overall business impact.
   How to Execute:
   • Create shared dashboards showing both team-specific and combined KPIs
   • Set up clear goals in your CRM for all teams – Sales rep quotas and activity targets, Marketing campaign performance metrics, Demand generation goals, Revenue operations benchmarks
   • Track real-time progress against targets
   • Include both detailed (micro) and high-level (macro) insights
   Business Impact: Teams work from the same data, make faster decisions, and stay aligned on progress toward shared business objectives.
   
4. Impact Measurement Framework
   What It Means:
   Create a transparent system that properly credits both marketing and sales activities throughout the buyer’s journey.
   How to Execute:
   • Define clear attribution rules for all types of engagement
   • Set up weighted distribution of credit across touchpoints
   • Track the influence of both marketing campaigns and sales activities
   • Measure the combined impact on opportunity progression
   • Document ROI for different types of sales and marketing investments
   Business Impact: Fair recognition of all activities that contribute to wins leads to better budget allocation and more effective collaboration between teams.
   
5. Data Quality Management
   What It Means:
   Build processes that safeguard valuable lead information and maintain data integrity across all systems.
   How to Execute:
   • Implement automated data quality checks
   • Set up regular system audits
   • Create early warning alerts for potential issues
   • Establish clear protocols for data cleanup and maintenance
   Business Impact: No valuable leads slip through the cracks, and teams can rely on accurate, up-to-date information for decision-making.
   
6. Cross-Team Feedback System
   What It Means:
   Create structured channels for sales and marketing teams to share insights, review performance, and continuously improve their joint efforts.
   How to Execute:
   • Schedule regular performance review meetings
   • Create standardized feedback formats for both teams
   • Establish monthly/quarterly joint performance reviews
   • Document and track action items from feedback sessions
   • Implement improvements based on shared insights
   Business Impact: Teams can quickly address issues like low-quality leads or missed follow-ups before they affect revenue.
   
7. Coordinated Customer Communication
   What It Means:
   Create a process where sales and marketing teams are aware of each other’s interactions with prospects. This avoids duplicate content and helps teams deliver a seamless experience.
   How to Execute:
   • Create a shared view of all customer interactions
   • Set up alerts for sales when prospects engage with marketing content
   • Coordinate email and outreach schedules
   • Establish clear handoff protocols between teams
   Business Impact: Prospects experience a coherent buying journey without repetitive messages or gaps in communication, leading to increased trust and higher conversion rates.
   
   
   

The RevOps Approach: The Missing Link to Alignment

A lot of times, organizations operate with separate Sales Ops and Marketing Ops teams, each optimizing for their own department’s success. However, these siloed approaches create inefficiencies and data gaps.

A unified RevOps strategy brings a holistic approach to revenue growth, ensuring that marketing, sales, and customer success operate from the same data, metrics, and objectives. Rather than optimizing for individual functions, RevOps aligns the entire revenue engine, making collaboration seamless and measurable.

Want to learn more about how adopting a RevOps strategy can drive business growth? Book a 1:1 Consultation today!

B2B buying decisions no longer rest with a single decision-maker. The average B2B buying group now consists of 6 to 10 decision-makers. Each of these members bring unique perspectives and requirements to the table. This evolution demands a sophisticated approach to stakeholder management.

Why do Companies Need to Automate Opportunity Contact Roles 

When a sales rep creates an Opportunity in Salesforce, they need to add relevant contacts roles from the account to that specific opportunity. For each contact, they assign a role that defines how that person influences or contributes to the purchasing decision. This association helps sales teams track their engagement with key stakeholders and establish the buying committee. Additionally, the association of the right opportunity contact roles enable marketing teams to accurately measure campaign influence on opportunities and provide customer success teams with visibility into important relationships post-sale.

Now, imagine the entire process being missed. The manual nature of this process to find and add contact roles in Salesforce often leads to incomplete or outdated information. Sales reps focused on moving deals forward may overlook finding and updating the right Contact Roles, especially as new stakeholders join the buying group throughout the sales cycle. The risks of neglecting Buying Group Automation in Salesforce extend beyond administrative burden. It could result in extended sales cycles, lost opportunities, poor adoption, and low customer retention. This is where automation becomes indispensable. Buying Group Automation can systematically identify and assign Contact Roles based on stakeholder interactions, ensuring more complete and accurate buying group documentation.

How Does Buying Group Automation Help?

Buying Group Automation addresses these challenges by systematically identifying and mapping stakeholder relationships throughout the opportunity lifecycle. The solution monitors engagement signals across multiple channels. From campaign interactions to sales activities, it automatically assigns appropriate Contact Roles. This systematic approach ensures comprehensive identification and management of buying group members while eliminating the administrative burden on sales teams.

1. Automatic Stakeholder Identification

Buying Group Automation streamlines Opportunity Contact Role management through our custom app, natively built on Salesforce. The app automatically identifies and associates relevant stakeholders based on predefined, customizable rules that analyze multiple engagement signals. The system automatically identifies potential leads and contacts  based on 

• Marketing campaign engagements
• Activity-based identification on sales activities as well as apps like Outreach, SalesLoft, Outlook, Gmail, Gong.io, etc.
• Recent Lead to Contact conversions
• Custom properties
• Territory assignments

2. Role Mapping

The app automates Contact Role assignment on Opportunities based on custom attributes like department, job title, role, seniority, and geography. Salesforce admins can customize the association rules to align with their specific sales processes and organizational structure. 

3. Real-Time Updates

The app maintains team alignment through automated notifications. Teams receive instant notifications when:

• New Leads / Contacts are identified or added in Salesforce
• New marketing engagements are recorded in Salesforce
• Critical stakeholders join the buying group
• New Opportunities are created for the Account and have missing contact roles 

Impact of Automation Across Teams

The implementation of Buying Group Automation delivers transformative benefits across the entire organization.

Sales Teams Achieve Higher Velocity

With automated Contact Role management, sales reps spend less time on manual data entry and more time engaging the right stakeholders. Automation ensures that they gain immediate visibility into complete buying groups, enabling faster deal progression and higher win rates. Reps can target the right decision-makers at each stage of the opportunity lifecycle.

Marketing Teams Demonstrate Clear ROI

Marketing organizations now have unprecedented visibility into their impact on revenue. By automatically connecting campaign engagements to opportunities, teams can accurately measure and report their contribution to pipeline and closed-won deals.

Beyond attribution, marketing can refine targeting strategies by filtering Contacts based on their association with specific Opportunities and stages. This allows teams to create highly relevant audience segments for personalized outreach, improving engagement and conversion rates. With better attribution and smarter targeting, marketing can optimize budget allocation and drive greater pipeline impact.

Customer Success Teams Drive Better Outcomes

With comprehensive visibility into buying groups, customer success teams are better equipped to drive adoption, increase revenue expansion opportunities, and improve customer retention. Understanding the complete stakeholder landscape from day one enables more effective onboarding strategies and stronger relationship development. 

Transform Your Revenue Operations Today

Book a personalized demo for Buying Group Automation in Salesforce with our team. See how Buying Group Automation can transform your approach to stakeholder management and drive measurable business results.